FUTURE CRIMES

Not futuristic enough? What about an interspecies Internet - one that links elephants, dolphins, and preservation? Though it may sound crazy, it's already here. In Australia, for example, there are over 300 sharks on Twitter (no, they did not sign up themselves). Researchers fitted 338 sharks, including many great whites, with acoustic tags that send an electronic signal to shore-base receivers when the animals come within half a mile of the beach. For a country that has suffered more fatal shark attacks than any other, this IoT development is saving human lives, and the sharks have attracted nearly forty thousand beach-going Twitter followers as result.

This criminal exploitation of technology is nothing new, per se. When most cops were on foot or horseback, Chicagoland gansters began using automobiles for their getaways. When the average patrol officer was issued a six-shot revolver, George "Machine Gun" Kelly was using automatic weapons. Drug dealers were the first major demographics after physicians to use pagers and had access to mobile phones long before any police officer was using them. Technology makes crime more efficient and so criminals are perpetual early adopters of all things tech.

он это на полном серьезе?

Since the days of Sun Tzu, military forces have relied on the art of deception in order to obtain a tactical advantage over their enemies. In ancient Greece, it was the gift of large wooden horse presented to the people of troy that misled. During World War II, it was fake radio transmissions and inflatable ballon tanks of Operation Fortitude that falsely signaled an Allied invasion on the beaches of Calais (vice Normandy) and allowed American and British troops to retake the European continent and defeat the Nazis.

"Is a badge on Foursquare or check-in worth your life?" That question, now commonly asked by the U.S. Army of its soldiers, is not rhetorical when even terrorists are taking advantage of geotagged data. For instance, when American military forces received a new fleet of AH-64 Apache helicopters at their base in Iraq, some deployed soldiers uploaded photographs of themselves in front of their new choppers to Facebook. Unbeknownst to them, their phones had accidentally embedded their GPS coordinates in the photographs.

Nearly all Internet companies have similarly draconian policies that work against you. While most stop just short of claiming rights to your immortal soul, many come pretty close, and the more words they use, the worse it is for you. Facebook's privacy policy has grown from 1,004 words in 2005 to 9,300 words by 2014 (not counting links to various sub-policies, terms, and conditions). To put that in perspective, Facebook;s privacy policy is more than twice as long as the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, PayPal's privacy policy and amendments are the longest in the industry at 36,275 words. By comparison, Shakespeare's "Hamlet has 30,066 words, including the famous 'To be, or not to be' soliloquy and the moving 'Good night, sweet prince' speech at the end."