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Privacy in a high tech world

PostPosted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:37 am
by Onix
I had a thought about Rob's Icar blog post on privacy. I was wondering if it wouldn't make sense for a person that was worried about privacy to have (please correct my terminology here if I have this wrong) Gaia entities that would go out and insert their creator's image into video feeds. Not just standing there, but acting like they were really in the feed. Something like an intelligent virus that goes out and acts like a distraction.

But now think of that on a huge scale. Spam the cameras with your image. Sure you don't want to be on every camera, but if you're on 30,000 cameras, it might be harder to figure out which one is the right one.

This would be really useful for celebrities. You'd never know if that's really Angelina Jolie walking into the local Wal-Mart (or equivalent) or just a spam image of her.

Now imagine that these intelligent agents have personality and behavior settings. For example, A celebrity agent could walk on camera like they're a star, or they could be covered up and look like they're trying to avoid detection.

What if a criminal could program their agents to occasionally act like they're breaking into the antiquities museum? Have your face show up enough and maybe they'll ignore the real deal when he breaks in.

Now, what if I'm Zaphod Beblebrox and I set my AI's personality to do crazy things? What if Fake Zaphod takes on a life of it's own and becomes a virtual celebrity?

Just really really interesting plot and back plot threads start popping up all over.

They wouldn't be foolproof of course, armed with an army of Gaia agents, law enforcement would be able to focus down on a single criminal and sort through the fakes. It's just an issue of how long it takes. The best video spam agents are difficult to detect, at most it's the behavior of other people in the feed that could give it away, but what's to say that guy that your video agent shook hands with isn't another video agent? Or maybe a real life patsy paid to walk out into the courtyard and pretend like you're there.

Maybe you just walked out and shook your own hand?

It's another interesting thing to give Gaia hackers.

Re: Privacy in a high tech world

PostPosted: Fri Nov 22, 2013 3:11 pm
by Rob Lang
I'm glad you liked the post, Emmett. You have a brilliant idea. The only restriction in vanilla Icar is that Gaia Entities can't hack a system, they don't have the permissions to do so.

However, imagine if you paid a bunch of hacks to lay your image dormant in a whole bunch of systems that they suddenly spring up! BOOM. You're everywhere.

You're right that it's always about how long things take. The Star Enforcers are pretty handy at cutting through the crap on Gaia but, like a smoke screen, it might be just enough to cause grief. And that's what you want.

Another way of doing it is paying a bunch of people to have plastic surgery to look exactly like you. Any amount of surgery can be done in Icar, so the doppelgangers could be made to look identical. Of course, this would need their consent and they may well be complicit in your crime.

If you were a popular Gaia film star, members of the public might have their appearance changed to be like yours just out of fandom. Spooky but a logical extrapolation.