Our protagonist stands in a dark office, hunched over a desk, face lit by a computer monitor. “Come on. Come on.” We see a file copy progress indicator zipping through filenames. 88%. 89%. We see a handful of armed men in black tactical gear quickly ascending a staircase. The protagonist’s hand hovers over the portable drive connector ready to snap it away. Presumably the seconds it would take to get out of an executive chair could prove critical. 94%.

The armed men have reached their floor, they begin to move down the corridor. Sweat is visible on the protagonist’s forehead. 97%. The armed men are positioned outside the door. Our protagonist looks up, as if aware of imminent danger.

The armed men break down the door and file into a similar, but noticeably lit, office. Room secure, our protagonist not found. A mean-looking man in a suit brushes past and rounds the desk to the monitor on the desktop. “Damn!” We see the screen “Data copied to remote terminal: 100%. Wiping local drive, pass 2: 20%…” before the suited man grasps the computer’s power cord and yanks it out.
“Span out. Check all offices with level 3 access. They may still be here.” We see our protagonist briskly walking down a corridor, placing a portable drive in their pocket, and leaving through a fire exit.

I love seeing, essentially quotidian, technology in dramatic situations – no matter how hackneyed. Especially running backups, which is inescapably tedious. If I’m not being paid to run backups, I’m just not motivated.

Something like The Tao of Backup is cute, but there’s no frisson. It’s usually a dramatic portrayal of data loss that prompts me into action for personal backups. Action usually being: add a reminder to back-up such-and-such to my personal To-do list or, if it’s (inevitably) already there, increase that task priority level… or something. Yawn.

And if we can’t get backups right, what chance do we have with data erasure, its data security twin sister?

Movies are already there, of course. When the secret base is compromised in movies (such as Mr and Mrs Smith and Blade: Trinity) the evacuation procedure involves activating remote data uploads and securely sanitising the local stores.

Sometimes it’s incorporated into the plan, with each stage trading power for mobility. Desktops and servers synced to laptops and abandoned, laptops synced to smartphones. Finessing the computing bulk like segments of an Apollo launch vehicle, cast off sections burning up on the atmosphere.

I sometimes lament that this data evacuation procedure doesn’t really exist for consumer level tech in the real world. Some simple procedure where personal data gets backed up, cleared out, and the device is reset to its virgin state suitable for sending off for repairs, loaning, selling, or even just crossing US borders. A sort of infotech hymenorrhaphy.

I guess the “copy everything and wipe” is the already the standard mode of operation for something like a digital camera. My iPod Touch actually has a self-destruct feature: fail to guess the access code after several tries and its internal storage is wiped. Reassurance that the impact of losing a device has an easily calculable monetary cost rather than the additional unease and uncertainty that comes with loss of personal data, access credentials, etc.

It’s odd that laptops don’t seem to have the same feature as standard. I guess it works on the iPod/iPhone as it’s not that much data, and any notes, calendar events, etc will get synced to my laptop usually within 24 hours. I wouldn’t lose more than I’ll be able to recall. (And I assume having network access and a MobileMe account would allow it to be synced more frequently than that).

So why not, as standard, a self-destruct sequence for a personal computer?

These invisible tendrils of self, of identity, attach themselves around our phones, computers, PVRs, iPods, video games. Our own data transforming into the vulnerable tamagotchi of self. A lost cell-phone contact list, a social-life crisis. A broken Animal Crossing cartridge, the loss of investment in an entire village.

It used to be easier, I’m sure. An older games console such as the PS2 could only store it’s configuration detail on small removable, flash memory cartridges. On games consoles such as the Wii the memory is inside the device. You could sit down and manually copy off just the personal savegame files on to a USB drive or an SD card, I guess. In the case of the Xbox 360, at least, the harddrive is an easily removable, replaceable, part.

The current model of personal computer backup is that of full system restoration, not of personal data. Even if you’ve never created a single document, installation of an operating system and office packages, and a couple of years worth of upgrades and downloaded updates still represents a large number of gigabytes of backup commitment.

Which means my backups get sent to a relatively bulky USB drive rather than, say, a 16GB microSD the size of my fingernail. Something that would be more than enough to backup the variable/irreplaceable stuff that lives on my laptop and be easily carried in my wallet. Or have surgically implanted in my arse.

Which is not to say that backing up full systems isn’t also useful. At least Time Machine exists and is actively bugging people to plug in their backup drives or whatever. It might be more impressive if, on a sufficiently recently backed up machine, there was also an option to set the conditions to securely wipe the original. (OS X doesn’t seem to make it easy to nuke the root device of a running system – I assume you need to first boot from an installation disc.)

I guess I’d just like to be able to “de-personalise” a personal computer. I’d like to transform this sense of ownership into a sense of custodianship. I don’t want it to always be “My Computer”. Wipe out my personal information and leave the tools, the programs, installed in place for someone else. (Like putting /home/ and /var/, on traditional Unix’y systems, on separate partitions that can be securely wiped.)

