Earth & Sky

Nanotech sensors raise privacy issues

Christina Peterson told Earth & Sky, "As technology advances, even if we didn't have nanotechnology, per se, we would still be having more and more advanced ways to record information, to detect information, about individuals. And we as a society need to think about how we want these collections of information to be handled." Photo by: Pam Roth

Existing chemical sensing devices can detect certain kinds of chemicals: explosives or drugs at airports, for example. But these sensors are limited.

Experts say if you want to detect a wide variety of things, you’re going to have to have very miniaturized devices. And that’s the kind of thing nanotechnology will become good at.

Christine Peterson is Vice President for Public Policy at the Foresight Nanotech Institute. She told us that nanotechnology – the science of the invisibly small – will ultimately let scientists develop devices for sensing just about any chemical substance imaginable. And that’ll create privacy issues.

Christine Peterson: One can imagine, perhaps, I’m speculating, that eventually federal education funding might be dependent on the deployment of these sensors in the classroom. So, if there’s any students present who perhaps have been indulging the night before, alarms would ring, class would come to a halt, and those students might get in trouble.

Peterson said that society will have to grapple with the privacy issues that come with nanotechnology. Who is collecting the information? Is it being kept? Can it be used in court? Can it be used by insurance companies? Many questions … whose answers belong to the future. Tell us what you think.

Our thanks to the National Science Foundation.

Written by Eleanor Imster