Too much information?

We’re well into the wireless revolution around the globe, so it’s a bit misleading to say it’s still coming, as The Economist does in its cover story this week “When everything connects” (requires subscription). This revolution has plenty of shock and awe, but The Economist’s 14-page special report on the world of wireless connections covers mostly the awe.

All the benefits of the computing world—innovation, short development cycles and low cost—are being extended to wireless communications. As a result, a myriad of hitherto separate objects are becoming connected to networks, from televisions and cars to industrial machinery and farmland. Tiny devices are even being placed into the human body to perform useful tasks. The new technology enables control to be exercised from a distance and lets different devices interconnect to do something new…

So far the mobile phone has been getting all the attention. Around 2.8 billion are already in use, with a further 1.6m being added every day. The phones themselves are improving at a cracking pace. Yet this boom is also spilling over into other areas of wireless communications, used for linking machines, sensors and objects…

This year around 10 billion microprocessors will be sold, embedded in anything from computers to coffee-makers. The vast majority of them will be able to “think” but not “talk”: they will perform specific tasks but cannot communicate. But this is now starting to change. The cost, size and power requirements of wireless functions are falling rapidly, so some unlikely candidates are now being connected to networks. For example, bridges and buildings are being monitored for structural integrity by small sensors. Farmland is being watched and irrigation systems are being switched on and off remotely.

In years to come, wireless communications will increasingly become part of the fabric of everyday life.

Take light fixtures, for instance…

If every one of them contained a small wireless node, people would not only be able to control the lighting more effectively but put them to many other uses too. If the nodes were programmed to serve as online smoke detectors, they could signal a fire as well as show its location. They could also act as a security system or provide internet connectivity to other things in the building.

There are so many uses for this technology, The Economist can hardly contain the excitement.

These ideas have been floating around for years, variously known as “ubiquitous computing”, “embedded networking” and “the pervasive internet”. The phenomenon “could well dwarf previous milestones in the information revolution”, according to a 2001 report entitled “Embedded, Everywhere” by America’s National Research Council, part of the respected National Academy of Sciences. A report by a United Nations agency in 2005 called it “The Internet of Things”.

But now it is actually starting to happen. Even governments have taken notice. Japan and South Korea have incorporated wireless technology into national policies, their sprawling IT conglomerates marching in lockstep with the political leaders. The European Union and America (where defence money paid for many of the advances) have issued thick reports.

For all the excitement, it will be a while before machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and sensor networks become ubiquitous.

Hold on….they’re already here. Now for some of the shock, which is thoroughly detailed in “Spychips: How major corporations and government plan to track your every purchase and watch your every move.”

Just as tags can be well hidden, so can the reader devices that interrogate them. In fact, readers can be even harder to find because they don’t have to fit in small packages or conform to various product designs. Since optical line of sight isn’t needed for radio wave transmission, RFID readers can be embedded in doorways, woven into carpeting and floor mats, hidden under floor tiles, embedded in ceiling tiles, incorporated into shelves, and placed behind store displays.

The “Internet of Things” is in there, too.

(It) wasn’t to be a new network; it was to be built on top of the existing Internet. But what was earth-shatteringly new was the revolutionary idea that inanimate objects would be endowed with the ability to talk to manufacturers, retailers, and even each other.

Why?

Assigning a unique serial number to everyday objects is like giving them Social Security numbers. It makes it possible for businesses to create a unique data file for each item that can store virtually unlimited amounts of information about it…Thanks to advances in computer technology and bargain-basement prices of data storage, there would be virtually no limit to the amount of information that could be stored in this way.

The information has great potential for good use. But also some we should be concerned about. One major corporation filed a patent application that details how to collect RFID numbers on shoppers and store them in a database.

Then, later on, “the exact identity of the person” can be determined from the tags and “used to monitor the movements of the person…(and) to identify a person’s age, race, gender and income bracket.

Among other things.

So who or what is on the receiving end of these reports? The consortium of businesses and government entities developing the RFID infrastructure plans to send them to massive Internet databases. Once all the billions of items on the planet contain digital (identifiers), theoretically, the whereabouts of everything and everyone will be known at all times and accessible to anyone with access to the databases, authorized or otherwise.

The Economist report gets to some of the risks at the end, and treats them only briefly. The final section, titled “The hidden revolution”, says a lot in the subtitle: “What you don’t see will need careful watching.” It admits to the controversy of this new wireless technological revolution.

Last year, a Wisconsin legislator proposed a law to ban any mandatory microchip implants in humans…or embedding a chip in a person without the recipient’s knowledge.

However, it went further than a proposal.

Civil libertarians cheered yesterday upon news that Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle signed a law making it a crime to require an individual to be implanted with a microchip.

Here’s a good summary, at the end of the Economist article:

“The ‘silence of the chips’ must be preserved as a fundamental right of citizens,” says Bernard Benhamou of the Institute of Political Science in Paris, who was a member of the French delegation at UN meetings on internet governance in 2003-06. Mobile phones, he believes, should be able to pick up the presence of sensors. People should be able to read basic RFID tags–and destroy them too to preseve their privacy. Such rights, he says, will become more important as wireless technologies become small enough to be invisible.

In the interest of balanced reporting, both sides of the controversy over these information chips are presented above. Just be informed, and ready to ask questions.