On controlling electromagnetic radiation and the data it carries
WearTec blog posts about a fabric that claims to block mobile phone radiation and Netowrk Performance reports an art-work by Susan Hartig that uses it to make a tent.
Ms Hartig says: "Especially in big-city areas, there are hardly any spaces that are not saturated by electromagnetic fields. Several mobile phone and WLAN networks are usually available. The human being is embedded into an invisible telematic network, and thus can itself link at any time with other humans over these available networks. By this data dispersion he/she can be increasingly topographically located......the tent becomes a “non-space�, a white mark in the telecommunication topography. A detection of individuals who are within the tent is no longer possible. Furthermore, communication with other people can only take place in the interior of the tent and except for acoustic vibrations, words reach neither from the inside outward nor from the outside inward. Thus the tent functions as a shield or third skin that wraps around humans."
e-blocker's company website refers to 'electrosmog', "an artificial word used to describe electromagnetic radiation. It refers to the electromagnetic fields created by power lines, radio and mobile phone transmitters, mobile phones themselves and radio applications such as WLAN or Bluetooth." Its product is positioned very much as a device to protect against potential health problems caused by electromagnetic radiation - eg you line the body side of your pocket with their fabric to prevent mobile phone signals getting through to you.
Thre's a certain amount of serious concern about electrosmog, though largely from the websites of companies who sell devices to protect you against it.
One thing I really would like to see is Usman Haque's Sky Ear, a cloud of helium ballons containing sensors that light up in response to electromagnetic signals. It "shows both how a natural invisible electromagnetism pervades our environment and also how our mobile phone calls and text messages delicately affect the new and existing electromagnetic fields."
See my earlier posting on Belinda Barnet's essay in CTheory, which develops similar ideas about the data smog you leave behind you when you travel and the 'global mnemotechnical system'.
A recent article by Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger argues that "Google saves every search query, and millions of video surveillance cameras retain our movements. In this article I analyze this shift and link it to technological innovation and information economics. Then I suggest why we may want to worry about the shift, and call for what I term data ecology. In contrast to others I do not call for comprehensive new laws or constitutional adjudication. Instead I propose a simple rule that reinstates the default of forgetting our societies have experienced for millennia, and I show how a combination of law and technology can achieve this shift" (His proposal: "Data is associated with meta-data that defines how long the underlying personal information ought to be stored. Once data has reached its expiry date, it will be deleted automatically by software.")
Less scientifically, I've compared the whole thing to the recording angel. And I'm fascinated by the idea of 'personal stealth' devices. Also we need something that will confuse facial recognition devices and something that will blur your image on a surveillance camera.
I'd suggest one weapon to use against the data collectors is to deliberately smog them by providing more data than they want -as Hasan Elahi's website shows. And of course there is no need for the data we publish about ourselves to be true. There's a whole literature devoted to RFID Spoofing, for example. (Buy RFID readers here)
We badly need an ecology of data: a set of standards about what should and should not be created and stored. (Oddly, although Mayer-Schoeberger's precis refers to this term, his article doesn't appear to use the word ecology anywhere else in its text.) I've speculated about the idea, without using the exact term, before. It's a very big question: are there limits to the virtual world?
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