Imagine a world in which mosquito-sized robots fly around stealing samples of your DNA. Or in which a department store knows from your buying habits that you are pregnant even before your family does.
That is the terrifying dystopian world portrayed by a group of Harvard professors at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, yesterday.
"Welcome to today. We're already in that world," said Margo Seltzer, a professor of computer science at Harvard University.
"Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible. How we conventionally thought of privacy is dead."
Another Harvard researcher in genetics said it was "inevitable" that personal genetic information would become publicly accessible.
Sophia Roosth said national intelligence agencies were already being asked to collect genetic information on foreign leaders to determine factors such as susceptibility to disease and life expectancy.
Seltzer imagined a world in which tiny robot drones, the size of mosquitoes, flew around extracting a sample of DNA for analysis by, say, the government or an insurance company.
Invasions of privacy are "going to become more pervasive," she predicted.
More at: Privacy out of date in the future - Times LIVE
