Researchers at the Media Lab are working to make entire rooms sensitive to what goes on inside them. These 'Smart Rooms' are strewn with cameras, microphones and other sensors - the walls really do have ears capable of recognising who is in the room and what they are doing. Such an intelligent office could become a kind of room-sized personal assistant that knows your work habits, remembers where you put things, and is able to make phone calls, arrange meetings, book holidays or retrieve documents through your voice commands.

The intelligent office could become a kind of surveillance system in which your every move, word, facial expression and even heartbeat is monitored, recorded and stored in a databank. Proponents of technology agree that safeguards for privacy are needed. They also argue that you can simply turn the room off (holiday's and day's off) when you don't want it to record. The convenience of affective computing lies in the fact that user's don't have to tend to these devices because they are always on and always responding to our signals. If users want them turned off, this must happen automatically too?

What if you forget to turn them off? Or what if someone else turns them back on without your knowledge or consent? How would you know? And what if the privacy safeguards are breached? Having computers, microphones, cameras and sensors observe our every move sounds like a nightmare to me. Most of us wouldn't want people around around this much, so why would we want surveillance around us this much? We have a long, long way to go before we suffer such ongoing contact with any surveillance devices, no matter how smart.

James and Joe

Security Advisors, NextWave.IT Ltd

www.nextwaveit.biz

enquiry@nextwaveit.biz