Imagine this: You’re marching toward a protest when a police van rolls up. There are whispers that the mayor has chosen to crack down on public dissension, and you’re worried that your peaceful demonstration could be misconstrued as something else. If it is, your face will be captured by a random camera, recognized, and filed as a problematic citizen—perhaps it will even get you arrested.
So do you don a mask? Nah. You just flip a switch on your ring. And anyone from the government to random advertisers can no longer use your face to identify you.
[Image: Argodesign]This is the idea of Me.Ring, a provocative new concept out of the design firm Argodesign. Me.Ring is basically a connected switch that you wear on your finger. When you’re open to your data being collected (from your face, your location, or just about anything else you can imagine), you switch it on. When you want to stay anonymous, you switch it off. The ring is essentially an Incognito Mode for real life, a means to opt out of your actions being recorded and analyzed forever.
That said, the Me.Ring feels feasible because it’s a fairly typical smart device. It’s a gadget with simple controls (literally, one switch) that uses an app for far more nuanced controls (much like a Phillips Hue light bulb or a Fitbit). In this case, the Me.Ring app would allow you to have settings for sharing things such as your contact data with professional networks, and your medical data with health practitioners. The switch would activate a collection of those preferences, customized to you.
To do so, the ring could send signals, like mini digital contracts, to these points of access. It would clarify whether your data was collectible, which parts of your data were collectible, and for what purpose. Then, for private-sector entities interested in using or collecting your data, Jared Ficklin, chief technologist and partner at Argodesign, suggests companies could send you offers. If a beacon noticed you were eating at McDonald’s, perhaps a restaurant analyst company could ask to record the next 10 places you went out to eat for a small payment or coupon.
[Image: Argodesign]As wild as the Me.Ring may look, Argodesign’s concepts tend to be quite predictive of the near future. Its plan for a flying ambulance drone isn’t so dissimilar to GM’s Cadillac Halo flying car or Hyundai’s proposed flying taxi for Uber. After suggesting that Amazon could deliver food right through your front door and into your fridge, Walmart began doing just that.
Indeed, if Argodesign’s example of hiring a service to track your face and find where you left your coat sounds extreme, just realize that the LAPD requested footage from camera-loaded Ring doorbells to identify Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. These powerful data-combing capabilities already exist; consumers are simply completely not in control of them. And if Me.Ring makes anything clear, it’s that the world of data collection and marketing is broken. If our very privacy can exist again, this world needs to be fixed.
“We’re industrial and product designers—we like to jump to the end,” says Ficklin of how the Me.Ring concept fits into the current culture of surveillance. “Maybe we want it to come as much as we see it coming.”
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