Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy

Опубликовано 4 августа 2016, 22:56

In 2006, co-authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel wrote Naked Conversations, a book that persuaded businesses to embrace what we now call social media. Six years later they have teamed up again to report that social media is but one of five converging forces – mobile, data, sensors and location-based technology – that promise to change virtually every aspect of our lives. Combined with social media they form a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends. The resulting convergent superforce is so powerful that it is ushering in an era the authors call the Age of Context. In this new era, our devices know when to wake us up early because it snowed last night; they contact the people we are supposed to meet with to warn them we’re running late. Scoble and Israel have spent more than a year researching this book. They report what they have learned from interviewing more than a hundred pioneers of the new technology and by examining hundreds of contextual products. What does it all mean? How will it change society in the future? The authors are unabashed tech enthusiasts, but they also warn we are entering a time when our technology serves us best because it watches us; collecting data on what we do, who we speak with, what we look at. The time to lament the loss of privacy is over. The authors argue that the time is right to demand options that enable people to reclaim some portions of that privacy.