Wear Are We Going?

I resisted buying my first cell phone.  “I have voicemail,” I reasoned, “why does someone need to call my body?”

Thirteen years later my body can be tracked via my smartphone, and through a host of other data mining devices, cameras and computers.  This week, Gigaom.com ran an article called “Where is Wearable TechHeaded?”  The author, Rahul Patel, discusses the potential of wearable tech describing “a small adhesive strip that can collect intimate biological data and tell your smartphone that you need to apply sunscreen or hydrate,” or, “devices that monitor health and behavior – human or animal.”

Organizations already scour social media to gain background data on potential employees or monitor current ones.  What happens when the biological information of each individual is linked into a digital data network?  Will organizations know an employee or potential employee is sick before they do?  Can discrimination become undetectable through background algorithms and data mining of wearable tech?

It is interesting that in the interactive Web 2.0 data mining seems to go in one direction.  The masses are unable to access and utilize monitoring data with any degree of similarity to large organizations.  Data mining is neither two-way, nor is it transparent.  Perhaps it should be part of the public record.  If not, we may be relinquishing a degree of control on our own fates that we might never regain.