
The Internet in 2020 - What the Experts Predict - alexandros
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frisco
Experts? Experts at what? Predicting the future of the internet? There is no
such thing as an expert opinion on the evolution of a technology like the
internet, especially at a timescale of almost 100% its effective lifespan.

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orangecat
I don't understand this at all:

 _"Anonymity online will gradually become a lot like anonymity in the real
world. When we encounter it, we'll take a firm grip on our wallet and leave
the neighborhood as soon as possible ‐‐ unless we're doing something we're
ashamed of." - Stewart Baker_

The real world is largely anonymous. I can walk into a store and buy something
with cash; nobody will know I was there, and there's no implication that I was
doing anything wrong.

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covercash
CCTV security aimed at the register will capture your face, perhaps a parking
lot camera will grab your license plate...

While the chances of someone using that information to track you down is
pretty slim, it is still possible.

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InclinedPlane
The chances of someone using that information depends very critically on its
nature and accessibility. Currently security cam footage tends to be
localized, kept on-site only on physical media (tape or hd). It also tends to
have a low shelf life (days) extremely low quality (think youtube at launch)
and very little meta data (camera and date/time).

But one can imagine a near future where a lot of these aspects are different.
Where year or multi-year long buffers of footage are archived in a network
accessible manner. Where technological advances lead to massive increases in
fidelity (from 200 lines of blurry interlaced video on an overused magnetic
tape is replaced by 60fps 1080p). Where extensive pre-processing generates
massive amounts of meta-data. Right now most CCTV footage is just raw video.
But imagine a system that kept track of persons, and collated appearances on
different camera feeds per store visit. It's easy to imagine how such a system
might work by, for example, comparing physical location and perhaps clothing
color to connect appearances on different cameras.

Then, when one reviews camera footage it's not merely a raw dump of video from
different camera locations instead it's a list of visits to the store. Imagine
a table listing the time of store entrance, the time of store exit, the
departments visited and for how long, the time of checkout, the list of items
purchased and method of payment, a high resolution headshot, and even perhaps
the name (depending on method of purchase and whether they used a loyalty
card). It's trivial to imagine how this technology could be expanded from one
single visit to linking every visit to the store (using loyalty card, cc/debit
card, or automated facial/body recognition as a means for correlation), and
from there it's easy to imagine mining this data for further metadata (typical
times and durations for visiting the store, typical items purchased, typical
store sections visited, highlights on atypical purchasing or other activities,
etc.) One can imagine a lot more metadata being extracted with more advanced
techniques. Such as determination of ethnicity, income, job, friends and
family, typical schedules, etc. based on sharing information from every
business (e.g. not just the grocery store but also the parking garage, the
restaurant, the hardware store, the DMV, google, etc.)

None of this is particularly technologically difficult, it's just expensive
and there's no reason for most businesses to do it. But if you look at, say,
the recent investigations in Dubai related to the Mahmoud al-Mabhouh killing
it's easy to see that a lot of this technology is already in use in some
places. The logical limits of the technology are frightening. One might
imagine that such systems could automatically track such things as your mood,
job status, and interpersonal relationships with a high degree of fidelity. It
could roughly determine your mood and emotional state through your spending,
travel, entertainment habits, and socializing. For example, are you
uncharacteristically not socializing (online or offline) with your friends and
instead watching a movie to cheer you up along with a pint of your favorite
ice cream? Everyone has their habits and patterns, with enough surveillance
and sophisticated enough processing it's possible to tease out these patterns
in a completely automated fashion.

Now imagine if you happened to come under active, rather than merely passive,
surveillance with such technology in place. Your phone and your internet
connection could be tapped, and this information (your email, your text
messaging, your voice conversations, your private irc messages, your personal
credit card purchases) could be added to this database. It doesn't take much
imagination to think about the amazing depth and breadth of information that
could be extracted from this data given sufficient technological resources, a
talented development team, and skilled investigators.

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martian
RT @FakeAPStylebook expert - 1. Person knowledgeable and well-known in a
relevant field. 2. The first person you could get to call you back.

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tcskeptic
I predict that by 2020 it will be very difficult to think of "The Internet" as
something as opposed network connectedness being the nature of all things.
However, I am not an expert.

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InclinedPlane
I think you're right (more right than these "experts"). Increasingly we're
moving toward a unified "data mesh" which every other form of communication
(wired and wireless telephony, television, etc.) uses as infrastructure. In
2020 there may no longer be separate voice or television networks, everything
will just use "the internet", but increasingly a lot of the traffic on the
internet will be for specific applications.

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PostOnce
Compare the internet of 2000 to the internet of today, while realizing that
the rate of change is compounding. Ten years is a very long way off to be
predicting things in technology.

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jff
If I compare to the internet of 2000 and extrapolate, I guess by 2020 we'll
all be using 1 site where we all post a constant stream of "lol"; the rest of
the Internet will consist of billions of useless HyperRails apps to interface
with FaceTwitSpace.

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smallblacksun
Don't forget about the porn!

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jff
Believe me, sir, I will _never_ forget about the porn.

