Smartphones, Smart Watches, Smart Devices but Smart Us?

How many times do you look at your smartphone a day? How often do you check your Instagram account? Most likely it is more than you would think.

The influence and impact of the internet on our lives and indeed all areas of society is massive and mostly beneficial. However, like any positives, there are negatives that counter these benefits.

Technology continues to progress at an exponential rate, gone are the days where a single computer could barely fit inside a small building, now we live in an age where an iPhone has more computing power than the entirety of NASA during the Apollo 11 moon landing.

The machines and gadgets technology has created have become more ingrained into our lives — so essential in fact that over 80% of us check our phones within the first few minutes of waking up, throughout the day we then keep our phone within three feet of us at all times.

We have developed a highly emotional attachment to our phones, a US study found that over 90% of Americans feel increased levels of anxiety if they forgot to pick up their phone before leaving home.

Often, our obsession with technology clouds our memory in that we are putting our information, our media, our lives in the hands of software that can easily be hacked, and this negligence comes at a price.

In 2015, ‘password’ & ‘123456’ still remained the two most popular passwords, so is it any wonder hackers can compromise data easily? To combat this, many websites and apps have begun implementing multifactor authentication methods to improve security. However, it is still important to change your passwords regularly and avoid being one of over 50% of people who use the same password for all their online accounts.

Consider your smartphone as a spy, who knows exactly what you are up to, where you are doing it, who you are doing it with, for how long and how often.

Google, for example, has developed technology that enables the ability to access calls made on your Android device, and use your conversations and the sounds around you to created targeted ads. So you might have been having a phone call whilst Drake was playing in the background, then the next time you were doing a Google search, an ad about Drake’s next concert may appear.

The majority of people are oblivious to all the data-gathering that occurs. Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute found in a study that only 5% of Angry Birds players knew that the app collects locational data, which it then sells to advertisement companies. These companies then, in turn, use this information as a forecasting tool to determine your future behaviour and thus potential purchases.

A report compiled by McAfee found that 82% of all Android apps check your online activities and 80% collect location data without permission being given.

Today, everything is connected via iCloud or Google products, but that convenience comes at the cost of our privacy. The majority of us simply have no idea what we are giving up or what it will be used for because the terms and conditions which outline that information and designed in such a manner that we ignore everything displayed before clicking ‘Agree’.

You could one day walk into a pharmacy and see an advertisement for suncream using a photo that you took with your friends and because it has been posted on Instagram, it is no longer yours. Whilst this is unlikely to happen, the terms and conditions set out by Instagram give them control over the content you post.

Imagine you have an alarm clock which connects with traffic cameras to adjust your alarm based on traffic congestion estimates. Or where your fridge reorders food because you haven’t got the right ingredients for dinner that evening.

Before this may have sounded like a futuristic vision, but the technology is already here. If we are already vulnerable to cyber attacks through computers and phones, imagine having hundreds of hackable devices in your home!

Newly emerging technology like robotics, artificial intelligence, genetics, nanotechnology will all have a profound and unimaginable impact on our lives, however, whether the effect will be predominately positive or negative depends largely on who controls them.

The consequences are currently in our control, but with such rapid development in of the fields synthetic biology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, humanity’s path will be altered and at some stage, there will be a point of ‘no turning back’. It is important that there is some form of governance in place to ensure this power is not abused.