Location Tracking

In the future, Sorian is a diabolical character that will go to any lengths in order to make sure she comes out on top. Throughout the movie, she admits to committing a slew of unethical acts for her own personal benefit. One example of this is when she chases down Adam in 2022 using technology that allows her to track people even across time. The fact that Sorian has such power and control over other people's private information creates an unsettling image of the future. Nobody should have the means to constantly track other people's location without their consent. An argument could be made that companies should be allowed to monitor the activities of their employees. In this day and age, there are already companies that track their employee's locations through GPS devices in vehicles [2]. Such measures would prevent shady activity from employees, such as the theft of company assets as Adam committed at the beginning of the movie. So is monitoring such a good thing after all? Monitoring is something that would generally be considered an invasion of privacy [2]. There is also evidence to suggest that monitoring employees reduces their job satisfaction and are therefore less incentivized to produce quality work [2]. It really goes to show how technology makes it so that you're never really allowed absolute privacy and also that big tech companies will go to any lengths to protect their profits and investments.

Censorship

The reason for Laura’s assassination attempt was because she found jump logs that exposed how Sorian travelled back to 2018 and altered the time stream to cover her tracks. This is a prime example of how society can be harmed if individuals have too much privacy. It’s like if a group of people had access to technology that could manipulate information without it being known by the general public. This would give them an unfair advantage over others and lead to social and economic inequities [2]. Arguably, the general public at large could benefit if this group had less privacy. In Sorian’s case, she outright abused the power of time travel and used it to gain wealth and power, all while censoring information under the veil of protecting her privacy.

Looking at privacy in the sense of outsiders seeking access to your information, it becomes necessary to draw the line between what should be protected and what should not. Breaching someone’s privacy is a serious offense that Laura may have committed when looking into Sorian’s jump logs. So let’s take a look at this through a Kantian lens. Some of the principles of Kantianism is that everyone is held to the same standards and follows universal moral guidelines [2]. By going back in time to tell her past self to buy stocks and create offshore accounts, it’s clear that Sorian holds no regard for these moral guidelines nor does she have any sort of transparency when it comes to her actions; which is why it’s Sorian who is wrong and Laura’s actions should be deemed justifiable.

After a failed assassination attempt on Laura, she was forced to live out on her own, avoid contact with any people, and minimize her footprint in order to escape from Sorian’s reach. You can imagine it’s hard to live a life in the digital era with limited access to technology, however, Laura knows how easy it is for others, especially Sorian, to access her personal data, so she basically lives a new life secluded in the woods doing the bare minimum to sustain herself. This really goes to show how technology makes it so that we have to take extreme measures in order to protect our privacy.

Sources

1. The Adam Project. Directed by Shawn Levy, Skydance Media, 2022. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/title/81309354.

2. Quinn, Michael J. Ethics for the Information Age. 8th ed., Pearson, 2020. Accessed 28 Apr. 2022.