Nanotech advances could limit privacy
Chris Toumey at University of South Carolina NanoCenter told Earth & Sky, "I fear that data about our own bodies is going to be shared and stored, not necessarily to our advantage."
Nanotechnology and an individual’s right to privacy.
Nanotechnology is the science of the very small. It has a powerful potential to increase the speed and precision of information gathering. Chris Toumey is an anthropologist at the University of South Carolina NanoCenter.
Chris Toumey: There’s talk, and I think accurate talk, about making smaller cameras, smaller sensors, things that could track one’s movements roughly the way radio frequency IDs today can track a package. But a second area which I think is even more of a concern is the medical interface. That is, nanomedical diagnostics are providing now better information about one’s genetic constitution, now to the point almost of molecular precision. And this is good because it means we’re on the verge of some very personalized medicine.
But it’ll also mean that detailed medical information can be shared easily, for example, with an insurance company that might want to know your predisposition to certain diseases.
Chris Toumey: One of the things that’s going to happen with nanotechnology is that our computers are going to become much more powerful as they become smaller and faster. And among other things I fear that data about our own bodies is going to be shared and stored, not necessarily to our advantage.
Our thanks today to the National Science Foundation.
National Medal of Science winner George Whitesides of Harvard University is another scientist who recognizes the relationship between the emerging science of nanotechnology and an individual’s right to privacy.
In an interview with Earth & Sky in 2005, Whitesides said: “It’s a second–order concern, but one area of technology that will be advanced by nanotechnology is information technology, and particularly electronic memory. As electronic memory becomes smaller and cheaper and faster, it gets to be easier and easier to store information in memory, and perhaps, with future advances, to find it. For me, that kind of advance in information storage and retrieval does lead to concerns about privacy and individuality in the future. But that is very much a question of how society chooses to use information technology enabled by nanotechnology, rather than the nanotechnology per se.”
Visit the University of South Carolina NanoCenter.
