Group presentation recap #2 - "World without secrets"

Sadly today was our last class, which meant the final two in-class group presentations. The first of the two groups chose to review the book "World Without Secrets: Business, Crime and Privacy in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing" by Richard Hunter. Needless to say, at 35 minutes plus, this group's analysis was thorough. Considering this was also the second group to present this book, at this point I feel as though I could give a presentation on this book without even reading it myself.

This group of seven covered all the chapters, except 5 which was skipped, in depth. The chapters that caught my attention were 6, 7, and 8. I think this was primarily because the other chapters seemed kind of obvious or outdated, while a few universal and timeless themes ran through these aforementioned chapters. Both the ideas of Microsoft and Gartner Inc. colluding to fight the rise of open source software in 6 spoke to the nature of competition in a capitalistic society, and the concept of "Mentats" swaying a distracted general public in 7 & 8 had me thinking about bigger picture topics outside of my day-to-day existence.

I would like to see Mr. Hunter release a 2.0 version of this book. I say this from the standpoint that Professor Fry revealed to the class that the program Hunter used as an example throughout Chapter 2 - "Streets without secrets", that tells the story of how Tampa, Florida law enforcement officials used facial recognition camera and software technology to identify wanted offenders in public places, has been completely abandoned. In the 2.0 version, I would like to hear Hunter's thoughts on more recent developments such as the introduction of "talking cameras" in London for example. Or possibly his viewpoint on the upsurge of blogging and consequent downturn of traditional media sources such as newspapers.

In conclusion, I think the group did a great job at presenting the information provided by the book; however, I was disappointed by how dated much of the material seemed. Not any one's fault, just one humble observers opinion : )