Chapter 19
Society's Changing View of Technology
While this book is about all kinds of smart products and services and technologically sophisticated companies, we would be remiss to not point out we live in an uneven, “unelite” society. A relevant question to ask is whether society at large is ready for the massive coming tsunami of technology. This chapter presents some considerations that cause pause.
Our Fragmented Society
At one extreme is Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist who, with his wife Joanne, encourages their kids to be comfortable with all kinds of technology. “The parents and kids publish a combined nine blogs. They bring a duffle bag on family trips just to carry all the cords, adapters, and batteries for their electronic devices.”1
And then at the other extreme there are what USA Today calls the “Tech-Nos,” including folks like Joan Brady: “No, she doesn't e-mail. And, really, she does not need you to call her and read the latest e-mail joke to her. She knows what she's missing, and she's grateful for it every day.”2
It is estimated that the number of U.S. mothers who have used midwives to deliver babies naturally has doubled over the past several decades. At least some insurance companies are starting to pay for alternative healthcare like acupuncture and chiropractic care—relatively low-tech services. (Of course, in a sign of the times, we now have laser acupuncture and expert systems to suggest precise acu-points to be needled depending on the ailment being treated.)
Then there are other customers that are cynical of technology—with good reason. Banks sold automated teller machines (ATMs) as customer self-service, and then tacked on fees for that self-service. Companies are now selling electronic invoices as “green” and progressive but then trying to tack on fees for that “privilege.” Hollywood has made money on the same content in VHS, DVD, and now BluRay formats. Customers feel that their privacy is not protected and their lives are subject to surveillance as technology increases in products. These customers are not Luddites—just wary.
In the middle between Wilson and Brady is someone like Brian Sommer. Sommer is a former Accenture partner and is now founder of a technology consulting firm, Techventive, and a ZDNet blogger. He is not a technology Luddite by any means; he just has a cautious philosophy on technology adoption. He explains:
I'm that fellow who repairs all the neighborhood computers and sets up everyone's wireless networks. Every desktop, laptop, and netbook I own, I've upgraded the memory, the disk drive, or some other component within them. I get technology and I've written, spoken, and researched the space for decades.
I don't, however, own a smartphone and I don't have a Facebook page.
I'm not making some sort of antisocial statement. Actually, it's just the opposite, as I may be a lot more social than many Facebook users. I just don't like the privacy tradeoffs many new technologies inflict on the public. I also don't buy into the premise that posting content on a website is the same as really investing in a friendship.
There's a fascination in tech circles that one successful technology can be made better by smashing another technology into the former. Cell phones used to be about making telephone calls. Now, some cell phones are computers, GPS devices, cameras, bill payment tools and music players. Yes, that sounds convenient, but I leave a GPS in my car. My digital camera has a great zoom capability that is nonexistent on a smartphone. My iPod stays mostly in my briefcase. I have a netbook and laptops for computers and they are still more powerful and secure than my phone.
I like “Just Enough” technologies. They're simple, straightforward, and easily replaceable. If I lose or break my cell phone, I can get another for under $20. It's similar for laptops and cameras. Not only are my repair bills low (or nonexistent), I never suffer complete technology failure the way those who put everything into one device do. If a thief stole my phone, they're not getting much. What would they get if they stole your smartphone?
Just enough technology gives me peace of mind. I don't worry about my cell provider or anyone else knowing exactly where I am. My privacy is easier to protect when I don't have one of these über-devices tracking and controlling every aspect of my work and professional life. Just enough technology is really inexpensive, too. I can cheaply change out any component. And, just enough technology means I'm never really tied up with a single provider and I'm not on contract with any firm.
I'm not on Facebook either as I find it's easier and more rewarding to have friendships the old-fashioned way. I use a cell phone to talk to friends and family, not to update my social network page. I make an effort to be someone's friend, to listen to them and to discuss their needs, wants, and challenges. I invest in them. I don't invest my scarce time and attention to building website monuments to my egotism or narcissism. When I see someone at a rock concert updating their social network page during a number, I feel sorry for this person and their date. They may have gone to the event together but they aren't bonding and their friendship is straining.
