Nothing to Hide??
The original motto of Google was, Don’t be Evil. It meant a number of specific things to the founders at Google:
here and
here.
This ethos was already cracking, even way back in 2003 -- but no one really cared. You didn't. Ho hum.
Because most people feel that they are not hiding anything, they are not doing anything illegal, and they are leading normal, ordinary lives that no one would particularly care about. So why bother about that pesky old concept, privacy??
People seem to be oblivious to the power of huge corporations such as Google and Amazon to distort the world and the world’s marketplace beyond recognition. Beyond your experience. And against your interests.
It began with Google’s products, which are so appealingly useful, such brilliant, privacy-invasive Trojan horses - free email! free online storage!! Freeeee stuff hooray!! - and now this phenomenon continues far beyond Google’s now ubiquitous online tools into a series of daily corporate indignities that have long since become invisible to us all.
Google opened the eyes of all of corporate America (and beyond, alas) to the fact that people don't actually care about privacy if you give them fun, free stuff. Now that ploy is used all over the internet, slowly and softly creeping up and into our lives, homes, and societies.
Credit card companies know exactly what you buy – and hence, exactly what you need. Phone and cable companies knowing exactly what you watch, who you talk with, what you say, what plots you might be hatching for the next bake-sale, or who you like - or that affair you're having (shhhh!). And theses companies, they sell your information. Utility companies know when you are home and how much energy you use compared to your neighbors through the spreading, forced use of “smart meters”. Your smartphone is already too damn smart, knowing things like who your friends are, where you are and when, who you are with, and depending on your apps, things like how much exercise you get, what courses you might be taking, what your favorite restaurants are, what languages you speak, what your opinions are, what your sexual orientation is – in short, all your secrets. ALL of them. You have nothing to hide, right?
Perhaps this really, slowly began to begin around the time of the introduction of supermarket discount cards, way back in the 1990’s, tracking individual purchases; or with pre-internet government inquiries at public libraries into reader’s choice of books (supposedly to find early “hackers” who were made out to the public as being a threat to national security, or “terrorists” who might be building homemade bombs) – which was considered an outrageous intrusion and caused a huge hullabaloo, with vocal public pushback against such an invasion of reader’s privacy. Can you imagine that now? People until very recently understood the value of individual privacy and how it could be used against you. Germans in particular sadly understand these concepts, from World War II to today, as they were learned in horror and blood. But we refuse to acknowledge this today. Because we are having too much fun using free email, talking to Alexa, befriending Siri, and using all our new toys. Fun fun fun. Who would hurt me?
You may feel safe now, because no one hates you. You see how others who are not you are treated – maybe this is people who live in ghettos, people who are female, people who are transgender or gay, people who are dark-skinned, people who are “other” – thank goodness that’s not you, right? Who wants to be treated like that? Underrepresented, locked out from prestigious jobs, provided with poor education, poor services – no sir, that sucks. So glad it’s not me. And, wink wink nudge nudge, you know those others? They are, well, different. Inferior, you know? They brought all that trouble and those bad things on themselves. They are Y, where Y = lazy, deviant, genetically inferior, criminal, immoral, stupid, incapable -- less-than.
They are not me. I am safe.
This thinking is patently false, it is dangerous, it is incorrect, it is justifying, it is comforting, it is denial, it is sticking your head in the sand. If you believe these statements or any form of them, you are not understanding the ugliness and strength of social forces, the brutality of unchecked government power, the reality of black-swan effects. The next holocaust isn’t going to happen to some other, it has already begun happening to the 99%. That’s you, buddy.
Corporations who want them now have access to vast, correlated personal histories compiled for every individual, associated with your email, computer location, credit card, internet, Facebook, and other identifying information. Medical information, financial information, insurance information, auto information, personal information. And they cross-correlate it using machine learning and artifical intelligence, and you can’t see the results, much less the raw data. You think TransUnion knows too much about you? Ha. Today’s technology and astonishing invasive overreach puts older data collection efforts to shame.
Credit companies, in those bad old days of limited information and collecting data in drips and drabs, collection of which was limited at the time and solely due to the efforts of public interest groups, and protected by laws that have long since been rescinded, ignored and/or forgotten, still managed to damage and degrade the lives of decades of individuals by utilizing proprietary algorithms that issued you a credit score in a cryptic way that you the consumer could not easily understand, much less protest. Credit scores are known to greatly overestimate the purported risk of a person to not be able to meet their financial obligations, which leads to expensive credit for those individuals and huge unearned profits for corporations. This is how corporations will use the vast treasure that is the corpus of your personal, private information. Against you.
As far as protecting privacy, no one ever bothers to read corporate privacy statements anymore – who has the time, amiright? They’re long. And boring. And sort of incomprehensible - but rest assured that in the small print every company has given themselves the ability, ostensibly agreed to by you, to swap information between them in order to scrape together a very, very full and complete portrait of you – your name, address, DOB, credit card information, income, and most importantly for your future finances – your purchasing preferences.
We as a society have tolerated distorted airline seat pricing for decades. There seem to be reasons, right? And we are comfortable that physicians charge all sorts of inhomogeneous fees. You can hardly get a straight answer from your doctor as to what a procedure or visit costs – because, they claim, their prices depend on your insurance carrier. Why is that ok?
These past, established financial practices have unwittingly, as an unintended consequence, prepared American consumers for the next step in a logical evolution of expropriating ever higher fees from you.
Here's a benign example. In the near future, if your shopping preferences and profile shows that you favor, for example, consistently purchasing foods such as rice, or skim milk, or Entenmann's crumb cakes, or tomato sauce, or Doritos – for you, that price for that item will increase. You won’t be able to avoid it, because you pay with a credit card and can be identified in a number of other ways as well – Google email address, IP computer ID, or smartphone broadcasting, as examples. Rest assured all this information is already correlated somewhere in a file with your unique identity. You cannot access that file, but it has been bought and sold, and others are making money from it. A lot of money.
If you move – publicly available information – furniture, house furnishings, and other items associated with moving, will increase in price for you. If you switch from sugar to honey – honey will increase in price for you. If your car is more than 3 years old – car dealers will begin to quote you higher prices for models that match your needs, scraped from their agglomerated knowledge of you. Did you have a baby? Baby supplies, diapers, carriages, larger family car prices - all will go up for you. Did you retire and are you male? Sports car prices will increase – for you! If you switch to a paleo diet, meat and protein food item prices will go up for you. If you’re a single woman and you break up with your partner, ice cream prices will soar - for you. This is in part due to the information Amazon and Google continually collect already from all sorts of coordinated technology – your emails, audio and video streams from Alexa-like devices in your home and on your smartphone, the cameras on your phone, computer, and TVs, any IoT device with a speaker, your home security system – any technology on the IoT. 5G will make this better and faster, too. Your refrigerator, which soon will know the moment you’re out of milk, will order it. Your home, which knows you’re on vacation because your utility usage is low, will report you’re away, and your online travel ticket purchases will report where you have gone. If you go on a very expensive vacation and your salary doesn’t justify it, the IRS will audit you. Far fetched? This already happens in France – beginning over a decade ago.
I'm saying - it's not ok, it's hapenning now, and it IS A BIG DEAL!!
I hope you're saying, I KNEW IT!!!
