Safeguards in a world of ambient intelligence

In the near future, every manufactured product – our clothes, money, appliances, the paint on our walls, the carpets on our floors, our cars, everything – will be embedded with intelligence, networks of tiny sensors and actuators, which some have termed "smart dust". The AmI world is not far off. We already have surveillance systems, biometrics, personal communicators, machine learning and more. AmI will provide personalised services – and know more about us – on a scale dwarfing anything hitherto available.

In the AmI vision, ubiquitous computing, communications and interfaces converge and adapt to the user. AmI promises greater user-friendliness in an environment capable of recognising and responding to the presence of different individuals in a seamless, unobtrusive and often invisible way. While most stakeholders paint the promise of AmI in sunny colours, there is a dark side to AmI.