This film includes a variety of references to the social implications and effects of networked communication. The most evident of these is the national surveillance system which can quickly track a person from one location to the next through use of biometric data. This data is communicated not only to authorities, but also to advertisers, who use it to determine what advertisements to show a given individual
This use of networks to enable rapid analysis of data and profiling of individuals mirrors the way in which the technology is now used in the real world. Targeted advertising and biometric database searches are now commonplace due to rapid interconnection. However, the ethics of transmitting such information on a public network such as the internet is still heavily contested.
This connects to the themes of this class because thorough ethical analysis is necessary to determine the moral state of using networks in this way. The significant social and economic advantages of transmitting information about individuals must be balanced with the necessity to secure it so that it is not used for nefarious purposes