It used to be that you needed permission to record someone. Most states required both parties of a telephone call, for instance, to consent to it being recorded. You could not film someone and use it without their permission. The general principal being that you own your body and your words. You could, therefore, ban people from bringing cameras into your business or into your show if you were a performer. In the olden times, I recall seeing people dragged out of concerts because they smuggled in a camera.

But, things have become complicated. Everyone has a mobile phone and they almost always have cameras. They also have audio recorders. Every election a dozen or so pols get caught in a controversy over someone surreptitiously recording them saying bad things. Mitt Romney’s “47%” bit maybe cost him the election. Obama’s “Bibles and boomsticks” line still haunts him. Donald Sterling was tossed from the NBA because his whore recorded him saying bad things. In many cases this is illegal, but no one ever gets charged.

Anyway, this story about the Marriot getting fined for blocking cell phones got me thinking about some of the looming puzzles resulting from the spread of cheap radios. People don’t think of their cell phone as a radio, but that’s what it is. Those drones available on Amazon are possible because of cheap and effective radios. The amount of data we can send and receive through the air is what’s changing the physical space of human existence. The whole mobile computing revolution is the consequence of cheap radios.

If a business cannot prevent you from transmitting radio signals from their property, they can’t stop you from recording them or transmitting images of their business via radio. In a weird way, eavesdropping and wiretapping have become legal. Eventually, they become ubiquitous. Because of the explosion of false rape charges, males are now recording their sexual adventures just in case this app does not prove convincing. Citizens are routinely recording cops, so much so that cops are being equipped with full time body cameras.

We’re at the point where no one owns their voice or image. You can’t have an expectation of privacy because everywhere cameras and recorders are rolling or at least assumed to be rolling. The only place that is yours and yours alone is the pace between your ears and that’s not going to be for long. Facial recognition apps will soon be cheap and everywhere.There’s a reason sci-fi writers imagined a future where the sentient beings no longer had facial expressions, I guess. The only defense of that private space will be studied lying and deception. Humans trust will fall to zero as a consequence.

Maybe Ebola is our Vegan choriomeningitis.