Imagine if someone could tell everything about your lifestyle, from your makeup choices, to the clothing you wear, what you eat and where you go. Well this Orwellian nightmare is coming true my friends, with a study saying that scientists can find out your lifestyle choices just from one swab of your smartphone.
So not only can using your smartphone make you blind, ruin your sex life, and make your headaches worse, but it can now be used in some totalitarian governmental regime to find out even more information about us. Well, potentially. Okay, only if you left your phone at a crime scene.
The conductors of the study hoped that their results would show just how much information can be gathered from the surfaces of objects we commonly interact with. If you’re a typical millennial who feels like an amputee without yours, your phone is probably your most-touched possession. Pieter Dorrestein, an author of the study, told the Washington Post, ‘The phone is very obvious. Most of us spend so much time on our phones, so there are lots of molecules from your hands being transferred to the object itself at all times.’
These molecules can be swabbed and can reveal an embarrassing amount about our lifestyle habits. Molecules from our food, drinks, clothes, our environment (e.g. seawater or sunscreen), makeup and medication can be gleaned from just one swab. During the study, researchers even found insect repellent on a participant’s phone, which they had used FIVE MONTHS before.
The idea could be used in the future to analyse the molecules on objects involved in crimes, with the aim of giving more clues to the lifestyle of a suspect. As long as no one discovers how long it’s been since we last did laundry, we’re okay with this (pass the antibacterial wipes though).
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.