The Orwellian World We Live In

We know that everything we share on social media is being “scrapped, sorted, and warehoused” by the usual suspects – Google and Facebook, writes Marc Goodman in Future Crimes. But data about you doesn’t just come from you:

“Your friends and family are leaking data about you as well.”

Like when they add your name to their phone’s contacts. Or when you are tagged on a Facebook post. Or when someone adds your birthday to Microsoft Outlook.

 

How can this be possible? Is it even legal, you wonder. Aha, remember those unreadably long Terms & Conditions that you approve when you install/sign up for those apps (many are longer than Shakespeare’s plays!)? Yes, those unreadable lines stop “just short of claiming rights to your immortal soul”…

 

Which brings us to the beloved smartphone. If you thought social media was the main source of info on you, you are so wrong because:

“(Smartphones) are veritable snitches in our pockets, digital spies tracking our every move.”

One can at least understand why the GPS app knows one’s location and movements. But even games (remember Angry Birds?) record every location you went to. Goodman points out how ridiculous things are:

“Why does your flashlight app need access to your contacts? Why does it ask for my location? My location should be obvious: I’m in the dark.”

So why does every app need access to everything about you? They sell that data to others who do have use for it. And no, they’re not too finicky who they sell to. One data broker named Experian even sold personal data of two-thirds of all Americans to an organized crime group in Vietnam.

 

And yes, governments too love this opportunity to snoop. Not just the usual suspects like China and Russia, but everyone, esp. the US. Once upon a time, the East German Stasi was the pinnacle of domestic surveillance. That’s laughable: they couldn’t monitor more than 40 telephone lines continuously! The comedic site, Onion’s satirical report wasn’t too far off the mark when it called Facebook “the massive online surveillance program run by the CIA”:

“We were astounded that so many people would willingly publicize where they live, their religious and political views, an alphabetized list of their friends, personal e-mail addresses, phone numbers, hundreds of photos of themselves… It is a dream come true for the CIA. Much of the credit belongs to CIA Agent Mark Zuckerburg.”

 

We can curse all we like, but ultimately this is the cost of all the free stuff we love and cannot live without – Google, Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, WhatsApp, Google Maps, Instagram, games… those companies do need to make money, don’t they? And this is the pact we have all signed up for. Voluntarily.

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