I'm staying off Facebook and I'm keeping my old “just-enough” technologies for now. Yes, you can try to shame me into getting a smartphone or a Facebook account, but I'll probably resist it. I want to keep my privacy and the flexibility that permits low cost. Plus, it helps keep me grounded in what's important: my time, my family, and building enduring relationships. If you'd like to have a real friendship someday, give me or someone like me a real call and let's connect in a positive way.
Our Digital Generation Gap
Wired magazine listed 100 things our kids will likely go “huh?” about, including the following:
- Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
- Rotary dial televisions with no remote control.
- The scream of a modem connecting.
- The buzz of a dot-matrix printer.
- Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
- Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
- Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
- Sending that film away to be processed.
- Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.
- Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.3
Asked about that list, Charlie Bess of HP goes, “And don't forget doing math in their head!”
Caitlin McNally is associate producer of the PBS show Growing Up Digital, which points out that “the Internet has created the greatest generation gap since rock “ roll.” She was still in her 20s when the show was made. In an interview she described her experience:
More than once, I'd be trying to follow up with a kid (featured in the show) and I would discover pretty quickly that the only way I could elicit a response was through a text message or social networking site. I would place call after call, or send e-mail after e-mail—nothing. But with a text, or a message on Facebook, a response would ping back within minutes.
This phenomenon was a surprise; it made me feel old-fashioned—and old. I thought my experience would resemble that of the kids more than their parents, as I'm not a parent yet and certainly still empathize with being someone's child. The majority of teenagers we talked to expressed good-natured exasperation that their parents “didn't know how to work a computer” or barely understood text messaging. I was confident that because I'm completely comfortable using a computer, e-mail, and a cell phone, I'd relate pretty quickly to how the kids we met communicate online. This was not the case.4
Our Digital Addiction
Starbucks has for some time marketed its coffee shops as the “third place,” a place where people hang out beyond their homes and offices. Part of the allure was wi-fi availability in most of its stores. Apparently, it has become the first place for some of its customers. Starting in August 2011, some busy Starbucks coffee shops in New York City have started blocking electrical outlets to discourage laptop users from hogging space and to free up seats for other customers.5
In 2011 in the UK, a 20-year-old Xbox player died from a clot suspected to be deep vein thrombosis typically associated with lack of mobility on long plane flights. His father said he would often play for 12 hours at a time.6 In 2005, a South Korean player died after a marathon three-day gaming session. On its Xbox Live site, Microsoft has a lengthy “Healthy Gaming Guide,” which recommends a healthy lifestyle, taking frequent breaks, and correct body postures, among other advice.7
In 2010 Nintendo put a notice on its site in Japan saying that “children under the age of seven should not use 3-D games, since their eyes are not fully developed. It also says gamers of any age should not play the 3Ds in 3-D mode for longer than 30 minutes at a time. For 2-D game play, Nintendo recommends breaks after an hour of play.”8
Websites like NetAddiction.com offer self-assessment tests to determine whether technology has become a drug. Among the questions used to identify those at risk: Are you frequently checking your email? Do you often lose sleep because you log in late at night? If you answered “often” or “always,” it says technology may be taking a toll on you.9
reSTART, an Internet addiction recovery center, says its research is showing the perils of the digital age: addiction, distraction, immaturity, disconnection, lower empathy, lowered creativity and analytical abilities, and increased depression.10 It offers a 45-day “detox” program at a Retreat Center situated in a “serene natural environment in rural Fall City, Washington, in the Pacific Northwest.”
Our Digital Fingerprints
In 2009, Wired magazine writer Evan Ratliff “vanished,” and the magazine offered a bounty of $5,000 to anyone who could find him. The magazine posted clues as to his whereabouts, and it was fascinating to watch:
What had started as an exercise in escape quickly became a cross between a massively multiplayer online game and a reality show. A staggeringly large community arose spontaneously, splintered into organized groups, and set to work turning over every rock in Ratliff's life.11
What was scary about the whole exercise was how many digital fingerprints Ratliff was leaving even as he was trying to stay underground. Even scarier was how even amateur sleuths were ingenious enough to trace him.
