What do you know about my inner demons?

Life in a data-driven society

Sometimes current affairs rally round and serve up the perfect backdrop to a book launch — and so it was earlier this year, when the Cambridge Analytica story broke just as my debut novel Everything About You was published.

As you probably remember, data was taken from around 87 million Facebook profiles and used to target thousands of adverts. Whatever Cambridge Analytica did with the information, it did effectively, contributing to changes in the political landscape that are still hard to credit.

Now that the firm is no more, there is one part of the story that has stuck with me. According to whistleblower Christopher Wylie, the firm consciously targeted people’s ‘inner demons’. How is it possible that a company had access to millions of people’s inner demons? Ten years ago we would have laughed at this idea and wished them good luck.

When writing Everything About You, I was setting events in the near future (the book is about a virtual assistant who takes over the protagonist’s life through knowing everything about her). But what the Cambridge Analytica scandal brought to light is that a time in which our hopes, dreams and deepest fears are known, interpreted and sold is almost upon us, and for the next generation it’s virtually unavoidable.

Every component of our daily lives is becoming a sponge for data: from public spaces, to household items, to our bodies themselves.

Take it outside

Though many people don’t bother, it’s easy enough to turn off your phone’s location setting and prevent apps from knowing where you go and where you linger. Apart from images captured on CCTV, usually kept privately for short periods of time, it’s possible to remain relatively invisible to the cloud. However the growth of facial recognition technology could soon take this decision out of our hands.

The city of Bristol, where I live, has been chosen as a testbed for 5G networks, which offer unprecedented potential for connectivity in public spaces. Our growing visibility in public could allow for a highly-personalised experience of the city, involving shop-fronts, cafes, street-furniture, public transport and even drones. It could make for a more enjoyable and fruitful visit, so long as you don’t mind ‘emotion-sniffing’ algorithms analysing your facial expression and categorising it as ‘interested’ as you gaze at those new trainers, or whacking up the price of a box of tissues should you look sad.

Inner sanctuary

While city connectivity is in its infancy, technology in domestic settings is already entering the mainstream, with ownership of ‘smart home’ systems doubling over the last two years and a third of households planning to buy a device. This makes a whole new spectrum of behavioural data potentially available — with appliances logging our cuppas, washing and cooking habits, noting our entertainment choices, energy use and more. Robotic vacuum cleaners such as the Roomba can map the rooms in a house, and smartphones are able to do the same. With new levels of connectivity, the previously private nature of our homes is changing.

And then there are the voice-activated personal assistants. You may have heard about the US patent, filed earlier this year by Amazon, for a voice-sniffing system for its popular Alexa virtual assistant, listening out for emotive words in order to build profiles of users and make more relevant suggestions. For me, the idea of having a device like this at home, and never being sure when it is listening, is unpalatable, yet many people love their Alexa and are more than happy to swap privacy for convenience.

Body… and soul?

When you take into account all the things that are now becoming connected, and which the advent of 5G will hasten, it is easier to believe the estimation that by 2025 we will interact with a connected device nearly five thousand times a day. Sales of wearable technology such as smartwatches and fitness-trackers are growing year-on-year, and Fitbits are so prevalent that the health data they provide has been admitted as evidence in court.

But this is nothing to the wrap-around tech that is coming. Connected clothing is already on sale — bikinis that tell you how long you’ve been in the sun, jackets you can swipe to take phone calls, yoga pants whose haptic vibrations tell you when to hold a pose. It is the next level of the internet of things — a network that becomes increasingly intimate with your body and brain.

Unsurprisingly, the greatest riches — in terms of data — are to be mined from social media. The Cambridge Analytica story shows how valuable a person’s likes and dislikes can be, and has helped raise awareness of the need to take an interest in privacy settings. But what if you are five years old, and your parents have already posted 1,500 photos of you online? According to a study by Nominet this is average, thanks to our culture of ‘sharenting’. For this generation, information about their movements, activities, preferences, friends and family will be out there, almost from birth.

Thus data piles up in vast, unfathomable swathes, a million times more information than the brain is capable of holding, generated online every single day. It would be impossible to interpret, if not for the equally impressive development of super-smart artificial intelligences, whose algorithms are powerful enough to sift through and draw conclusions. It means a person’s story can be captured with fearsome accuracy, their identity located somewhere in the cloud, along with their hopes, dreams and inner demons.

Little did I realise, when I started writing Everything About You six or seven years ago, how quickly reality would catch up with science fiction.

Originally published at https://www.antipope.org on November 14, 2018.