Eye-Tracking Computers Will Read Your Thoughts

If we have learned anything from the steady drumbeat of revelations about data collected without our consent?think Carrier IQ in November, Android in December, and Google, Twitter, Apple, and Android last month?it is that these stories tend to follow a predictable pattern: After a few days of headlines, calls for congressional or FTC investigations, and damage-control statements from company representatives, attention shifts elsewhere. For each data collection leak that gets identified and plugged, there are probably dozens more waiting to be discovered. It is an environment in which asking forgiveness, not permission, has proven to be a highly successful business strategy.

The overwhelming majority of the time, no one will be interested in putting all of this information together. But if someone does want to identify us by name, study our eye movements, and try to gauge what we, as individuals, were thinking as we viewed digital content, all of the necessary data will be readily available.

We also have to recognize the law-enforcement and security applications for eye-tracking. Researchers in the United States and the United Kingdom have mapped the correlation between blink rates, pupil dilation, and deception. The Department of Homeland Security has been developing a ?pre-crime? program aimed at identifying criminals before they act. The DHS program, known as Future Attribute Screening Technology, is designed to analyze images acquired at airport security checkpoints to measure eye movement, position, and gaze (as well as heart rate, respiration, and facial expression) to identify behavior deemed suspicious.

Of course, it?s tempting to think that there?s a very low-tech solution to unwanted eye-tracking performed by our personal electronics devices: put a piece of masking tape over the camera. For today?s devices, that would do the trick. But that may not be an option in the future. As evidenced by an Apple patent application, future display screens could include thousands of tiny imaging sensors built into the screen itself.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=24cc776b56d140e89f39969d3c65cdfc

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