Recently a British runner was convicted for life in prison for murder of two gangsters. Mark “Iceman” Fellows was under investigation for killing a crime boss and his associate. The nail to Fellows coffin was his Garmin watch. Garmin wathces can measure a lot of parameters such as blood pressure and heart beat, but can also show the GPS location of the watch.
The suspect was seen wearing one of these watches during a marathon in 2014. Police found the watch and checked it’s location history. Data showed that months before the crime was commited Fellows was doing reaserch in the area. Route from the day of the murder was used to support evidence that Fellows was guilty of the commited crime. This case is one of the examples how technology, smart watches, home devices like Alexa or even our mobile phones can help our catch a criminal. In my opinion this is great but there is also a bad side of the story. For us everyday users of smart watches and smart phones it is not that good of a story, unless you like to be stalked all the time. Those devices spy on us constantly, they know our location, they can predict if we are scared or excited based on our heartbeat. It just shows how expensive is information today. Companies go to every measure possible to know the most about customers. For me it looks very grimm that every piece of technology will constantly monitor me, the worst case sceniario is for me Alexa, it can record without your knowledge your whole day schedule, making it easy for someone to hack it and rob the house when you are not at home.
Sources:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/18/18188205/garmin-data-iceman-murder-mr-big-amazon-alexa
As you said the vision of lack of privacy due to the gadgets which collect data from every source is disturbing. I wonder how world will look in 5 years when there will be even more advance techonological devices.
the level of control that a simple tracking device can get is both fascinating and terrifying. Also how stupid someone has to be to wear any tracking device when they are going to murder another person.