Privacy
Personal privacy is a major issue in this episode. The grain allows people to record and recall everything they see. This greatly reduces the amount of privacy an individual has. In our time, even when someone does something in the presence of other people, most of the details aren’t remembered. There is an instance in the movie where Jonas and Ffian are talking privately, out of earshot of anyone else. Liam views them at a distance, and is able to use the stored memory to zoom in on them, and perform speech recognition to understand their conversation.
Another issue regarding privacy is who has access to people’s memories. While the grain is used to store memories, people are able to create backups. It’s possible that these backups could be stored in the cloud, with the company that produces the grain. This raises the question of whether certain employees of that company would be able to view the memories of people using their product. Also, this poses a huge security risk. If they do not store this memory data securely, it could potentially be stolen, allowing hackers to know almost everything about a person.