You Might Really Want Big Brother to Watch You
It’s nearly impossible to predict which technology will most shape our lives in the future, and even more difficult to predict how it will change them. Here’s one of my top contenders:
Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.
The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure.
Thus begins the predictable drama that surrounds every new technology. Alternating groups tell us that it will either solve all our problems or destroy life as we know it. Right now we’re on the pessimistic side with this particular technology:
The Information Commissioner, civil liberties groups and privacy lawyers strongly criticised the potential of the system for “taking the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level”. Hugh Tomlinson, QC, an expert on data protection law at Matrix Chambers, told The Times: “This system involves intrusion into every single aspect of the lives of the employees. It raises very serious privacy issues.”
I seriously doubt that this technology would accomplish much in most workplaces. Managers can already snoop on their workers in various ways, such as internet usage or video cameras. The problem with worker supervision isn’t in the technology, but in the labor required to interpret the results.
This technology is more mature than many people realize. It has already been used extensively in the armed forces, and this article suggests that some pilots, firefighters, and astronauts are already using them.
And as those uses suggest, the real power of these implanted body-monitoring systems is to instantly communicate when your body is in trouble, whether that trouble involves sleepiness, low oxygen, irregular heartbeat, or just about anything else. If the technology becomes cheap enough, then the elderly could start signing up in droves. An abstract fear of Big Brother will quickly lose out to the opportunity to get immediate help with much more real and reasonable fears of stroke, heart attack, etc.