IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2013 - 31

GUEST EDITORIAL: SPECIAL SECTION ON SENSORS

KATHERINE
ALBRECHT

KATINA MICHAEL

Connected: To Everyone
and Everything

T

he activist group Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN) was founded in 1999 by
Katherine Albrecht. The very same year
Kevin Ashton, co-founder and executive director of the
then Auto-ID Center at M.I.T., made a presentation to
Proctor & Gamble with a title that included the phrase
"Internet of Things." According to Ashton, "the most
numerous and important routers of all" are people [1],
but people have limitations and are not very good at
capturing data about objects in the physical world.
By 2001, Ashton's automatic identification vision
became a lot clearer. At the Auto-ID Center during
a Forrester Executive Strategy Forum he stated: "In
nature, identification is a matter of life and death. If
you can't identify things, you can't count them, you
can't work out whether or not you can eat them, you
can't work out whether or not they are friends or foe"
[2]. All this was in the context of a discussion with an
African tracker, emphasizing how a predator decides
to attack a herd of zebra to "singulate," "hunt," and
finally to "exhaust" [3].
It is true that the "connectedness" offered by
the Internet of Things is extremely powerful, and
has tremendous possibility, but as far as people are
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2013.2291170
Date of publication: 9 December 2013

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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wINTEr 2013

concerned, there are two fundamental, and potentially fatal, flaws to its vision. The first flaw is that
people are not "things" but as soon as they are incorporated into the Internet of Things, they become
things, at least in the eyes of the system. In addition,
people potentially become prey as well, as we have
seen in recent events - prey for marketers, for overzealous security arms of government, and for a whole
lot more.
People are not mere "objects." Placing numbers on
individuals and putting them on equal footing with
cans of cola and bags of dog food is simply dehumanizing [3]. At one point, Kevin Ashton was planning a
book tentatively titled Soda with Souls [4], implying
that an rFID sensor could imbue inanimate objects
with a spiritual essence. Of course the reality is just
the reverse, because an underlying trajectory of all
these sensors is human beings. Far from numbers
enhancing the soul, putting a number onto a person
all but denies that persons humanity. The terrible evidence for this is still with us from our not too distant
past [5], [6]. 
The second flaw is that linking objects to subjects
en masse may someday sound the death knell to our
fundamental human right to privacy [7]. Ashton's
vision of people becoming the most important "routers" of all indicates this. routers act like gateways
and are devices that forward data packets on between
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