Consider two statements from different ends of the privacy awareness spectrum:
Facebook and Google helps me by offering great, free-to-use services. The ads they show me are not so bad, they usually match my interests and that’s fine. Everyone is using their products, so they can’t be very harmful. I understand they collect some data on what I’m doing, but I have nothing to hide.
Most things I’ve done, said or searched for online is stored somewhere, controlled by people who haven’t earned my trust. They can use that knowledge to change what I see online, influence how I spend my time and my money, coerce me into giving them more information and help others to monitor me or feed me propaganda. This freaks me out.
Which one would you say reflects your views better?If it’s the first, are you ready to learn why it might be a false picture?
If you picked the second, would you like to do something about it?
Listing all the ways our realities are being tracked by companies is a challenging task. Browsing history, decisions, clicks and taps were the start, then with the rapid adoption of smartphones, fitness trackers and IoT devices, it’s now the data on how often you hit the breaks in your car, what products you pick in the supermarket and what you say during intimate conversations in your bedroom. There is little going on in your life that at least one major corporation doesn’t know about. Data collection like this can be framed as inevitability, as progress, as a necessity that brings us free services or convenience and personalized experiences. And it can be framed as something Shoshana Zuboff in her new book calls “surveillance economy”.
Considering the possibilities of where all this might take us by 2025 is an alarming exercise. As you walk into a furniture store, a shop assistant equipped with an AR device gets a summary of your backstory and preferences based on your past logged actions to help her close a sale. All motion and voice data captured by millions of miniature low-power devices on buildings is aggregated and tied to your personal ID; corporations use it to monitor, control, influence and possibly blackmail you. Searching for and writing about topics online deemed inappropriate are known to authorities within a second thanks to cooperating companies; the consequences range from increased surveillance and punishments determined by an AI to public shunning.