Of 5G and Privacy

It’s an oft-told story nowadays, but at the beginning of 2015, many researchers thought they were still a decade away from developing an artificially intelligent program that could beat the best human Go players. The ancient board game was too complex and vast—in chess, there’s an average of 35 possible moves at any given time; in Go, there are upwards of 250 moves on average during any given turn. By October 2015, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat European champion Fan Hui 5–0 in the formal game of Go. A few months later, AlphaGo bested the game’s greatest player, Lee Sedol, 4–1.

This is all to say that technology advancements are accelerating. In the next few months, you will hear a lot about 5G networks. Actually, you are probably already hearing about them from your internet and/or mobile device provider. If you are unfamiliar with 5G—and why these networks are vastly different to today’s 4G LTE standard—click here for this month’s feature on the topic, but at their core they are the new standard for wireless telecommunications and they will be faster and able to handle exponentially more devices. 

While these networks will be commercialized this year, most of these announcements are overhyped. It’s more likely than not that we won’t realize the full benefits of this new technology for several years. The consensus among the experts I spoke to is that it will take five years to see true mass adoption of the standard. But it should also be said that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make predictions when it comes to tech development. “Sometimes new technologies appear and it’s very hard to predict how they’re going to unfold and what’s going to happen,” Octavio Marenzi, CEO of consultancy Opimas, told me. 

And he’s right. But I do hope that the industry takes its time with this latest revolution. 

A Question of Privacy

With any new shift driven by technology, the issues of privacy and security inevitably come into play. As individuals we are increasingly willing to give up our personal information and privacy in the name of convenience and entertainment. 

As a Gen-Xer, while my childhood included the commercialized birth of the internet, I was raised in a household that was wary of giving away our information to outsiders. I distinctly remember my dad railing against getting an E-ZPass automated toll tag for the car because he didn’t want the government tracking him. While my dad is an eccentric, he was a technologist who built datacenters for massive international corporations. But he was also skeptical of putting what amounts to a tracking device into his car. Of course, though, convenience eventually won out. And today, my dad, and everyone else in my family, carries around a tracking device—a smartphone—at all times. 

That tracking device will become much more powerful with the advent of 5G, as it will provide more accurate geolocation data to network mobile operators that will allow these companies to follow an individual everywhere they go with a sniper’s precision. Considering that people are already more than willing to give up their actual DNA to third-party companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe.com, they will undoubtedly not think twice about allowing their everyday data to be pulled in by third-party network operators and app providers. It’s the price we pay to be able to yell at complete strangers about just how wrong their politics are. Ah, democracy! 

There are also very real security concerns. The US government has been warning other countries like Canada, Germany, Italy, and Japan about allowing Chinese telecommunications behemoth Huawei to help in those nations’ 5G development. Additionally, 5G will supercharge the amount of data created by internet-of-things (IoT) devices, which are notoriously vulnerable to security breaches. 

There are serious questions that will need to be considered and addressed in the years ahead when it comes to the rollout of 5G networks. Perhaps the biggest question is who will address these concerns: people, companies or governments?