The Network – Is Resistance Useless?
First it was Phorm and this weeks it’s Phorm by another name much more suited to a John Grisham novel – The Network. Scareeeee!
This is Logica’s new intelligence gathering platform that tracks you via your mobile. And because we take our mobiles with us everywhere as opposed to our PC’s which we leave behind when we step out, according to the Sunday Times article, The Network will “create a crucial bridge between the virtual world and the real world”.
By following our every move and developing profiles and patterns The Network, an opt-in service, will send us vouchers as we near shops we like, alert us to friends in the vicinity, inform us if we’ve left the gas on or if we’ve got loo roll stuck to our heels.
Responses to the Sunday Times article online are predictably derogatory and Orwellian in nature and on one-level I have to agree. It is scary. However, it really is too late. We are already on a thousand databases and filmed everywhere we go. There is no stopping the proliferation of computerisation of life and everything in it.
I am neither a apologist or a surrendering, but I do know for a fact that by the time my (3 year old) son is twenty in the world he will live in all the marketing he sees and media he consumes will be highly tailored to his every peculiar passion. And that we have to accept. It is however, the misuse of this information by the authorities that must be protected against and although it will be nearly impossible to decipher between the two, the first is inevitable and the second is…..oh heck, inevitable.
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