In Minority Report, information privacy is a theme called upon many times, as the film explores a society where information is sold and used at an exponentially higher rate than today. At the core of this time lies the ethical debate about whether privacy must be sacrificed for security and control. The move uses the portrayal of precogs and invasive biometric systems to show how information privacy can be a real concern in the future as technology becomes exponentially more and more advanced.
In the movie, the precogs are beings who have future seeing powers in the form of nightmares about crimes that are going to happen. Because of this, they lie unconscious in the PreCrime facility, and their thoughts are scanned 24/7 for crimes that are about to happen. Their thoughts are public property for the precrime facility to observe and monitor, and the precogs do not have any consent in this. This helps raise the question of whether one should be able to keep their thoughts private, even if their thoughts could prevent serious crimes. It raises concerns about one’s own intellectual privacy of the most private thing ever: one’s thoughts. With mind scanning technologies today becoming more and more advanced at interpreting signals of the brain, and with the boom in artificial intelligence, we might need to ask ourselves whether we should be able to keep our thoughts as our own, or whether companies or law enforcement have the right to scan our minds for private thoughts.
The film also uses eye scanning technology in order to give personalized ads in the form of holographic and auditory ads, extending personalized ads beyond just the computer. This technology also allows the government to track people in real time, which raises an ethical concern about whether someone’s locational data should be able to be monitored by the government. In today’s world, an example of this is Australia’s move to enforce minors 16 and under to be forbidden from using social media. While this seems like its in good heart, the way they would go about it could lead to something along the lines of what the movies eye scanning technology is like. Australia’s enforcement would need some way to track the age of people, since anyone can put that they are over 16 if they are given the chance to. People have speculated that this may be their way to enforce digital IDs of everyone, which may give the government even more surveillance power and infringe on people’s privacy.