Nano-technology and privacy: on continuous surveillance outside the panopticon

Since the onset of modern technology, privacy has been an issue on many people’s minds. The plethora of information available on the Internet, as well as the constant access and sharing of data, make data privacy both a legal and moral issue. Regulations to protect the personal sphere and people’s privacy have been implemented over the last century, and have been associated with much debate. Today, it is clear that a person’s privacy encapsulates the processing of any information associated with them. Now, as new technologies are being developed, it is necessary to reevaluate the definition of privacy, and to examine how new privacy issues arise.

In this paper, nano-technology in the form of invisible tags, sensors, and Radio Frequency Identity Chips (RFIDs) and their relation to privacy are discussed. As a departure from the typical focus on centralized surveillance, nano-technology involves constant, decentralized observation, which may involve local data collection, rather than permanent, centralized databases. The use of nano-technology in smart sensors, invisible RFID tags, and intelligent fabrics will begin to seep into the worlds of retail, health care, supply chains and more. This will cause privacy concerns to expand to not only include the processing of data, but to the design and manufacture of materials and nano-artifacts, such as chips and tags. Additionally, the moral implications of new technologies are analyzed in this paper, as well as the potential necessity of moral requirements that should be involved in the design of a new generation of surveillance devices.