In comparison, there are professional sleuths like the start-up Social Intelligence, which generates reports on job applicants or monitors existing employees. It does so based on employer predefined criteria, both positive and negative. “Negative examples include racist remarks or activities, sexually explicit photos or videos, and illegal activity such as drug use. Positive examples include charitable or volunteer efforts, participation in industry blogs, and external recognition.”12 They search social networks, blog entries, videos, photos, comments, and other forms of user-generated content available publicly on the Internet.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports that “75 percent of recruiters are required by their companies to do online research of candidates. And 70 percent of recruiters in the United States report that they have rejected candidates because of information online.”13
In this chapter's guest column, Professor Mary Cronin writes about “Do Not Track” consumer protections. Even if we can mandate corporations from not tracking us, just about anyone else, curious or malicious, can and will.
Ethical Expectations of Technology Companies
In Chapter 17 we saw how sustainability is a growing expectation of technology companies. It is, however, only a subset of a broader expectation society increasingly has of business ethics.
The Ethisphere Institute is a think tank dedicated to the creation, advancement, and sharing of best practices in business ethics, corporate social responsibility, anti-corruption, and sustainability. Every year it lists the “world's most ethical companies.” Attorneys, professors, government officials, and organization leaders assisted Ethisphere in creating the scoring methodology.
The 2011 list includes several technology companies including Accenture, Adobe Systems, Avaya, Becton Dickinson, Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Philips, Salesforce.com, Singapore Telecom, Swisscom, Symantec Corporation, Teradata Corporation, and T-Mobile USA.14
Don Rickert has a broader definition of ethics. In a blog post he writes,
While the various professional organizations to which people involved in technology might belong have codes of ethics, serious reflection on the ethical impact of technology in the workplace is a rare thing.15
To expand on Rickert's point, very few technical or business schools put much emphasis on ethics in their curricula. And when they do, like Professor Herman Tavani who teaches computer ethics at Rivier College in Nashua, NH, and has written several books on the topic, few technology vendors call him. This walking encyclopedia on cyberethics is not being leveraged enough by technology practitioners. Professor James Moor at Dartmouth, another authority on cyberethics, also confirms he is not often consulted by technology vendors.16
Needed: A New Generation of Professionals
Given the gap between the technology avalanche and society's ability to absorb it, we will need a new generation of therapists, new career counselors, and new professors to teach ethics to technicians. We will need more people like Kelly Chessen, who is a former suicide hotline counselor and now DriveSavers’ official “data crisis counselor.”
Part psychiatrist and part tech enthusiast, Chessen's role is to try to calm people down when they lose their digital possessions to failed data drives. Chessen says that some people have gone as far as to threaten suicide over their lost digital possessions and data.
“It's usually indirect threats like, ‘I'm not sure what I'm going to do if I can't get the data back,’ but sometimes it will be a direct threat such as, ‘I may just have to end it if I can't get to the information,’” said Chessen.”17
We will also need a new generation of human resource professionals who appreciate that younger candidates will have information online that for a generation prior was offline and be careful how they evaluate such social data.
Conclusion
While we can build technologically elite enterprises, we cannot mandate a technologically elite society. The reality is that it is “unelite” and very uneven. So we need a new set of professionals to prepare society for the avalanche of coming technologies. In a guest column, Professor Mary Cronin of Boston College focuses on another challenge we will face in the next few years. She addresses the continuous, automatic, and invisible tracking of individuals by multiple smart devices and related explosion of personal data and the new privacy challenges society will have to address.
Guest Column: Smart Products Consumers Can Trust—Professor Mary Cronin
Mary J. Cronin is a Professor of Information Systems at the Carroll School of Management, Boston College. Dr. Cronin has more than 20 years’ experience in managing and advising technology-intensive organizations. During this time she has written extensively about online privacy and data security issues, including the impact of smartphone apps, RFID, smart products, and geotracking.18
When I starting writing about online privacy in the 1990s, the declaration that “There is no privacy on the Internet—get over it” was still controversial. Today's upsurge in social networking and the ubiquity of targeted online advertising and customer profiling makes the lack of online privacy abundantly obvious. However, recent developments indicate that the privacy policy pendulum may be swinging back in the direction of online consumer protection.
In December 2010 the FTC issued a report on “Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change,” which repeated the well-known reality that “many companies—both online and offline—do not adequately address consumer privacy interests.” But for the first time the report proposed “a normative framework for how companies should protect consumers’ privacy.”
