We are warned these days that everything one commits to digital communications can be accessed and seen by hackers and other cybersecurity experts. I have come up with a way that secret or intimate information which one wishes to remain confidential can be conveyed from one individual to another. This is an exciting prospect – and one which offers both a commercial opportunity and the prospect of hundreds of jobs. See what you think.
Postscript: When all of our communications are digitised, impersonal and readily available to any party skilled in cyber-insecurity, it occurs to me that there might be a commercial opportunity arising from people’s occasional need for communication which is characterised by certainty that the information is being transferred in confidence from a point-source to a limited number of point-recipients selected by the source. Imagine, for example, the situation in which one person (the point-source) wanted to communicate personal information (of any sort) to one receiver: a one-to-one communication. Rather than following the usual protocols relating to transmission of digital information by satellite technology, through selected encrypted social media in the Cloud which is, in effect, permanently available to the public, suppose that it was possible to encode the selected information in single issue, unique, hard copy form.
It is possible to conceive of this being operationalised by the point-source, using some combination of a medium capable of being physically marked (stone, say, or slate, or compressed layers of barley husks?) and a medium for the marking (a flint, say, or ash, or a corrosive acidic reagent?). By such means, the point-source could transfer the required information from their brain to a unique inanimate physical entity (one wouldn’t want to have the secret intelligence simply wandering away).
The challenge is then how to have this entity transferred into the cognition, via visual field, of the intended recipient. This is where I think the commercial opportunity exists. Suppose one was to enter into a contract with a person to actually carry the entity to the place of residence of the intended recipient: the contract could specify a financial return to the trans-shipper and a moiety for us as owners and managers of the intellectual property associated with the venture.
A huge amount of administrative backgrounding would of course be necessary: one would need physical addresses for any party that might be the target for transmissions; a book of Yellow pages into which those addresses could be collected (they could be alphabetised for easier access?); a system for putting potential point-sources in contact with the service, some means of levying the agreed fees from users of the service, and a large stock of yellow waterproof coats and modestly-powered motorbikes. (I wonder whether the fees could be levied on both parties to the contract – source and recipient?)
There would also need to be developments of associated infrastructure. For example, if the targeted recipient is not working from home there might be no-one home to receive the entity. Perhaps those who opt in to the scheme could affix some sort of receptacle to the outside of their door or their fence into which the entity could be placed? (This might lead to yet another commercial niche: whole companies could produce little printed flyers to be pasted onto these receptacles in an attempt to prevent miscreants from putting unsolicited items in them?)
Some sort of government licensing of the parties involved would probably be required and if it went really well government might take it over from us?. Inter-State travel might be involved and (I am ambitious for the scope and scale of the service.) even international flights.
My preliminary budgeting suggests a unit cost per contract in the range of $US13-14,000 but if the service took off that cost would fall rapidly. There might be a market for a special service (a twice daily delivery?) for a slightly higher fee. As I describe these possibilities, still more options occur to me. For example, being a physical object, the entity to be trans-shipped will have two sides; it might be possible to put the two to different purposes: one for the textual intelligence to be communicated, the other for a pictorial representation of the nearest seaside resort to the location whence the entity is being dispatched.
Any such further aspects to the proposal must be evaluated in the context of the requirement that the central purpose of the whole enterprise is not compromised – being the protected transmission of thoughts, feelings, intelligence and family news between two parties, both of whom seek a level of privacy or confidence not provided by traditional digital means.
What do you think? Am I onto something here?
Please get back to me.
Love always – your brother – gg