Peter Cochrane: Our devices know more about us than we think

It's not just Big Brother that is watching you - increasingly, it's every electronic device we use, warns Peter Cochrane

When people think about their information and privacy few stray beyond email, text messaging, instant messaging, documents, social networks, browser history, diary entries, address book, who they call and who calls them.

However, these are but the tip of a very big and fast-growing iceberg. Our modern mobile phones and tablets contain a vast, and fast growing, array of sensors and network types that generate more information than we might imagine.

Embedded sensors routinely include GPS, compass, proximity, accelerometer, gyroscope, thermometer, hygrometer, barometer, light level, microphone/s and camera/s in cars, smartphones and increasing numbers of devices. And these immediately give details of our location, movements - speed, direction, altitude and orientation, plus of course, vibration and other movement patterns - to goodness knows who.

As a result we see a new means of mapping our travels and activities in a new ‘n-dimensional space' without recourse to any physical visualisation or reference to our 3D physical surroundings. Mapping a journey by vibration, G-force, acceleration and deceleration gives an entirely new and very informative picture Then, of course, our microphone/s and camera/s also gather unique acoustic and visual data as we move from location to location, and thereby add more contextual data.

What does all this mean?

We have created a ‘forensic heaven' that is about to be amplified by chemical sensors in the fingerprint security pad and touch screen to be followed by others on the device body.

So, what might we know and what might we be able to deduce from all this disparate data?

I'd say with far greater confidence we can tell who you are, what you are, what you do, have done, might do, where you have been, when and how, and where you are likely to go and what you are likely to participate in next.

In short, we are carrying our own behavioural analysis system and toolkit in our pocket and hands - throw-in a bit of big data analysis and it's not far off from the full Minority Report.

Your exact location and mode of transport are easy to determine as is the general state of your health. It is even easy to ascertain the types of food, when and where, you eat and with whom. Your friends and colleagues are so easy to identify too. How? Apart from all the data you generate and carry, WiFi, BlueTooth and, to a lesser extent, 3G, 4G and (coming soon) 5G, are connecting and colliding all the time, providing confirmation of location and relationships. Who and what you connect too and for how long and the file transfers says an awful lot about you and them.

Where does this stop and can we control it? It doesn't, and we can't!

The bigger questions are: how can society profit from all this? In short; health, safety, security, efficiency, ecological savings, and social cohesion. There is great benefit to be had on all sides from this coalescence of highly personal information. It makes us more identifiable than ever before; it gives us continuous health monitoring for free; and, real-time feedback on our behaviours and that of others to achieve more, in less time, while reducing a wide range of risks.

Of course the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and big data analysis add even more dimensions, and while the ‘dark side' is already figuring out ways might exploit it, regulators and (perhaps) governments have yet to wake-up to this new reality.

In my view, the more degrees of freedom and variation we create, the more secure we become as it all amplifies the entropy of this space, making successful attacks less likely.

Or, to put it another way: Passwords and PINs are relatively easy to crack. Additional bio-factors make it exponentially more difficult, very fast. So two-factor authentication by keyboard and fingerprint is going to drift up to ten factors and beyond.

All counter intuitive, perhaps, in terms of security. In terms of how all that data is used, well, that's perhaps a bigger matter and one that we are only just beginning to get our collective heads around - let's hope we can work it out before ‘social credit ratings', based on all these factors, become the norm.

Peter Cochrane OBE is an ex-CTO of BT who now works as a consultant focusing on solving problems and improving the world through the application of technology.