Chris Rimmer writes in with four themes of what might go wrong in our e-enabled world:

1. Trying to fix ‘people problems’ with technology.

This theme mainly stems from watching various governments, in particular our own, try to implement forms of electronic voting. It is clear that there is a problem to be solved here. Voter turnout is getting lower and so the public at large has less and less involvement with the political process. To fix this, the government has decided that turnout can be boosted by making it easier to vote. This of course could have disastrous consequences as the security pitfalls of many forms of electronic voting are well known.

To make matters worse, I would suggest that they are fixing the wrong problem. I love using dodgy metaphors, so bear with me here. If you consider politics as a product which you want to sell to the public, there are two things you can do to increase sales. You can make the product more appealing or you can lower the price. In this context you can consider the price to be the effort required to cast a vote. The government has decided that it needs to lower the ‘price’, by making it easy to vote. But all the surveys show that the electorate is disillusioned with politics in general. They are not staying at home because they are interested in politics but can’t make it down the road to vote. To get the genuine involvement of the electorate the product needs to be made more appealing, but unfortunately this is a much harder and longer term effort.

So my fear is that other problems in society will have similarly damaging technological solutions applied when the problem that needs solving is much deeper.

2. Losing control of the data that rules our lives.

There is much said about privacy and security in our increasingly electronic world. But increasingly the data that matters most to us is outside of our control already. Take the Royal Mail’s PAF database which is used by increasing numbers of businesses to map customers to postcodes and hence to locations. This data is plainly outside of our control. But if your house doesn’t appear in this database then you will suddenly find that it is very difficult to access a whole range of services. It’s bad enough finding out that your house doesn’t officially exist, but imagine a future where you have to produce your ID card to do pretty much anything. What to do you when someone screws up at the Identity and Passport Service and *you* don’t officially exist?

3. Automated law enforcement.

I’m not talking about Robocop-style police walking the street, although that would be pretty scary. I’m talking about some trends that are already with us. I don’t have a big problem with the idea of speed cameras but in some ways this could be seen as the thin end of the wedge. Law is built upon people making judgements about what is “reasonable”, something which is not easily automated, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying.

When technology is introduced to try to stop something happening in the first place, additional legislation is then required to make circumventing it illegal. So we end up with the much reviled DMCA law in the United States. This makes it a crime to circumvent digital protections on a media file regardless of whether your actions would otherwise have been legal. This path could lead us into Kafkaesque scenarios where we have the right to do something but actually exercising that right causes us to break the law.

4. Technology introduced without any thought to privacy.

Almost every new technology introduced creates a new data ‘footprint’ that reduces our privacy. Some schemes, such as an all encompassing identity register make us more susceptible to identity theft by aggregating data about us and then allowing those with access to the data to see large chunks of it. Other changes have a smaller impact, but they all add up.

It is quite possible with a little thought and the use of cryptography to allow us to keep much more control over the amount of information we give out. Unfortunately, the people introducing these grand schemes
(politicians) don’t seem to know that this can be done. I think this is because there is no ‘real world’ analogue to, for example, proving the claim that you are over 18 without giving out your date of birth. There also seems to be the attitude that loss of privacy is the price that must be paid for technological ‘progress’.

Like all else on Blindside these are personal views and not related to his employer. Chris’s work blog is here. Sorry you couldn’t make the barn-raising Chris - hope to meet you soon.