Just as the smaller companies have mostly been put over in this side of the convention center, they’ve also seemed to have sorted the individual companies based on their primary products they’re showing off. So, actually, I think I have a pretty decent bonus for searching for things that might be suspicious or possibly flat-out evil.

My gut instinct says that the “security center” row is a good place to look. These are the companies and startups whose goal is providing “security solutions in a modern age,” and with that slightly vague wording, that encompasses a whole lot of stuff that is a whole lot not good.

Take this “guard robot,” for example. Yeah, guard robots are very commonplace these days, especially in low risk areas like retail stores where the value of stolen items barely makes a drop in the ocean of companies’ bottom lines. However, this robot here, apparently designated P-RET6 as a prototype model, is not there to chase down shoplifting teenagers or to patrol the grounds of a warehouse. This one appears to record everything it sees and hears. Its information is then, as the ad next to it says, compressed into metadata and stored. Then each week the robot is sent back to headquarters and has its data uploaded to a central server to provide better security services in aggregate.

That sounds like a bunch of malarkey at first, but to put it simply, it means some AI is analyzing the data and automatically adjusting every single other robot of the same brand.

Listen, robots are stupid. But that isn’t a bad thing. Creating a hivemind of robots that act under the direction of some algorithm is already creepy enough, and I don’t think I expressed my distaste for it quite enough during my adventure with Karina and Lamar chasing down auto-conbinis. But this is basically the unconsented monitoring of every person in vision or audio proximity to one of these guards. With enough of them, you could track everyone in the city.

The First Protocol is going to get broken by some lunatic scientist sooner or later, and the entire internet will go down in minutes. That’s an inevitability. But I’m almost just as worried that someone’s going to forego the internet entirely, accidentally create a hivemind of robots, and their algorithms will realize that humanity is destroying the planet and should probably be exterminated.

We might deserve it, but I still don’t want it to happen!

All of this monitoring stuff gets worse the more I look at the security software some of the newest startups have to offer. I know they’re brand-new because some of them don’t even have a logo yet, just a product and an itch for investors.

A whole row of these startups all have variations on the same exact thing: “Anti-Social Media Killer” prevention systems.

Yeah, they’re a bit late to the party considering she stopped attacking back in like, March, but it’s probably a really green market for anyone who is paranoid about their personal lives being leaked online, or shady pasts they want to wipe clean before a job interview or a political campaign or a second date.

The ethics of deleting your past and covering up events that might be pertinent are iffy, but putting that aside, the red alert sirens are going off on my head big time right now, looking at the “features” for some of these.

This one, called “Hackproofer,” will, with your permission, go through your social network profiles on Netnect, Jelly, Bird-Up, and six other sites I’ve never heard of, rating your posts on a “deletable” scale from one to ten, and then letting you automatically delete anything it rates as too dangerous to keep. It’s a scam of the highest order if you give it even a bit of thought--you’re basically just giving your entire profile to some third party company, and now they have literally all of your personal information, including the stuff you want to delete. You don’t think they aren’t going to keep that, especially in case they just uncovered some nice dirt on you?

Ridiculous. The Social Media Killer was always going to inspire some rotten people to cash-in on her efforts with their own moneymaking schemes, but this is downright evil. The digital representation of the phrase, “snake in the grass.”

I’ve got to move on, but I’m absolutely keeping my eye out for more stuff like this.