Phicons: Where are you hiding?

Jim Vaughey's  "Sony Gets Caught" article inspired me to post this article today which I had previously posted on another site (http://changester.com), in a bit of a "rawer" version aimed at the Bay Area. I also previously posted a piece on our Rights of Participation that is referred to in this piece.

I thought my fellow Gather-ites might appreciate it too.

Phicons: Where are you hiding?

Just because you don't know what they are doesn't mean you shouldn't wonder about how they might invade your spaces. There is an indication that they may well drop in on your life faster than podcasting became a concept.

Phicons are "physical" "icons," or a combination thereof in some manner. They haven't really been fully invented for public purposes yet, so we can't tell exactly what will become industry standard (pretending for moment that that is a good thing).

But imagine an icon in a computer sense (the objects you drag around on your screen) taking shape in the physical objects that you count upon to make your daily existence organized, bearable or maybe fun.

Now imagine that you can drag and drop these kinds of things right off your favorite screen (hand- or desk-held) and put them into action on something else.

If you can imagine that, then you have a good idea of what a phicon is in concept.

Early discussions of this possibility included descriptions of what it could be like to pick up a model of a building (from an architectural display) and move it around on a tiny doll-size campus representing, oh, something like a future city. Low and behold, a new electronic map might instantly pop up on a nearby screen showing either where that building really belongs or what the implications are when you redesign this site map. This kind of "phicon" would essentially reprogram itself and the world around it to supposedly make your world a better place.

Pretty cool.

Now that kind of description was initially generated some time ago before the real fun started. With the perfection of everything from "radio-ized" zebra coding to GPS tagging to always-on wireless connectivity to invasive software (see today's Sony "deception"), there is absolutely no reason to have such a limited view of a movable world.

Everything is or soon will be interconnected with everything else and we will all get to participate.

It's for your own good, Mr. or Mrs. Participant; trust me on this one.

From what is known at this point, it is totally conceivable that the "icons" that make up my office mess could be tagged to keep themselves orderly with built in phicon capabilities. Imagine what it would be like, for example, if my file cabinet projected a virtual reminder that files were out all over the place, and that my important client was due at the door?

My mother would be instantly updated with a whole new concept of what it means to be proud of her son.

But the actual implications of this are a bit broader. Not the least of which being general privacy concerns.

I think there is a much greater consideration, however, in the form of our overall Rights of Participation. The next great social conflict could well be over our rights as to whether, when, where, why and if we want to participate in all kinds of invasive exchanges of information.

When chatting with an engineering friend he conveyed his perception of the future. His fascination is with the little radio chips that retain information on the goods we buy in the grocery stores or malls. Such "Radio Frequency IDS" (RFIDs) actually activate when the item (or wearer) walks within range of a given magnetic/electrical field, and then they transmit what they consider relevant data from themselves to their exchange partner, if you will.

"Won't it be something," he said, "when the day comes and you can point your little activator at the door of someone's office (insert home, bedroom, etc. here) and a little screen on the door tells you who is inside, what company they work for or, for that matter, what they bought at the grocery store before coming to the meeting."

(The latter idea being helpful in allowing my friend to better plan lunch menus for his potential clients.)

"We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter," wrote Howard Rheingold in his 2002 (a lifetime by technological standards) Smart Mobs: Transforming Cultures and Communities in the Age of Instant Access. "Although we leave digital traces of our personal lives with our credit cards and Web browsers today, tomorrow's mobile devices will broadcast clouds of personal data to invisible monitors all around us as we move from place to place." And the social side effects, he speculates, are only beginning to erupt.

In California, we can take heed that we don't have to worry too much about this because we have constitutionally protected guarantees of privacy. Right?

Well, sort of. If you go to http://www.privacyprotection.ca.gov you can see our specific Fair Information Practice Principles in action, as guaranteed by the State's Constitution. But recognize that all is not as it seems. Our rights of privacy—unlike those in the European Union—are "industry specific" and not necessarily all they are cracked up to be.

Take the specifics of the Vehicle Code (Section 9951), which covers the inclusion of that magical "black box" within your automobile that can tell much about how you drive. According to the State's lawyers:  "This law requires automobile manufacturers that install 'event data recorders' in vehicles to disclose that fact in the owner's manual. It also limits the retrieval and use of data from such a device to the vehicle owner or others permitted by the owner, in response to a court order, for the purpose of improving vehicle safety, or for servicing or repairing the vehicle." (Emphasis added.)

So when was the last time you asked your repair gal what she did with your vehicle's data?

In the good old days we could take comfort in knowing that most of our private information was safe unless we decided to spend money to gain access to someone else's products. In the age of phicons, businesses will thrive by being able to show that they can keep you on the cutting edge of access to everyone else's little bits of information, whether those people want it or not.

Unless we have some Rights of Participation.

In the Bay Area (where I live) we should be both proud and perplexed by this pending invasion. We did, after all, germinate the computer revolution and some of the percolating Open Source "devolution" of corporate access and protectionism.

But who is to say what will happen as our "industry specific" participatory regulations begin to take shape and profiteers begin to hire their own techno-savvy lawyers?

(Sony—a curtsy please!)

Right now nonprofit programs in the Bay Area are doing better than most places trying to figure out what advantages technology offers the world of consumer protectionism and advocacy. According to a study by Stanford on the challenges facing the nonprofit sector, some 70% percent of organizations in this sector have a website—wow, a website!—compared to only 30% of the rest of the world.

I'm not sure I'm feeling safe from the phicons.

Our challenge, it seems to me, is to try to outsmart the phicons of the future by figuring out their secrets before they figure out ours. That is why I started a website called http://OurRightToParticipation.pbwiki.com. The intention of this evolving site is to detail the specifics of just what rights we should have to keep the world from worming its way into our lives, or to at least do so with a recognition that all is not what it seems when they promise us privacy protections.

Feel free to participate--in everything, if you dare.

Allan