Casting an Information Shadow

 Everything Casts an

Information Shadow

I couldn't find an official reference to the term Information Shadow so i'll give credit to Mike Kuniavsky, a founder of both Adaptive Path and ThingM. I first read the term Information Shadow when doing the research for the Internet of Things articles a couple of weeks ago. I am very familiar with Mike's work on the BlinkM MaxM device, a very cool implementation of smart, network (I2C) controlled LEDs. I've purchased several BlinkMs for some of the work I was doing with the iTV and StrataLighting projects, part of that work has morphed into a software development effort I'll be outlining in another post.

New Terminology

If Google is any indication of popularity, and I think it is, this term hasn't made it out into the world yet because the relevant search results were extremely limited. We should expect to hear this term quite a bit in the future, especially in the context of the Internet of Things and the rise of cellular based cloud activities. I read a post here that associates Tim O'Reilly with the term, although he hasn't gotten credit officially yet like he did for the term Web 2.0. The link also contains a short video interviewing a couple of analysts from IDC regarding their recent digital universe report. One interesting fact is that IDC, when measuring the size of the Internet, found it to be an order of magnitude larger than they suspected and growing at an even more rapid pace. We knew that.

Personal Information Shadow

EMC² provides a locally installable application (Mac and Win) that when completed will calculate the size of your YTD information shadow in real-time. It's a great idea and probably a good marketing tool but it can't be very accurate as there are just too many things to consider in this type of calculation. For me at least, this calculation is probably wrong by 50% or more, but for most casual technology users it is probably a little better than that. Regardless of the parameter tuning, the numbers are big as you can see from my 2010 information footprint on the right.

What is an Information Shadow

There are several different terms that are being applied to this phenomena like digital footprint, data exhaust and even clickstream exhaust but the most appropriate term in my opinion is information shadow, because that's what it is, a shadow. The initial views of this idea only took the web into consideration but now a much wider perspective needs to be employed to consider the millions if not billions of devices and sensors that are coming with the Internet of Things.  

An information shadow is any digitized or digital information associated with an object or resource, this means pretty much everything has and leaves some type of information shadow. Sounds simple enough until you consider what that really means and how it is changing and expanding every day. In today's terms a digital shadow or footprint includes things like:

• Television watching patterns - FIOS, Comcast and most digital content providers track what you are doing on your television,
• Power consumption patterns - Been happening for years now, gas and electric usage are closely monitored,
• Credit cards - We all know this one, everything we purchase is tracked, stored, analyzed and monitored,
• Voice communications - This includes all voice transmissions across both wired and cellular networks,
• Internet activities - Every mouse click and keystroke is retained somewhere on the Internet, 
• Cell phone movements - GPS, accelerometer and triangulation all combine to form a detailed description of your movements,
• Personal information - Health and dental records, employee information and even affiliation, club and association data.

All this information and more is stored on servers and in databases all across the Internet, even corporate intranets are exposed to the cloud in one way or another. In many cases the data is copied and recopied until it is scattered all over the cloud, not only its original form but also mashed up and aggregate forms as well. Even analog phone calls to support representatives you've made are digitized and stored somewhere in the cloud, at this point almost everything you do ends up cataloged and indexed somewhere. 

The inputs to the information shadow increase dramatically as internet enabled cell phones and the Internet of Things continue along their path of projected growth, ultimately including more and more information about not just us but everything on the planet. Consider the following set of inputs that are likely to have a huge impact over the next several years:

• Biosensors and Biometrics - The ability to track your blood pressure, heart rate, sugar levels and dozens of other metrics are either available now or just around the corner. It is probable that some of these technologies will be incorporated in cell phones, that's the most logical place.
• Environmental Sensors - We already have thousands of environmental sensors scattered all across and around the planet in the form of weather stations, buoys, satellites and various other tools. In most cases the data produced by these legacy resources is already online and available but their deployment is on exponential growth curve, granularity down to a specific coordinate is where we are headed. There are new types of sensors being introduced practically everyday including virus and bio-hazard, smog and allergen, contaminants and chemicals, etc.
• Buildings, vehicles and things - You've probably heard the terms Smart Home, Smart Building and Smart Car, these are all using digital technologies that are becoming fundamental components to their design and function. It doesn't stop there however, we are making the highways and roads smarter with sensors and cameras. Airports and various government buildings have face recognition software running on every person, how long before that same technology is in Macy's and on the street lights?
• Tagging everything - This is a pretty familiar concept on the Internet because many sites allow content to be tagged with words or phrases by the community and its users, pictures and videos are a great example. This paradigm has been extended to include everything, literally. The advent and use of micro and nanoscale RFID chips, intelligent image interpretation algorithms and a number of other methods are allowing things to become part of the digital collective, all the while creating their own information shadows.

