Quand les objets deviennent communicants La mise en confiance des acteurs humains et la question des traces numériques

The “Internet of things” is likely to give a second breath to the information society. However, the loss of control over personal information is both problematical and widely criticized. The “promise” of a better society offered by new services based on communication between machines carries with it frightening corollaries: it evokes a totalitarian space, where anonymous exchanges are no longer possible and the various traits of people’s digital identities are stored by agents of public and business powers. It is thus the management of digital tracking technologies that we wish to explore in this publication. Our hypothesis is that current criticism of a police state or of new forms of economic alienation is taking place at far too general a level. It obscures the real problem with the profusion of tracking methods, which for us reveals a crisis of confidence (as Giddens means it), at the individual level, in the means of production of telecommunications, which is the result of a deficit in the standardization process. From this perspective, the issue of the profusion of tracing technologies and their management transcends the issue of social control to encompass that of social responsibility and of modalities of proofs when the system fails.