Cyber-paranoia or time to ponder?

3 times Black Mirror got it right this seasonWhat if, by 2020, life decides to go all technology-twisted on us?What if, a couple of years from now, we find ourselves in an episode of the British series Black Mirror? The dystopian anthology has quite the love-hate relationship with its viewers. While entertaining and considered an uncontested cinematographic gem, it also reveals just how cruel human beings can become in various scenarios where technology is misused. The titular “black mirror” refers to the off-screen of an electronic device, as if to symbolize the vigilante curtain falling on the guilty character.WARNING, this article may contain spoilers.

 S03E01: Like me or dieImagine that, starting tomorrow, everything we do is rated by social media. This sounds familiar, you say? Well, no wonder, because this is exactly how the third season of Black Mirror started out this year, with Lacie Pound starring in a pastel-colored world where everyone rates each other using a 5-star system. The purpose? The higher your ranking, the more you can access new riches and goods. The same way a low ranking will get you… well, virtually nothing.

This September, there’s one nation that could actually rival with the screenwriters of the series. In Beijing, an official document was just released, taking this whole social rating thing to a complete new level. The outlined policy illustrates China’s ambition to create an elaborate “social credit” system with the aim of rating whether a citizen is “good” or not. The idea is to register everyone into a vast national database by 2020, by collecting every scrap of information available online about the Chinese people. Based on their record of “trust-breaking”, citizens will be given a rank (source: BBC).

At the present time, eight Chinese companies are already issuing this type of “social credit” scores. Baihe, China’s most popular matchmaking services is one of them. The dating site better promotes clients with a good social credit score, as opposed to clients with a low or inexistent score. In the future, this social credit is supposed to fuel a “new system” that rewards those who diligently report (or rate, in this case) acts of breach of trust. Bluntly put, your rank could end up affecting your entire life. In other words, welcome to Stasi 2.0 or Securitate 2.0.Pretty scary to think this is happening in our times, isn’t it? Even more scary to think that this could give way to a new trend in hacking or in “rate-dealing” – people desperate of changing their rank or wanting to flunk someone else’s. Imagine the success ransomware would have then. One could easily be blackmailed with his score being tampered with. Nowadays, having nude photos of yourself leaked on the Internet might have a negative impact on your social image, but it definitely plays no role in whether or not you can take out a loan. What if all that were to change by tomorrow?  S03E03: From us hackers, with loveCybersecurity is the center piece in Black Mirror’s “Shut up and dance” mid-season episode, as hackers spying through a teenager’s webcam blackmail him into doing unspeakable things. Later on, we learn that Kenny refused to report the perpetrators to the police fearing his secret might be exposed. Indeed, at the very end, we learn that the whole point of this “sextortion” is to expose the seemingly shy Kenny for the pedophile he is.

News this month from the real world brought to our ears that thousands of hacked webcams are currently being streamed on a Russian website. More than 4,500 cameras in the USA, 2,000 in France and 500 in Britain are figured on the site, along with their GPS locations. Home security cameras, office cameras and even baby-monitoring cameras are among the webcams appearing on the site.

While no cases of “sextortion” were recorded yet, it becomes clear that the hackers could have toyed a lot more with the victims. But they didn’t. The site’s administrators went on record saying that it was designed “to show the importance of the security settings”. They also added that for people to remove their webcam from the website, they just have to change their default passwords (“1234”) to a more secure one. What a way to learn the lesson, right? When the founder of a huge social media platform puts duct tape on his webcam, you should probably think twice about who might access your webcam. S03E06: To ‘bee’ or not to ‘bee’The season three finale of “Black Mirror” explores the consequences of a massive hack directed by autonomous drone insects, which pollinate flowers in a world where bees have gone extinct. The hacker behind it kills at the end of each day another person on the Internet with the help of these zombie-drone bees.

Worrisome or not, Dylan Hendricks, program director of the Ten-Year Forecast at the Institute for the Future, couldn’t help himself from making a statement with regard to this episode, labeling it as “surprisingly realistic”. And we can’t argue with him. A team at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has been developing autonomous flying microrobots (known as RoboBees) for over a decade now. And as we all know, there is no such thing as 100% secure.We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Black Mirror brings us, essentially, dystopian scenarios, in a future “five or ten minutes from now”. However, the episodes we chose to illustrate in this week’s article clearly take place now. All the technology trends referenced here already exist, from ranking systems to webcam malware and autonomous drones. The point was not to make a parallel with fiction, but to underline the fact that fiction doesn’t need any more technological embellishment to scare the wits out of us. The brave new world is here. 1984 is now.