In particular the FTC endorsed a browser-based “Do Not Track” mechanism that would provide a simple way for consumers to disable tracking of their online behavior across all Internet sites. Various Do Not Track bills that would give teeth to the FTC framework have been working their way through Congress and state legislatures during 2011. In anticipation of stricter privacy enforcement, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are already providing some Do Not Track features in their latest browser releases.
But a browser-based privacy solution won't address the much larger consumer information sharing issues posed by connected devices and products that are called smart products or more generally the Internet of Things. At a time when smart connected products are generating unprecedented amounts of data about the daily lives, locations, health, and habits of consumers in their homes, in their cars, on mobile networks, and in every location that they might visit, the tracking of online browser behavior is just the tip of the iceberg.
Even if Do Not Track becomes the norm for web browsing, the technology and infrastructure of mobile phones and other consumer devices connected to the Internet of Things represent uncharted territory and abundant temptations for product vendors and service providers to test the boundaries of personal privacy. Analysts project that there will be 50 billion smart devices online by 2015—a number that dwarfs Internet-connected computers and the 6 billion mobile subscribers around the globe.
Apps designed for smartphones with GPS chips already track consumer locations 24 hours a day, often reporting this information to third-party partners who mine it for insights about consumer habits and for precision targeting of individuals. In addition to tracking consumer location, smartphone apps can access the contact information in subscriber phone books, the photographs, and other media stored on the device, and other uses of the phone.
As more smart products are connected to the Internet, new types of reporting and analysis of consumer behavior are enabled. And unlike web tracking, most smart product data collection operates behind the scenes in ways that are invisible and largely unfamiliar to the product owner. What's more, smart product connections that enable monitoring are typically embedded in appliances, automobiles, and medical devices that may not provide any two-way communication options for the consumer. Often data collection is built into the functionality of the smart product itself so that the owner cannot effectively use the device without a connection that also enables vendor reporting and oversight. By design, there is currently no way to set a smart product Do Not Track option, even temporarily.
As I noted in my book Smart Products, Smarter Services, “the features that make smart products so intelligent are often the same ones that make them capable of amassing significantly more data about more aspects of their owner's life than ever before.” From the moment the buyer activates a smart product, that device monitors its environment and often the presence of nearby connected devices on the same network, often noting any unauthorized connections or uses. It records the exact times and dates that software and content are accessed, scans for upgrades or vendor-controlled instructions, and uses this data to allow or restrict certain types of use by the consumer. Such monitoring and reporting may sound like a futuristic scenario but it's as close as your Kindle, your smart thermostat, or your car's cruise control and collision avoidance systems.
The major new privacy challenge for this decade is the continuous, automatic, and invisible tracking of individuals by multiple smart devices. In the aggregate, consumer-owned smart products collect and report data at a level of precision and frequency that vastly outstrips the consumer information collected online.
The number of smart products owned by a typical consumer is growing at a rapid pace. Home health monitoring and smart energy systems for the home are still in an early adoption stage; by the end of this decade they are likely to be as common as Internet-connected TVs and smartphones in middle-class U.S. households. Smart devices will inevitably develop more sophisticated behavioral tracking and data reporting capabilities and, in the absence of privacy guidelines, vendors will use those capabilities to the fullest. Until smart product privacy gets more attention, consumers are unlikely to realize the extent of tracking and highly personal data collection that is enabled by the smart products used in their daily routines.
Smart Products That Consumers Can Trust—A Business Opportunity
Rather than waiting for the government to mandate smart product policies, companies would be well served in adopting and disclosing consistent and verifiable guidelines for the permissible use, duration of storage, and data security protection measures taken to protect all of the consumer information that is collected by their connected products. Smartphone, automotive, home entertainment, and other smart product vendors should also disclose the privacy practices of their ecosystem partners who develop applications and peripherals for their products.
Providing clear information to consumers about smart product data collection capabilities and offering buyers a spectrum of service and privacy options can provide new business opportunities for vendors. Leveraging the communications capabilities of smart products in ways that allow owners to talk directly to the vendors will create a new form of value and encourage even more data sharing. Many consumers would opt to accept the vendor's stated data collection processes, in exchange for value-added services, improved customer support, and the personalization that such data collection enables. Those who opt out might do so only temporarily. Having control and choice about data sharing would make buyers more comfortable with using the smart product in a variety of ways.