The City That Remembers Everything - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/james-joyce-as-police-operation/553817
The ubiquitous installation of sensors, whether it’s for the audio surveillance of a child’s bedroom or for applying facial-recognition technology at an infrastructural scale, could be described as Joycean: That is, smart cities take the literary challenge of Ulysses and turn it into a technical goal. From the post office to the pub to the bedroom, something is recording nearly everything we do now. We are all Leopold Bloom. Smart TVs, Google Homes, even diagnostic medical devices have become surreptitious documentarians, compiling first-hand evidence of our everyday activities.
If the very promise of the smart city is that the details of people’s lives will be captured at all scales and in every medium, then the technical ability of these sensors to record more and different types of data will, by necessity, only increase. In October 2017, for example, researchers at Mitsubishi revealed that they had successfully used machine learning “to pick a single voice out of a crowd,” allowing them to track a person against the background noise of a cocktail party—or a political demonstration.
As the city becomes a forensic tool for recording its residents, an obvious question looms: How might people opt out of the smart city? What does privacy even mean, for example, when body temperature is now subject to capture at thermal screening stations, when whispered conversations can be isolated by audio algorithms, or even when the unique seismic imprint of a gait can reveal who has just entered a room? Does the modern city need a privacy bill of rights for shielding people, and their data, from ubiquitous capture?