A Chip for Your Thoughts
Source: Asbury Park Press
May 15, 2000
Privacy advocates fear that as rapid advances are made
in technology, the personal lives of Americans may be shadowed by a
cloud no bigger than a computer chip.
MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor proposes uploading
information direct to people's brains via computer chip. One proposal,
drawn from a recent science fiction film, is close to reality.
Michael Saylor the 35-year-old founder of MicroStrategy,
who perhaps is most famous for watching his personal net stock worth
drop $6 billion in a single morning without whimpering is involved
with the concept.
Saylor wants to beam information directly into your
mind; he calls it "telepathic intelligence."
Saylor would do it by having a tiny transmitter
surgically implanted in your skull or by sewing a computer chip into
your wrist and having it transmit to an embedded radiolike device near
your ear bones.
His computers already process a mammoth amount of data;
pertinent portions would be tailored to your life and interests, then
transmitted to brain or ear instantaneously 24 hours a day, seven days
a week.
Your stock is tanking sell. You're on the wrong street
turn here. Your spouse wrecked the other car call the insurance
company. Your house is being burglarized call the cops. The doctor
called in your prescription visit the pharmacy.
"I don't know who in their right mind would let somebody
implant this in their head," says Fordham University Law School
professor Joel Reidenberg, an expert on information privacy. "To the
extent that we begin to create a system of automatons responding to
chip implants in people's brains, we will be destroying the
foundations of a democratic society.
"Without question, there would be a great opportunity
for mischief here."
MicroStrategy spokesmen confirm that Saylor "sees
potential in the future of such a chip" and that the firm's
Strategy.com subsidiary a network of "customer intelligence channels"
that sends 300,000 people some 2 million
personalized messages a week is working long term on the idea.
But MicroStrategy spokesman Michael Quint said this
would be what computer business calls "opt-in": ""It's all permission
marketing. If you're talking about the privacy thing, we'd need to get
the permission of the customer or the consumer."
Reidenberg is not impressed: "The notion that it's
"permission marketing only' is a hoax. There's no way a citizen in our
society can make an intelligent, informed decision about the risks of
these implants, which would be sold through very sophisticated
marketing by organizations with
large economic interests whose goals are not to promote the public
interest. That's a very scary vision for a democratic society.
"Forget the health and safety issues. Assume they figure
out how not to kill people when they put it in. The
information-control aspects are beyond what George Orwell could have
dreamed about."
Not everyone is upset by this techno-vision.
When online prankster Bill Cross a few months ago put up
a hoax Web site that offered $250 for letting surgeons insert an
electronic chip under the right palm for cashless purchases, he was
stunned at the response. People signed up for the nonexistent implant
"in droves," he says.
And the techno-vision is reality.
Three months ago Applied Digital Solutions a publicly
traded firm based in Palm Beach announced it had developed a high-tech
transceiver chip, thinner than a dime, that could be implanted in
flesh and used as a tracking device
by transmitting the person's whereabouts to a global positioning
satellite.
Trademarked as the "Digital Angel," the chip could be
inserted in children at the behest of parents who fear kidnappers or
in elderly parents at the behest of children who fear those afflicted
with Alzheimer's will wander off. The chip can hold medical and
financial information.
Applied Digital says the implant would be voluntary,
making the privacy issue moot.
But David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic
Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., worries the device
could evolve into a workplace requirement one that "would dwarf
polygraphs and drug testing."
And more than 500,000 pets now carry between their
shoulder blades an implanted, scannable computer chip carrying owner
and vaccination data.
"The technology is there to implant chips allowing
programming of devices, like in your pacemaker," says Washington
privacy consultant Robert Gellman, who calls Saylor's idea "Big
Brother on steroids."
Says Gellman: "I keep thinking one day soon they'll be
able to beam commercials into your pacemaker that warn, "Buy our
product, or we're going to skip a couple of heartbeats.' Think of all
the people who believe the CIA is beaming rays into their heads
already."
Saylor bothers privacy advocates in another way.
He wants the government to make the huge Medicare
database available online so it easily could be compiled and searched
by his firm to discover dangerous medications and unsafe physicians,
about whom you would be warned.
"Give me your medical records, and I will give you more
life," Saylor says.
"Privacy advocates should take him seriously," said Evan
Hendricks, publisher of the watchdog Privacy Times. "He's putting out
his own version of "Mein Kampf.' Saylor is very genuine, I think. The
more data they have, the more strategic decisions they can make."
by John Hanchette
Gannett News Service © copyright 2000
Second of three parts
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