Citations

Existing Citations

  • digital exhaust : We’re putting ever greater amounts of data into the cloud. Nest knows which rooms in your house you spend the time in, and when. Smart appliances transmit our voice commands to their manufacturers. Car insurance companies deploy tracking devices to gauge driver safety. Fitness trackers know our heart rates and how many steps we take each day. The photos we upload to Instagram may include geographic coordinates. In addition to the information we deliberately post to Twitter and Facebook, social networks could log other information, such as how often we log in and what times we generally post. . . . Individually, it might not seem like much of this data would be problematic if it were leaked. But as it starts to be combined in new ways, this data in wrong hands could come back to haunt us, perhaps even years later. “As we interact with our devices there’s this trail of digital exhaust that we leave behind,” he [Kevin Westin] says. “Once you combine this data and create very rich profiles of people, I worry that it’s going to be the death of privacy.” And those profiles become even richer when our homes themselves are conveying intimate, constant data about our minute-to-minute actions in our own homes. (†1998)