REASON MAG: Welcome to the Naked Future

This is really a fascinating REASON story.. and really frightening too.

We are not “close” to the future where privacy is dead, we are in it. The information age and been pushed aside.. hubris and selfishness and selfies have led to people releasing every possible thing about themselves on every app they can.. and all the while, alphabet agencies in the police state are showering themselves with your person information.

It’s here, baby. Welcome to your future.

From REASON, reporting no a new book called THE NAKED FUTURE: WHAT HAPPENS IN A WORLD THAT ANTICIPATES YOUR EVERY MOVE by Patrick Tucker, the money quote: 

To illustrate just how naked we all soon will be, Tucker opens with a vignette from the near future in which your cellphone wakes you with a text message alerting you that on your way to work you will run into an old girlfriend who is going to tell you the happy news that she is engaged. The phone tells to you to act surprised at the news. This scenario unfolds as predicted, but instead of waiting for her to tell you, you blurt out your congratulations. As it happens, she not yet made her new romantic status public and is quite alarmed by your mistimed felicitations. The phone did warn you to act surprised.

Tucker then explores the early technologies that are combining to make this future a reality. Consider how the phone knew that you would run into your old girlfriend. Tucker discusses database investigations conducted by University of Rochester researcher Adam Sadelik to predict where people will be in the future using Bayesian software techniques. Parsing a database of 26 million tweets, of which 7.6 million were geotagged, from 1.2 million people in Los Angeles and New York, Sadelik tried to learn about the locations of people who did not geotag their tweets. He found that if non-geotaggers have two real friends who do allow their tweets to be mapped, his system “can predict your location at any moment (down to 328 feet and within a 20 minute time frame) with 47 percent accuracy.” That’s nearly a 50-50 chance of catching you, even if you think you’re opting out.

….welcome to your life.

REASON MAG: Welcome to the Naked Future