While this may paint a bleak picture for privacy in the future there are many that argue this is a good thing. I think, like any other technology or knowledge this will have both a positive and negative impact on society. There are enough gloom and doomer's to pontificate about the dangers this may pose in the future so this post is focused on just the basics.

Everything Produces a Shadow

Just like physical objects that interact with light produce a shadow so will every digital interaction, these shadows will make up an entirely new ecosystem of businesses, technologies and pundits. This concept is one that immediately offers an infinite loop of recursion by way of the shadows producing shadows, this phenomena will produce orders of magnitude more information and digital content then the original interaction.

When I say everything will produce an information shadow I do mean everything, it is likely that over a few decades everything on the planet will have its own unique digital signature. These signatures may be as simple as an RFID tag or as complicated as the numerical representation of some physical object, a tree for example. If we consider that an organism's DNA can uniquely define that organism from an information point of view, then we are now in the process of giving everything its very own DNA (identifier) so we can identify, track and correlate the information shadow left behind.

Some of the technologies will evolve to perform multiple tasks in order to extend the reach of the cloud. Consider biosensors initially being used to track a persons heart rate, blood pressure and various other metrics in combination with cloud based services that aggregate and analyze the information, producing alerts when certain predefined conditions are met. These same sensors could be used to look for allergens, smog, certain chemicals, radiation and a whole host of other substances and conditions making them environmental sensors as well. 

Reduction in scale of the underlying technologies has a huge impact on these ideas, there is no doubt that as nanoscale engineering and materials science advances these insanely small wireless computers will become ubiquitous. Consider that on the nanoscale something the size of a grain of sand can contain massive storage capacity, this may be hard to believe but living organisms manufacture incredibly complex machines on these scales, so will we. Just to put this in perspective, let me describe two of the machines that are forecast to exist at these scales:

• Imagine weather stations that float through the air like pollen, constantly communicating their location and various atmospheric conditions to satellite receivers producing a granular real-time weather map at every level of the atmosphere, all over the planet.
• Another application is organism identification through the use of DNA discovery granules. Similar to the weather idea, these granules are dispersed through the air like pollen but they attach themselves to living organisms where they determine the unique signature by reading a strand of DNA. Consider this a smart RFID chip on the nanoscale. If the chip wasn't able to find any DNA on an object it would detach and float away until it finds a living organism, once it does it attaches itself to it and becomes a beacon of the organism's unique identity, characteristics and location.

This is a major reason why people are so excited about nanotechnology, genetic engineering and materials science because when combined they form infinite possibilities. As we progress through the nanoscale revolution and the ideas presented by ubiquitous computing the potential for innovation is massive, in a historical sense everything else will shrivel to insignificance when compared to this era of Internet expansion. Exciting? I think so.

Summary

We're here, the era of ubiquitous computing is upon us and gaining momentum everyday. Information shadows are already being actively aggregated, sorted and analyzed in order to refine marketing and advertising plans. These will expand greatly in the future to include things like weather forecasting, healthcare maintenance, environmental controls and even national security.

The recently introduced and adopted paradigms of Web 2.0 and the Internet of Things along with nanoscale technologies and genetic engineering will drive the world into a state of science fiction where everything talks to everything else and the sum of all human knowledge is always on and available. This is all projected to occur within the next 40 or so years, basically 100 years after the introduction of the television!

We may be early in the curve but we are well past the beginning, that was the 70s and 80s. At this point, society is going down a path that is irreversible and regardless of the barriers or concerns human kind will build the Internet of everything because we can. The technology is driving the revolution, not humans. Computers are designing and building computers, these machines influence every aspect of culture and society. As Ray Kurzweil describes it, we are approaching the Singularity.

Additional Reading

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