Inperton, Spraying invisible data on your clothes
After reading Brave new World from Aldous Huxley, I woke up with this dystopian view of the world where data would be written in objects in ways that human eyes could not see. For example, on your t-shirt. Imagine your clothes being written by a wave of invisible binary data in which no one can see, feel, smell, and decipher. Like a spray, this technology could be used for example if you enter a store and the establishment wants to write a ‘cookie’ on your clothes to track your visit. Using sensors, they could track, for example, what time you entered the store, where you are, and how much time you are spending in front of a specific product. I gave it a name: ‘inperton’ — invisible persistent atomic data.
A large portion of the data we consume is the data we can see. Since the printing press, written language is now everywhere: in this article, signs in the street, clothes tags, magazines, bottle labels, instruction manuals. That is, data that we can see and comprehend without using any decoding device. In the other hand, a huge volume of data is stored in binary format in hard drives on our computers. Although we can’t read this data, we know that the device is a data container. We know that the data is there. The only purpose of that hardware is storing data, therefore, if we destroy a memory card or DVD, the data is gone.
In the early 19th century, a new format of data was introduced. The discovery of electromagnetic waves created an opportunity for the ‘invisible data’. Both analog and digital data is flowing around us like a mixture of smokes that propagate trough the air. Radio stations, Wi-Fi networks, TV signal are in front of us right now — we just can’t see it. The good part of this story is that this invisible data is volatile. Use it or lose it. We can only use the waves that are being produced now but we can’t retrieve the waves that were produced by our radio station yesterday. Basically, it does not ‘stick’ anywhere. However, invisible data can already be stored and retrieved in other ways.
IBM researchers successfully stored data on an individual atom last year. This was a great achievement to reduce the physical size of hard drives, but still does not mean that these atoms can be ‘sprayed’ in objects and retrieved in an ordered manner. DNA storage is also already possible. Researchers were able to store millions of data containing from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Martin Luther King speeches. This DNA storage can last thousands of years. Molecules could be inserted in objects for permanent data. However, DNA data storage is complex to sequence and to retrieve.
On a less threatening usage, the technology combined with blockchain, could be used to enforce private property. Like a serial number, each product could be built containing as unique id on its molecules. If you bought a car for instance, instead of having a VIN number on its chassis, it would be present in every part of the car. All the components, tires, wheels and bumpers would contain that number, and there would be no way of erasing without destroying it.
If researchers could find a simpler way to rearrange the fibers of clothes, the atoms of matter or implant DNA that could be easily written or retrieved, it would be the next breakthrough in technology. Similar to the discovery of nuclear energy, it will bring many ethical concerns. Data is becoming increasingly valuable and many institutions are working on alternatives to store, retrieve and analyze them.
Invisible data, can be hard to detect, and advanced encryption algorithms had become almost impossible to decode. As any other technology, invisible-persistent data stored on particles could be used for the good or the bad. Look at your shirt now and ask yourself: is there invisible data on it? Scary? Yes… but maybe this is our brave new world.
