Despite the denials our devices are spying on us at work, at home, and everywhere in between. The evidence is obvious to our senses, but why do we keep downplaying it, and why hasn’t anyone done anything about it?
When my twelve-year-old son Nicky asked how much the latest AVENGERS film made its first record-breaking weekend, I recommended he check out the website BoxOfficeMojo.com for the latest box office receipts. About twenty minutes later I got on Facebook and was served the usual tsunami of sponsored ads, including one from… Box Office Mojo.
Have you experienced similar? You’re conversing on your phone or at home — then visit a social platform, news aggregator, or eCommerce site and get targeted with a related ad? When it happens do you retrace your steps, wonder how the advertiser knew? Unable to sense the direct connection, you glance suspiciously at your phone, and the Alexa lurking on a shelf nearby.
Our eyes and ears inform us that eavedropping is happening. We’re reminded every day that the relentless mining of our personal data goes beyond directly browsing, liking, commenting on, or sharing certain content, and has gradually but inexorably migrated into passive communication. Big Tech gaslights us and apologizes when busted doing it — but it’s real. Try it.
The brave new world of Surveillance Capitalism has arrived, where companies actively, ubiquitously, and illegally spy on everything you do digitally — and within earshot of your smartphone and other voice sensitive devices. How is this tolerated? How is this not an urgent threat to individual liberty and national security? Read Zucked and weep — then take action.
The “good news” is that the more our devices know about us the more eminently useful on-demand services become. Consider the astonishing immediacy and breathtaking convenience of effortlessly summoning a car, reserving a table, renting a room, streaming music and movies, and having just about anything on the planet shipped to you within 24 hours.
But also consider the “bad news” as the price we pay in terms of our personal data being wantonly acquired, analyzed, and indiscriminately shared without our express understanding or overt consent. As we shop and stream, the boundaries between corporate greed and authoritarian control become increasingly tenuous, and in much of the world already dissolving.
Forget about censorship, folks, that’s a minor issue compared to the more urgent challenge of tech oligarchs whoring themselves — and all our data — to the highest bidder, annihilating our privacy. The violation of our civil rights is only a few clicks and taps away because information is knowledge and knowledge is control: they have it, we don’t, it’s all been sold away.
The core dilemma goes back to the creation of the Web itself, Tim Berners-Lee demanding freedom and transparency. Nobody understood the Internet’s potential until its incredible power was gradually usurped by behemoths such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Still demanding the world’s content for free, we offer our data as payment, churning billions of us into their product.
Is it too late? Will government regulation be as destructive as today’s chaos? Who should regulate us, if we can’t control ourselves? Effective change begins at home, most importantly with our kids. Digital Natives, they were born into the world we created, reaping its benefits, suffering from its dangers. Sadly like the climate, the next generation is inheriting a big digital mess.
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