Privacy
In the Age of Smartphones
Every month Google sends me a report about where I went in the neighborhood using data from my cell phone.
I'm sanguine
Nobody is interested in me.
But what if they were?
Say I was a rich guy cheating on his wife and didn't want his movements to be tracked by his wife?
When I was quite young my grandparents would get a phone company operator to connect their calls. The operators could listen in and were trusted to not invade privacy.
I've lived in the country with a party line. Each number had a distinctive ring pattern and everyone on the line could hear whenever anyone else was called. Of course nobody ever listened in. (being ironic).
We're moving into a new era - Our phones not only track every move we make but also everything we say to anyone. It's a regular thing for phones to be seized and analyzed by the cops.
What if the cop doesn't like you? Or has a quota to fill?
And what if you try a burner phone that has no long term information on it? The cop sez: step over to this line for suspicious people.
What's true for our phones is also true for our computers but moreso.
When I was young and when pot was illegal we lived by the rule of never speaking about it on the phone. We figured the cops could be listening to anyone at anytime. I'm amazed these days to find that all kinds of crazy shit - from insurrection to flash mobs of shoplifters are arranged on their phones.
We have all these issues in democracies with constitutions and civil rights where we more or less trust government to not prey on citizens going about their legitimate business. Surely Nazi Germany couldn't happen again! Ponders
About 15 years ago there were a bunch of cases where employers were demanding access to social media accounts from employees and potential employees. And lo - employers were not always pleased at what they found people were doing in private and people lost jobs and opportunities.
Privacy is like a social lubricant - it allows people with different ideas to get along in peace without rubbing each other the wrong way.
But we may have to get used to living in the open. Google knows who Simulat Almendros is. Soon I bet it will link to Sim's paratar .
What do you think?