One thing we can be assured of is computerized data not staying in a container, resting easily or behaving. Information, in this sense, truly wants to be free–as in liberated–especially since so many stand to profit from its agglomeration and dissemination. We’re just at the beginning of the Internet of Things, in which a conversation among machines, a real-time exchange of numbers and pictures and more, will likely make quotidian life more efficient and convenient while it quietly obliterates privacy.

Excerpts follow from two pieces on the impact of data on transit and surveillance in the next five years. The first is a Verge Q&A with outgoing U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Anthony Foxx, and the latter a speculative scene by Peter Moskowitz from Fusion about the inescapable transparency of American political activism in 2020.

From the Verge:

Question:

It’s November, 2021: what does the world look like?

Anthony Foxx:

By 2021, we will see autonomous vehicles in operation across the country in ways that we [only] imagine today… Families will be able to walk out of their homes and call a vehicle, and that vehicle will take them to work or to school. We’re going to see transit systems sharing services with some of these companies. It’s not just autonomy in the vehicles. You’re going to see trucks running more closely together, which result in fuel savings and positive climate impact. You’ll see companies that will start to use unmanned aircraft to deliver products to us. My daughter, who will be 16 in 2021, won’t have her driver’s license. She will be using a service. …

Question:

Data collection can enable autonomy, but only if it’s shared across the industry. How do you encourage that sharing?

Anthony Foxx:

I want us to have a broader imagination of how data can lift the safety advantages of autonomous cars. [If] I drive over a pothole and you are driving behind me, and see what happens to my car, you glean that understanding and you think to avoid that pothole. If an autonomous car runs over a pothole, will it be able to communicate and share that data not only with cars of the same type [of car], or a particular manufacturer, but [with] all autonomous vehicles regardless of who made it? That’s one question I think the industry needs to spend time on, because there are issues around propriety of information. We found in the aviation arena that information is shared between commercial carriers all the time on an anonymous basis. [The information] doesn’t identify the carrier specifically, but it identifies the situation and it allows us to attack safety challenges much more quickly. What if, for example, a car… averts an accident by making a particular move? Can that information now be shared among other vehicles?•

From Fusion:

It’s 2020, and you live in Chicago. A little bit about yourself: You’re politically active. Not a front-of-the-lines activist necessarily, but someone who cares about race, and income inequality, about the state of policing and the police state. You’re tech savvy—not a hacker or a programmer—but you know your way around social media, and that’s where you get a lot of information about events like readings, birthdays, whatever. You see an event in your Facebook newsfeed one day, a protest against police brutality, let’s say, and you click “attending.”

Here’s what happens next.

You’re already being watched before you leave your house. No one’s eyes are necessarily on you. But you are being tracked, logged, recorded, nonetheless. We’ve all heard about how much data sites like Facebook and Google collect on you, even when you’re not on the sites. They often know your location, what you’ve purchased, and what you’re searching for. Most of us give those companies our data voluntarily, without even knowing exactly how it’s used, either by private companies, or by the police state. 

Surveillance has always been legal in the U.S., but before the proliferation of technology, it required manpower. Someone had to be actively surveilling you, driving a car behind yours, clicking a camera, jotting down notes on your every move. Now, tracking people is cheaper and easier than ever.

In 2020, law enforcement agencies are using this data in smarter, more precise, and creepier ways. Technologies were developed long ago to track you and your friends via your Facebook feed. So were databases where pictures of faces are stored indefinitely for use with facial recognition software. Cameras watching our moves on subways and in traffic and on the street have been inconspicuously recording for decades.•