Thiruvananthapuram: Privacy and confidentiality of personal information is under assault by emerging technologies, according to an expert on IT laws.
Eben Moglen, of Columbia Law School, founder of the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), New York, and a long-standing Free software supporter, says that a combination of the internet, Cloud and mobile devices, with data mining "is emerging as a super machine that will soon know more about people than people themselves".
Moglen was speaking here at a session on "Ethics and Emerging Technologies".
He said mobile phones had become data-capture devices capable of capturing and uploading to the Cloud various user data such as location, browsing habits, shopping behaviour, and even lifestyle information.
"It is likely that within the next one generation, entire behavioural aspects of humans will be transparent to such machines," said the expert.
He added that on other fronts, such as military robotics, a "robot infantry" will have profound ethical implications for the future.
"Throughout history, military forces have been guided by human values and ethics, but a non-human force may not be constrained by such ethical values while dealing with its victims," he said.
Significant changes, he said, were likely to happen in future, and the traditional notion of ethics of technology would be severely tested by this. "The ethics of emerging technology will be the ethics of human privacy," added Moglen.
Mishi Choudhary, of SFLC New York and founder, SFLC India, pointed out that many aspects of the digital lives of citizens were being monitored, and the end-user licences that many of us accept without even reading them, actually gave the companies the permission to do so.
"The on-line behaviour of billions of people are today visible to machines and to the companies that own them, and may be directly or indirectly influencing user behaviour, Choudhary said adding that all that had "serious ramifications" not just for commercial aspects such as online shopping, but even for democratic processes.
"This was one of the reasons why net neutrality was an important debate," said Choudhary.
Satish Babu, director of the state supported ICFOSS, pointed out that given the increasing role of software driven machines in the lives of people, it is important that people had control of such software.
"The only way to do this was through Free Software, which provided rights to the user community to use, study, modify and share the software that they used. It was therefore imperative that Free Software be mandated for use everywhere," said Babu.
