As this next generation comes fully into adulthood, with digital documentation of every irresponsible thing they did during adolescence, it’s hard to believe that some politicians won’t champion the cause of sealing virtual juvenile records. Everything an individual shares before the age of eighteen might then become unusable, sealed and not for public disclosure on pain of fines or even prison. Laws would make it illegal for any employer, court, housing authority or university to take that content into account. Of course, these laws would be difficult to enforce, but their very presence would lend a hand in changing norms, so that most adolescent mishaps caught online may ultimately be viewed by society with the same lens as experimental drug and alcohol use.
Other laws may emerge as attempts to safeguard privacy and increase the liability for those releasing confidential information. Stealing someone’s cell phone could be considered on a par with identity theft, and online intrusions (stolen passwords, hijacking accounts) could well carry the same charge as breaking and entering.7 Each country will determine its own cultural threshold for what type of information is permissible to be shared, and what type is inappropriate or just too personal. What the Indian government considers obscene or perhaps pornographic, the French might let pass without a second thought. Consider the case of a society that is deeply concerned about privacy but is also saturated with camera-equipped smart phones and inexpensive camera drones that can be purchased at any toy store. The categories that exist for paparazzi photographers (“public” versus “private” space) could be extended and applied to everyone, with certain designated “safe zones” where photography requires a subject’s consent (or, in the case of Saudi Arabia, consent from a female subject’s male guardian). People would use specific apps on their phones to get permission, and because digital photos generate a time stamp and digital watermark, determining if someone took an illegal picture would be simple work. Digital watermarking refers to the insertion of bits into a digital image, audio or video file that contains copyright information about the file’s owner—name, date, rights and so on. Watermarks act as protection against manipulation because, while they are invisible, they can be extracted and read with special software, so when tampering is suspected, technical experts can determine whether a file is indeed an unadulterated copy or not.
For the third type of coping strategy, at the societal level, we need to ask how non-state actors (such as communities and nonprofit organizations) will respond to the consequences of the data revolution. We think a wave of civil-society organizations will emerge in the next decade designed to shield connected citizens from their governments and from themselves. Powerful lobbying groups will advocate content and privacy laws. Rights organizations that document repressive surveillance tactics will call for better citizen protection. There will be support groups to help different demographics deal with the consequences of undeletable data. Educational organizations will try to reach school-age children to avoid over-sharing. (“Never give your data to a stranger.”) The recent campaign in the United States against cyber-bullying is truly a harbinger of what is to come: broad public acknowledgment, grassroots social campaigns to promote awareness, and tepid political attempts to contain it. Within schools, we expect that teachers and administrators will treat cyber-bullying with the same weight and penalties as physical altercations, only instead of a child’s being sent to the principal’s office after recess, he will be sent there when he arrives in the morning for something he wrote online the previous night at home.
In addition to mitigating the negative consequences of a more connected world, non-state actors will be responsible for generating many of the most promising new ideas that harness these technological changes for the better. In developing countries, aid organizations are already leading the way with innovative pilot projects that capitalize on the growing global connectivity. During the 2011 famine in East Africa, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Rajiv Shah reported that his organization was using a mix of mobile money platforms and the traditional “hawala” money-transfer system in Somalia to get past the violent Islamist group al-Shabaab’s ban on aid for affected populations. (The hawala system is an Islamic-world network of trust-based money-transfer agents who operate outside of formal financial institutions.) The high rate of growth of mobile adoption and basic connectivity in the country has forged new opportunities for both the population and those seeking to help. Nonprofit and philanthropic organizations in particular will continue to push the boundaries of technology-driven solutions in the new digital age, well suited as they are to the task, being more flexible than government agencies and more able to absorb risk than businesses.
The fourth category of coping strategy is the personal. Citizens will demonstrate an increased reliance on anonymous peer-to-peer communication methods. In a world with no delete button, peer-to-peer (P2P) networking will become the default mode of operation for anyone looking to operate under or off the radar. Contemporary mobile P2P technologies like Bluetooth allow two physical devices to speak directly to each other rather than having to communicate over the Internet. This is in contrast to P2P file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent, which operate over the Internet. Common to both forms of peer-to-peer technologies is that users connect to each other (acting as both suppliers and receivers) without using a fixed third-party service. For citizens in the future, P2P networking will offer an enticing combination of instant communication and independence from third-party controls or monitoring.
All smart phones today are equipped with some form of peer-to-peer capability, and as the wave of cheap smart phones saturates the emerging markets in the next decade, even more people will be able to take advantage of these increasingly sophisticated tools. Bluetooth is already massively popular in many parts of the developing world because even very basic phones can often use it. In much of West Africa, where mobile adoption has vastly outpaced computer use and Internet growth, many people treat their phones like stereo systems because easy peer-to-peer sharing allows them to store, swap and listen to music entirely through their phones.
Mobile jukeboxes in Mali may be a response to specific infrastructure challenges, but people everywhere will begin to favor P2P networking, some for personal reasons (discomfort with undeletable records) and others for pragmatic ones (secure communications). Citizens in repressive societies already use common P2P communication platforms and encrypted messaging systems like Research in Motion (RIM)’s BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) to interact with less fear of government intrusion, and in the future, new forms of technologies that utilize P2P models will also become available to them.
Today, the discussions around wearable technologies are focused on a luxury market: wristwatches we’ll wear that vibrate or apply a pulse when our alarm clock goes off (of which some versions already exist), earrings that monitor our blood pressure and so on.8 New applications of augmented reality (AR) technology (the superimposing of touch, sound or images from the virtual world over a physical, real-world environment) promise even richer wearable experiences. In April 2012 Google unveiled its own AR prototype called Project Glass—eyeglasses with a built-in display over one eye that can convey information, handle messages through voice command and shoot and record video through its camera—and similar devices from other companies are on the way. In the future, the intersection of wearable technology, AR and peer-to-peer communications will combine sensory data, rich information channels and secure communications to generate exceptionally interesting and useful devices. In a country where religious police or undercover agents roam public areas, for example, good spatial awareness is critical, so a wearable-technology inventor will design a discreet wristwatch that its wearer can use to send a warning pulse to others around him when he spots a regime agent in his vicinity. An entirely new nonverbal language will emerge around sensory data—perhaps two pulses tell you a government agent is nearby, and three will mean “Run.” Using GPS data, the watch would also share the location of its wearer with others, who might be wearing AR glasses that could identify which direction the agent is coming from. All these communications will be peer-to-peer. This makes them more secure and reliable than technologies that depend on being connected to the Internet.