“You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day,” are the opening lines to the television show Person of Interest, which is based on the premise of a machine built for the Government that utilizes artificial intelligence to mine data to predict when a crime may occur.

The good news is that a system that does this does not currently in existence; the bad news is that it’s not a matter of if such a machine will be built in the future, but when, as both the State and private enterprise continue to develop artificial intelligence in leaps and bounds.

Such an all pervasive artificially intelligent form of state surveillance that can replace the need for mere mortal human-controlled surveillance is where we are heading, but as we approach that point, sometime before now and the singularity (the point where the machine becomes more intelligent than man), what we are doing now is developing technologies, and indeed selling items that will ultimately make the job of such a machine that much more easier.

At the top of the list is the group of technologies commonly bundled under the term the “Internet of Things,” or simply IoT.

IoT

The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that the IoT market has a total potential economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion a year by 2025, while IDC predicts that the installed base of IoT units will grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 17.5 percent from 2013 to 2020, reaching 28.1 billion units.

Here’s the catch: every single one of those 28.1 billion units can potentially be used for surveillance, at any point along the communications chain, be it from the device itself through to the smartphone operating it, via the router that connects all the devices to the internet, or even via the third party cloud-based company that is threading all your devices together.

This isn’t simply a case of surveillance cameras, because the devices (such as a smart thermostat) now use motion and heat detection to work out who is in the room. A smart toaster or fridge records when it is being used so there is a record available as to when you are home. Smart light bulbs that are turned on and off provide a pattern of when you are home, and what rooms in which you may prefer to be.

Perhaps the scariest new device on the market in terms of potential surveillance is the increasingly popular Amazon Echo.

Echo actively monitors a space for a voice command, meaning it has an always on microphone; yes, so do many smartphones these days, but the likes of Siri on an iPhone require you to be within two feet of the device, whereas the Echo monitors a far larger space.

Amazon on its part denies that this is a security risk and claims all communications with the device are encrypted so they cannot be accessed, but that may be a moot point given the Government is demanding companies install a backdoor into encrypted systems, the iPhone being the most high profile of recent examples, but also with the Facebook, Inc. owned WhatsApp.

When the current President of the United States demands backdoors to encryption, and the potential next President does as well, all data will be fair game for State.

In the future, you will be watched by devices you made the conscious decision to install and use.

Image credit: renaissancechambara/Flickr/CC by 2.0