And then, when I’m in control of my information on the devices I own, I can start worrying about the the information out on the net, on devices I’ve never even seen, for now just assuming that it’s all safe in the hands of professionals.

What’s the cause of the data anxiety? That others may look past their public physical presence and judge them based on the blinkenlights? Or, more likely, that they’re intimidated by the numbers themselves.

I understand why the information can have that effect. Things like time, distance, even kcal burned, that’s all fine. The one that’s always a little scary is heart rate (which gets displayed by the machines with electrodes in the handles, or picked up from transmitter units). I’ve always just mentally filtered it out. I’ve never felt the need to know about my heart rate. It’s icky scary of-the-body stuff. Until I looked it up recently I wouldn’t have know what a normal, resting, heart rate would be. I’ve somehow never even taken my own pulse.

This bugged me for a while. I decided I wanted to develop some kind of familiarity with my heart rate. The idea was, I’d buy a heart rate monitor and try to cultivate a checking reflex – not just during exercise, but any time. Like how you might occasionally check the time, or an unread message count.

So I broke my personal rule about not buying new tech that wasn’t a replacement for something else (it’s not replacing a watch – I haven’t owned one since my Pop Swatch popped off over a decade ago). I poured over the specs of various products and eventually got into the tech buying trap of attempting rationalise paying more for features I previously didn’t care about (GPS, computer-downloads, etc).

Eventually I decided it hold off, for now, on anything too sophisticated and went for a Polar FS3c. And maybe I was a little swayed in my choice by the fact that it’s one of the heart rate monitors sported by Edward Norton in the 2008 movie The Incredible Hulk.

The Incredible Hulk was one of my favourite movies of last year. Mainly because, by focusing on the fugitive story that drove the 70s TV series, it positioned itself as a geek Bourne Identity. Instead of a trained assassin, Banner is a renegade scientist able to somehow evade a Special Forces snatch-squad (even before his involuntary green ríastrad, a transformation only triggered after local bullies mess with his PC).

A fairly close embodiment of hacker nomad of net-lore. Have encrypted laptop and network radio equipment will travel. He can jury-rig a centrifuge in the favela for grinder-style self experimentation whenever needed. While the Hulk represents the fear of our bodies betraying us, Banner becomes someone taking steps to overcome that fear. (Like the movie hard-men able to perform surgery on themselves.)

It even has a little fun with the current conventions of the genre. Bruce empties the contents of Betty’s handbag on to a motel bed: “Basically we can’t use any of this because they can track all of it.” “My lipgloss – can they track that?”

If there’s any complaint I have about the movie it was that there was too much Hulk. I do appreciate the artistry of CGI monsters hitting each other, but the final half hour takes it a little too far. Apparently sci-fi movie budgets are such that multi-million dollar recreations of the alley-fight from They Live now seem like a good idea.

There’s no word of a sequel yet, but the tying of Hulk into the Captain America origin-story, along with the Tony Stark cameo, firmly establishes it as part of Marvel’s Avengers remscéla – perhaps as hero, perhaps villain.

The heart-rate monitor itself is used cleverly in the movie. It takes the role of a sinister countdown clock. The beeping of the watch heralding the potential for disaster. And while the watch performs as it would in reality, the movie does lie a little.

We see Norton bare-chested (a clear requirement for the role) on several occasions when using the heart-rate monitor. I assumed that the elecrodes were embedded into the strap, but a little research shows that the Polar devices use a chest strap – something I assume has been finessed away from the movie’s world for aesthetic reasons, even though strapless HRMs actually exist.

2002′s Panic Room is another movie that uses medical monitoring in this way. A diabetic’s watch shows their current blood glucose level – it’s suggested that below a certain point and hypoglycaemia kicks in. The watch is a movie fiction – we just have to assume there are wires in the body, either connected to the watch, or relayed from a sensor elsewhere.

The current, real life, version of this continuous blood glucose monitoring is something like the Dexcom system in which a cool little cyborg wart is stuck to your body and is relayed to a hideous tamagotchi-looking receiver unit (that would have looked odd even back when people still carried pagers).

I think I’ve assumed that there was some good reason that personal medical tech always had to look a little out of date, but the iPhone 3.0 preview last Tuesday showed a preview of a iPhone fingerstick (rather than continuous) glucose monitoring application.

So what happens when the device that records your medical status is also the device you use to update your social connections?

I can see some crossover with the grinder and personal infomatics (“Quantified Self”) crowd who aren’t afflicted with the specific aliments these technologies are aimed at. Just adopt the tech as cyborg gadgets providing yet another datapoint – especially for non-invasive measurement techniques.

