Could, “The Circle”, be the near future?

A few months ago I watched, “The Circle”, and I just can’t stop thinking about it. Especially as I find my life becoming more absorbed and involved with technology. I start asking questions like ‘How could I integrate these apps?’ or ‘What if my home was fully automated? Deleting mundane tasks like opening a garage door or flipping a light switch from my life’.

What personal information would I have to sacrifice to make these things possible? Perhaps feed my daily schedule into some learning computer algorithm that runs my house? Or set motion sensing cameras around my home so they can turn on my lights? We have the Amazon Alexa for things like this, a device that always listening and ready to take a multitude of orders from opening blinds, to powering up the Xbox with just a simple command. What if systems like these could be hacked? The cameras and voice capture systems could become surveillance tools for thieves or Uncle Sam. 

“But if you have nothing to hide you should be fine”. I don’t have anything to hide but it’s not really anyone’s business to know when I’m cooking or watching T.V. in my own house. 

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” -Benjamin Franklin

In The Circle, they take these ideas to the extreme by placing small cameras essentially everywhere public, and offering a service if people want them in their homes.

The benefits:

-Health tracking, if someone had a heart attack the cameras could understand and would call 911.

-Video calling from anywhere.

-Scheduling updates.

-Home automation for anything electronic.

-Crime updates. These are like the amber alerts we have today, but these would alert the public to crimes in progress, turning nearby people into a mob of vigilantes. Similar to how projections in Inception would attack intruders that were not a part of the original dreamers subconscious.

The drawbacks:

-THERE ARE LITERALLY CAMERAS ALWAYS RECORDING YOU.

-People can drop in and call you anytime without having to approve the call first. 

-Personal information is available to all others in the circle and is regularly accessed by the technicians managing your account. 

I don’t know if these systems are that distant from the ones in place currently. Think about what would happen if someone got the username and password to your facebook account, what about Instagram, or maybe your online banking account? 

I’m not trying to scare anyone, but I want people to be aware of how certain technological integrations could impact their privacy and security.