Jun 9, 2012

Coming to a Telescreen near you

Technology alert: Intel Inside! That is, inside your living room, a black box atop your teevee, using its facial recognition gizmo to make sure it's you watching, not your cat.

Somehow --without identifying you as an individual person, according to its maker -- it knows what kind of advertisement will be most likely to sucker you in.

You suspish? Imma suspish, even though:

The set-top box pitched by Intel doesn't identify specific people, but it could provide general data about viewers' gender or whether they're adults or children to help target advertising..." 

Right. And the first Telescreen probably couldn't yell at Winston Smith in real time that he was fudging on his calisthenics. But by 1984, the G3 or G4 version was a right handy little tool for the Inner Party's NSA, TSA, CIA, etc.

It is one of the horrors of our time that there is really no good way to outlaw technology which is specifically designed and marketed to eliminate places where we are allowed a "reasonable expectation of privacy."

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