Inside Story

What’s the cost to privacy in our connected lives?

Balancing security and privacy against ease and convenience – is a more technologically connected world a better one?

An extraordinary array of gadgets are on display at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, both technologies already on the market and ones that will be soon.

There is less discussion about the privacy and security costs that come with our increasingly connected world.

Many of us live our entire lives “connected” by smartphones, which we carry every day and everywhere.

Phone apps turn your house lights on and switch off air-conditioning.

Cars monitor not only our location but our driving habits and send that information back to the vehicle’s manufacturer, among others.

What tech companies call the “Internet of Things” will make us healthier and safer, they say.

Critics reply that we are being stripped of privacy and isolated from communicating with other people.

So is a more technologically connected world a better one?

Presenter: Sami Zeidan

Guests:

Gry Hasselbalch, DataEthics.eu.

Robert Pritchard, The Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies.

Nishanth Sastry, King’s College London.