I was inspired to write this article , which discussed how, focusing on facial recognition systems, we miss the whole idea of mass data collection: you can identify a person by completely any data. Even people themselves use various methods for this: for example, the brain of a nearsighted person relies on gait to identify people at great distances rather than trying to recognize faces.
The idea here is that society unconsciously rejects new technologies rather than trying to understand the true reason.
But I would like to add that there are technologies that can take surveillance to a fundamentally new level, significantly closer to Orwellian reality. And these technologies are much closer to mass successful implementation than we think.
These are technologies that allow you to obtain information that ordinary people are not used to receiving in transformed digital form. This is information about scents. In the real world, scent carries enormous amounts of information from which people can gather additional information about you personally. For example, even a couple of minutes by the campfire will leave your clothes smelling of smoke, which can linger in them for an identifiable time of up to a week. There are entire perfume industries working on scent synthesis.
Did you know that there is no "old person’s smell"? In fact, the tissues and body composition of an old person have almost no smell. It’s just that their skin has absorbed particles of substances from the air from all the places they have been throughout their lives.
"Digitizing" scents was long considered a complex task that essentially came down to chromatography. That is, methods of chemical composition analysis that directly examine the molecules of which it consists.
Twenty years ago, chromatographs were laboratory cabinets that required minutes or tens of minutes of work to analyze a substance.
But today, the task of determining the molecular composition of gas and comparing it with the "fingerprints" of known substances is solvable in a portable device format. Many of you have seen it in the subway for a long time: it is In no more than five seconds, this "mini vacuum" can determine whether you have come into contact with explosives, drugs, hazardous poisons, or toxic substances.
The thing is, odor has unique characteristics:
- It easily penetrates most materials, including body tissues.
- There are an enormous number of different entities of odor…
- … that can combine in various combinations.
- … it also has an "analog" nature, where intensity is regulated by quantity.
- … but, like all of the human senses, it has a logarithmic intensity dependence on the "perceived" level.
But in the real world, intensity is the amount of substance. Physically, the total number of molecules. And, like everything from the analog world, we are increasingly able to digitize them more easily and accurately. Soon we will be able to create simple devices that can determine whether you were around a campfire yesterday. Tomorrow — a week in the past. The day after tomorrow — for a whole year, and you will even be able to identify the type of wood that burned. This entire picture of odors will soon be able to be digitized and transformed into a uniquely identifiable fingerprint that can be read from a distance. And with the entire accessible history at the reading point.
It is very hard for us to imagine how deep the world of odors is, but for centuries we have utilized the superior sense of smell of dogs to locate well-hidden dangerous things. For example, a dog working at customs can distinguish the scent of TNT packaged in several vacuum-sealed bags and spritzed with perfume in a suitcase.
From a distance of several meters.
The dog.
Simply, its ADC has a wider dynamic range and resolution. But the environment is the same. So it’s just a matter of technique.
We might need to start considering what dangers could arise from the ability to identify people by scent.
Please refrain from using the argument "I have nothing to hide" in discussions. It does not add constructive value. This issue has been widely debated before, and society has already reached a consensus. Use search; therein lies the power.
Source: habr.com
