26 October 2019 | New Scientist | 41It isn’t just inequality. The balance between
personal privacy and public security is only
likely to become more delicate as digital
connectivity increases. Again, that raises
questions of what sort of internet we want,
how it should be regulated and by whom.
Take the internet of things. This evolution
of the internet, in which it isn’t just computers
and smartphones beaming data to and fro,
but also objects from household refrigerators
to autonomous vehicles, is now in train.
“We already have smart hairbrushes, noodle
forks and fish tanks,” says internet privacy
researcher Paul Bernal at the University of
East Anglia, UK. “In 50 years, it will be a very
rare thing that isn’t online.”
The advantages could be big: homes
or offices automatically adapting themselves
to your preferences when you arrived, or
cars drawing up to meet you when you left.
The security risks, however, are also
significant. Hooking up cars or home
appliances to the internet exposes them
to the same kind of malicious cyberattacks
phones and laptops face. Yet where a
hacked phone probably can’t kill you, a
hacked car or oven perhaps could. Again,
maintaining an open internet in an era
of universal connectivity brings risks.
One response could be more personalised
security to regulate our access to the internet.
A few people have already inserted RFID
chips in their hands or fingers – similar to
the microchip injected into the scruff of a
pet’s neck – that let them open car doors
or turn on coffee machines with a gesture.
But even without going to such extremes,
systems such as face recognition are likely to
become more widespread, essentially bringing
us online too, like it or not. “We will be
recognisable by who and what we are,” says
Bernal. “Faces, retinas, fingerprints, voice
recognition are just the start. How we move
our hands, how we use a touchscreen, pretty
much anything we do will be recognisable.”
Protesters in Hong Kong already hide their
identities from internet-connectedsurveillance cameras by wearing masks.
They have stopped using public transport
cards, which record every trip in a central
database. And they use encrypted messaging
apps to prevent eavesdropping on their
conversations – until they get switched off.
In 50 years, Bernal thinks we will still
both care about privacy and be able to
protect it when we need to. “All technological
developments will be accompanied by
parallel disruptive technology,” he says.
There will be make-up and clothes that thwart
biometric recognition, spoofers that disguise
our location or fake our identity, and signal
blockers that disrupt Wi-Fi or its successors.Haters gonna hate
Of course, hackers will still hack, scammers
will still scam and trolls will still troll. There
will still be viral memes and pornography.
The trend towards filter bubbles and walled
gardens will hardly stop. There will still be hate
speech and extremism. “These are not
dependent on tech but on human nature,” says
Bernal. “It won’t be possible to clean up the
internet, whatever our governments think.”
However we are actually wired up,
everyone and everything will be connected.
We will probably think about the internet
even less than we do now. Being a node in
a non-stop, two-way flow of information will
be the norm, for most humans and objects
alike. Whether we will all be seeing the same
thing is less certain.
In September, an international working
group met at the United Nations headquarters
in New York to discuss the future of the
internet. The meeting made few headlines,
but China again took the opportunity to push
its vision of an internet broken into state-
controlled zones. Others are starting to take
notice, drawn by the desire for greater control
and protection from outside influence and
attack. Besides Russia’s plans, Vietnam and
Tanzania have also adopted Chinese-style
internet restrictions in the past few years.
The open internet is no longer a given.
It may well be that an internet without borders,
allowing free movement of information,
enabling commerce and spreading innovation,
is better. But as we come to appreciate the
significant downsides – cyberattacks,
misinformation and big business running
amok – it is a case that must now be made,
rather than simply taken for granted. The
internet has changed the world immeasurably
in its first 50 years; its next 50 years depend
crucially on how that argument plays out. ❚distributed denial of
service (DDoS) attacks
worldwide in 2017
SOURCE: CISCO- 5 million