I was inspired to write this article by a translation that described how, focusing on facial recognition systems, we miss the whole idea of mass data collection: you can identify a person by any data. Even people themselves use various methods for this: for example, the brain of a nearsighted person relies on gait for identifying people at great distances, rather than trying to recognize a face.
The idea here is that society unconsciously rejects new technologies rather than tries to understand the true reason.
But I would like to add that there are technologies, using which, to bring surveillance to a fundamentally new level, significantly approximating the Orwellian reality. And these technologies are much closer to mass successful implementation, as it seems to us.
And these are technologies that allow receiving such information that ordinary people are not used to receiving in a converted form of a digital form. And this is odor information. But in the real world, the smell carries a huge amount of information from which people can receive additional information personally about you. For example, even from a couple of minutes by the fire your clothes will smell of smoke, which will remain in it for a distinguished time with the naked nose from time to week. There are whole perfume industries working on the synthesis of odors.
Did you know that there is no "smell of the old man"? In fact, his tissues and body composition are still almost odorless. It was just that his skin absorbed particles of substances from the air from all those places where he had been in life.
The digitization of odors has long been considered a challenge, which in fact has come down to chromatography. That is, methods for analyzing the chemical composition of a substance, directly analyzing which molecules it consists of.
For another twenty years, chromatographs were laboratory cabinets, where it took minutes or tens of minutes of work to analyze a substance.
But today the task of determining the molecular composition of a gas and comparing it with the “imprints” of known substances is being solved in the form of a portable device. And many of you have already seen him in the subway for a long time: it’s ID Kerber . In no more than five seconds, this “vacuum cleaner” can determine if you had contact with explosives, drugs, hazardous poisons or toxic substances.
The thing is that the smell has unique features:
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