Multi-Modal Literacies: You're leaving a digital trail

     I found this article both interesting and disturbing and I can't seem to make up my mind about it.  At the beginning of the article, my first thoughts were that it's scary that peoples' movements and habits can be so easily tracked.  To me, this seems to open so many different possibilities for invasion of privacy and and increase in crimes related to stalking and different things of that nature.  It reminded me of Little Brother and made me think of the ways in which these new technologies and collective intelligence may eventually lead to tracking and censorship similar to Little Brother.
     However, while all this may be the case, the article did present a lot of positive uses of new technologies.  For example, the article mentioned that collective intelligence can be used to track business trends that can help people in the stock market or owners of businesses.  I also found the advantages to public health to be particularly positive.  The article mentioned that with the use of collective intelligence, researchers can predict when a new wave of the flu would be going around.  I also thought it was interesting that the article said that the SARS epidemic could have been prevented in a few days with these technologies.  These are all positive things that people should consider.  However, there was one quote from Dr. Pentland in the article in regards to the SARS epidemic saying “If I could have looked at the cellphone records, it could have been stopped that morning rather than a couple of weeks later, I’m sorry, that trumps minute concerns about privacy.”  My question though is "does this really trump concerns about privacy?"  I realize that in the SARS situation, lives could have been saved and I agree with the use of technology for that purpose, but how far will people take this attitude of "the end justifies the means?"  This is something we all should think about.
     To this end, I think it's important for teachers to teach students the importance of being safe on the internet and being careful about what types of information they provide about themselves.  Internet usage and social networking is so common for students, that I think teachers need to remind them that they need to protect themselves and their privacy.  I've provided a link to the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence for people to learn more information about the research going on in this field.

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence