Privacy

The global digital Fog―including the constant input of wearable, implanted, installation-mounted and vehicular sensors feeding into it, and the armies of AIs constantly aggregating, analyzing and adding to it―ensures that nearly everything that happens within range of a suitable device can be sensed and recorded, and later (depending on one's settings and privileges) retrieved. Children given their first PDAs or AI toys are taught: “Ask a question, get an answer.” This common wisdom applies to all publicly-available data on people, places and things (such as retail products and public facilities).

More advanced systems, of course, can identify non-verbal signals such as gaze, hand gestures, eye movements, or subvocal commands as “questions”, and respond by popping up an AR layer corresponding to the requested data. Look at a person and squint your right eye: up pops a variety of icons, data boxes and graphs indicating all public data on their identity, social networks, reputation and citizen scores, and any other data they've decided or agreed to project (including revenue-sharing ads, sponsor logos, favorite free software and social causes).

For most Ubi citizens, anonymity is essentially a thing of the past. Even without access to your PIDkit, CitySystem can usually utilize nearby sensors or drones to produce enough information to link you to your PID, identifying you with a high degree of accuracy (with a small margin of error). But this doesn't mean it always does so: such constant calculations on all citizens would require a ridiculous amount of bandwidth and CPU cycles. Instead, data is gathered, tagged, compressed and stored by different subsystems, to be sorted out later if needed (in the case of a police investigation or a resource abuse complaint, for instance).

see Tracking