Data and privacy are just like two parallel lines, they can never meet. No matter how much the government tries to tout how private they are, Uncle Sam will always have an idea of what you’re doing. As long as you’re doing it on a computer that has access to the internet, you can rest assured that the big guys know everything.
Your privates are only excluded from your friends, families, and neighbors. And maybe the random strangers you come across on a daily basis. But nothing flies under the radar of the government without their approval, if they want to know every yama-yama text you’ve ever sent, they can do that easily. The only reason they haven’t is because so far we haven’t really done anything that’ll draw their attention to us.
Yeah, I know allegedly, governments don’t just have access to our data, they have to go through some legal hurdles to make it happen, but it still means that if they want to, they can. They can put it down to doing it for the national interest or saving the lives of people. And they’ll be legally allowed to breach your privacy.
And that’s where my pitch in support of this comes in. The only place this can ever mean well is when a crime has been committed. When a person is murdered or goes missing, one of the first things cops do is to try to establish the last few hours of the person’s life or when they were last seen. They need to know who they were with, the last person they spoke to, the last person they chatted with, and even the last thing they browsed. All these can help provide clues that will point to either the killer or finding them.
If only they will keep it to all this, but no! They’ll always want more, and soon it stops being for the people and starts being about them. Almost every app acts like a data farm, everything you do, say, and type, it records and stores which will then be forwarded to those who make use of it. It could be sold to ad agencies who will send targeted ads that will suit your taste.
Also, when the wrong people have a hold on your data, they can use it however they want. Take for instance the superhero movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the subplot was about how they created an algorithm that used people’s data to predict the future. From their choice of music, voting patterns, texts, and emails, they were able to create a pattern and predict the future, figuring out people who would become threats to them even before they knew it. It was so good that they figured out Dr. Strange would be a threat even before he had the accident and got his magic.
I know that’s a superhero movie, but can we say all that isn’t realistic? When you have access to people’s data, you can predict their next move. You know the very thing to do or say that will cause them to react in the exact way that you want. You’ll be playing them like a puppet and they would have no idea because they think everything is of their own volition.
Oil and AI feel like the goldmine of today, but only a few people realize just how lucrative the data business really is. Some apps exist simply to collect your data, and then it’s sold to the highest bidders. And let me tell you, targeted ads are only the least that they can be used for. There is blackmail and whatnot.
For me, there will never be enough justification for why our data isn’t private. I know that it shouldn’t be so, but that has never stopped anybody before. These conglomerates will still do what they want and because we’ve come to be extremely reliant on their technology, we can’t stop using them. So, we’re in this toxic relationship with them and the cycle keeps going.
Well, too bad, I guess.