I’m a member of a generation that’s seen the culture of internet personal sharing and disclosure occur only after our own youthful embarrassments were already behind us. Financial and medical information is private – that much is sacrosanct. Which is why I wouldn’t be surprised to see that attitude challenged over the next decade.

Imagine some ambient representation of your friends list which incorporates this information – marrying the medical telemetry of the USCMC in Aliens with the wearable contact list of clatter

It might be a represented by subtle changes in shape, and colour. Or maybe just like the changing face of BJ Blazkowicz. You might learn to tailor any real-time communication to your recipients present physical state.

It doesn’t seem too far fetched. My girlfriend allows me access to her Nike+ data (in an interesting connection, it was Edward Norton’s voice on the commercials). I’m not a runner myself, so it doesn’t ever represent useful actionable information. Yet the access itself has some meaning, some value that I don’t yet have the tools to describe.

Of course I’m still mentally entrenched in the world of risks and nightmare scenarios. You might not want to keep discretionary medical records that can be subject to discovery by insurance claims investigators. Or, in the UK, the many tentacles of the RIPA-enabled state (the current message to banks and benefit claimants alike seems to be: if you ask for support, you consent to surveillance). Maybe stories of spouses demanding an explanation for jump in heart rate for a partner supposedly working late at the office, or the panic of parents when equipment glitches produce aberrant results.

I’m cautious and conservative when it comes to this sort of thing. It can take years for the technologies, especially those encourage new forms of sharing, to find their way through the following mental sluice gates:

• How is this any different or better than X?
• Why do you care?
• Why do you think anyone else would care?
• What are the potential health/privacy/lock-in risks?
• What are the network benefits?
• Do the benefits outweigh the potential health/privacy/lock-in risks?
• Why is my preferred username already taken?

Whenever I hear about someone preserving a moment of chemical idiocy to a social website it’s usually followed by “that’ll come back to haunt them when they run for political office and discover they’ve inadvertently licensed the indiscretions of their youth to a media conglomerate”. But part of me wonders if there’s really that much value in the idea that we need to maintain some kind of plausible deniability about our lives – in the unlikely event we run for political office (…in an future where only paragons are electable).

Indeed, I recently watched an episode of The West Wing on DVD that seemed to suggests that, for high profile politicians, at best the position of well-guarded privacy will result in culture shock when your entire life is suddenly thrown open to the scrutiny by your enemies, and at worst your secrets become the things other use to influence you.

So maybe, when the issue arises, we should just relax.

Current heart rate: 69 bpm.

I have no objections to it, myself.  It’s a lovely little hieroglyph that reminds me how awesome computers seemed to me in the 90s.  They were the go-to MacGuffins of the modern computer-era in movies like Hackers and The Net.

These days memory cards are the size of fingernails and disks can look like anything from tiki statues to laptop humping dogs.  So what do we get as the current representation of data storage? A featureless rectangular slab?

In OS X, Apple choses to represent unmounted .dmg disk images as metallic cases of internal hard-disks, a circular indent showing the location of the platters (something that’s familiar to most computer people, but probably abstract for Mac users). Oddly, when mounted, they then come to resemble an external drive of some kind – a white flat rectangular casing.  Apple’s iconography for online storage (iDisk) is an external drive casing with a abstract cloud symbol on it – possibly enshrining it as a future anachronism.

So the modern floppy-less save icons tend to look like arrows pointing at slabs, or at cylinders, or pointing into file folders (because some metaphors transcend).  Sometimes it’s a sharpened pencil writing directly on to the surface of a magnetic disk.

Of course there are some that regard the question of representing a save icon as moot.  The concept of “save” is apparently tied to a doomed file-centric paradigm, and that files will be replaced by a continually recorded timestream of changes – the file-as-document will become closer to a spool. The play and record buttons are always down.  (The specific user action will be closer to concept of “export” where capturing the state of a “file” at a specific time is still required.)

This concept of auto-saving has been a familiar one in videogames in the last few years,  but that hasn’t removed the need for iconographic communication.  The games still need to communicate when information is being saved to warn the user not to switch the power off or remove devices and risk leaving the data in a corrupted state.  There are no secondary indicators – no whirring noises, no flashing indicator LEDs, no iPod display requesting not to be unplugged.  On PS2 games they would frequently use an iconographic representation of the removable memory cards.  But how do you visually communicate the internal storage of the Wii?

One of the games I’m currently playing uses a spinning DVD (a read-only medium in videogame-land) to represent, not when the DVD is being read (duh), but when data is being written to internal memory.  I assume there was nothing else suitable in their development kit.

So instead of an icon a user selects to instruct the computer to save, we’re now in need of a universal visual representation an instruction from the computer.  “Attention human: I’m saving your work.  Don’t do anything that might prevent me from doing this.” (Something that potentially becomes much trickier when you think about devices with no persistent storage saving directly to the cloud.)

And, really, what communicates this better than an angry cartoon mole?