In this blog post, we explore whether the advancement of surveillance technology truly only brings us convenience, and what underlying problems exist, using the movie Minority Report as a lens.
You enter a department store building to buy new jeans. As you pass the entrance, a small light flashes briefly. Immediately, a beautiful model appears on the screen you were looking at, calls your name, and says: “Welcome. Did you come to buy new jeans?” The beautiful model recommends several pairs of jeans to you. You happen to need jeans, so you might be happy to receive this information. Or would you feel uncomfortable knowing someone already knows all your preferences?
This scene isn’t just a vision of the future; if technological development continues, it could become part of our everyday reality. As more and more technology infiltrates our daily lives, collecting and analyzing personal information is becoming commonplace. But is this technology always beneficial? We gain convenience in exchange for providing information, but we also lose much in the process.
You return home late after shopping and collapse into sleep. The cold touch of metal wakes you. Coming to, you find a bizarre spider-like robot prying open your eyelids with its tentacles. A camera attached to the robot scans your eyes. Then, a monotone mechanical voice intones: “Thank you for cooperating with the investigation.” Only upon seeing the news in the morning did you learn there had been a crime in your apartment building. The police knew you were at the department store during the incident solely from your iris data, so they didn’t investigate you. How do you feel about the fact that you weren’t called in for questioning because the police knew your location? While you might consider yourself lucky to have been uninvolved in the crime, you might also feel uneasy knowing how easily your information can fall into the wrong hands.
Residents of the Minority Report world would likely accept this as normal. By 2054, the setting of Minority Report, corporations or governments possess vast amounts of information about you. Walking down the street, ads recommending clothes matching your taste appear based on your iris data, and during police checks, you simply need to look into a camera. Everyone probably thought these things would be helpful. But does society’s observation of individuals truly benefit them more than it harms them? Beyond convenience, are we underestimating the side effects of information monopoly and misuse?
The first problem that arises is that individuals can escape surveillance by any means. The street vendor who sold drugs to protagonist John Anderton had both eyes removed. The curiosity about why such eyeless people exist is resolved midway through the film. To re-enter his former workplace, the Precrime Division, John Anderton undergoes an illegal procedure: having his own eyes removed and someone else’s eyes implanted. The owner of the eyes used in the procedure is only named, but they were likely people in a similar predicament to the drug dealer. John Anderton then successfully disables the iris recognition system monitoring him and infiltrates the facility unnoticed.
The same holds true in reality. While technologies like CCTV are used to track criminals, criminals can evade them through simple methods like wearing masks and hats to conceal their faces. No matter how sophisticated surveillance technology becomes, attempts to circumvent it will always exist. Furthermore, the possibility that surveillance systems themselves could be misused for criminal purposes cannot be ruled out. It might become a world where those who should be under surveillance still operate freely, while innocent people get caught in the surveillance net and live in fear.
The second problem that arises is that even if this information acquisition was initially used for benevolent purposes, there is potential for it to be misused by others. When John Anderton enters a department store after his eye transplant, an advertising model mistakes him for someone else and addresses him: “How did you like the tank top you bought last time?” This allows us to infer that the previous owner of the eye wore tank tops and was likely female. Before John Anderton’s eye surgery, he frequently saw ads encouraging travel, suggesting he was originally an extroverted traveler. Thus, observing what ads another person sees allows one to gather information about them for potential misuse. For example, if a thief knows John Anderton frequently travels and targets him, lurking around his house until he leaves, the likelihood of his home being burglarized increases.
Furthermore, if this information gathering occurs at some point without regard for an individual’s choice or consent, we would no longer live free lives. If people don’t know when or where they are being monitored, they will increasingly self-censor. This is the greatest psychological harm a surveillance society can inflict, ultimately stifling autonomy.
The third problem is that aggregated information is vulnerable to leaks. While not depicted in the film, even today, famous shopping sites, game servers, portal sites, and banks are frequently hacked. Sensitive personal information like citizen ID numbers, card details, and account information frequently falls into hackers’ hands. No matter how thoroughly security is prepared, since humans ultimately control the technology, the risk of personal information leaks remains. In the world of Minority Report, the scale of information stored appears incomparably broader than today’s, meaning a hacking incident would cause damage on an even larger scale. For example, if someone leaked the pre-crime recording predicting a husband’s murder of his wife’s affair partner, that person would gain leverage to blackmail the wife.
Due to these three issues, the idea of monitoring individuals, storing their information, and using it for crime prevention or advertising is likely to result in more losses than gains. As technology advances, the ethical dilemmas we face will become increasingly complex. Such problems are unlikely to be fundamentally resolved. Not only can no technology perfectly eliminate the potential for abuse, but even if it existed, its use ultimately rests with humans, making risks like internal betrayal impossible to avoid. Technology is never neutral; how it is used depends entirely on human hands.
Residents of the Minority Report world likely accepted providing their information to corporations or the state because they believed it would benefit them more, or simply because they had no particular reason to oppose it. However, even within the film, this exposed problems and side effects, both directly and indirectly. We can learn from this that any technological attempt to obtain personal information, even if it began with good intentions, should be avoided.
