Big Brother-Is he here and is he you?

Seriously? What could they be watching?

So, for my first foray into the Blogosphere, I will throw out an idea dropped on me yesterday while getting ready for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Ybor City, FL.  Ybor City (pronounced “eee-bore”) is a historic district located in Tampa, FL, known historically for its Cuban culture and more recently for its party scene. Ybor has a significant number of surveillance cameras on the streets and was the prototype for the Tampa Police facial recognition pilots.

 A fellow Krewe member and I were chatting about the utility of the new iPod Nano with video capability.  A really cool and really small device that can record up to 8 hours of video and is about the size of a business card.  What does all of this setup have to do with Big Brother?  Well, hang onto your pants, because here is where it gets interesting.

 

My friend made the statement to the effect of “with these gadgets, we have become what we most feared”.  At first I didn’t get it, but then it occurred to me he was talking about the Big Brother concept.  Forget the cameras on every street corner installed by the City of Tampa as there are now hundreds, if not thousands of them in the hands of every day folks like ourselves.   A couple of clicks or swipes on the cell phone and instant picture or video that can be loaded near real-time to viral social media sites everywhere. 

 

We have become the cloud computing version of Big Brother.  Free sites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr give users the ability to share information in the social cloud.  We might as well have a direct feed to the local police station.  The public nature of the sites allow anyone, even government agencies, to search and poll visual information.  The ability to tag people in pictures further drives the specificity of the information coming in from the ether.  When I think back to the Apple commercial introducing the Macintosh based on the “1984″ theme, I think the irony is thick given Apple has innovated many of the devices that enable new “Recon Cloud”.

 

So, at the end of the day, are we the innovators of the very technology that enables Big Brother?  As a consumer of these devices and sites myself, I find I am drawn to continue to use them.  The ability to leverage these tools to our advantage and to do good probably outweighs the more nefarious uses and I suppose if your not doing anything you shouldn’t be doing, you have nothing to worry about…. or do you?

Please let me know what you think about the idea and provides some good and bad ways the social recon cloud can be used.

 

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