OR OR OR ORWELL
Thursday, April 15, 2021 – daily column #6729
We could browser it, or be good careful tortoises, cutting all our connections and stay hidden in our shell.
What if we could divide what we share from what we hide/keep private?
Is there an APP for that?
Be careful.
Big brother is watching.
I wish I had a big brother, but that’s not my intended meaning.
The world we’ve been warned about this by McLuhan’s message about medium, or Orwells’ warning about so many evils in ‘1984’ – colliding as wisest philosophers and scholars never predicted.
Who is minding the store?
Are governments and institutions ‘questionably guided’ by people who are not the sharpest blades in the drawer?
Should that frighten us?
Absolutely!
The world of information, the notion of privacy, and staying safe are illusions.
When I visit my doctor, I had confidentiality – but now, there is an electronic health record.
I’m careful about my information, but I cannot avoid the data kept by all those usual suspects: governments, banks, credit cards, charities, Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc.; plus every organization we’ve ever been a member of, political party affiliations, newspaper subscriptions, and everybody who knows where we live, and where we live on the internet. We voluntarily give away our privacy with every phone call, text, email, and snail-mail we send or receive. We are less a person than we are a data point. There is so much that has been written on this subject it is easy to gag, easy to rant, and easy to retreat into some self-imposed turtle-sphere of hermit living.
But there is a flip side to why we need and want big brother watching.
Imagine a global system of interconnection of every piece of data about all of us – would we have pandemic panic, or simply an effective way to manage illnesses, diseases, viruses, political opinions, voting, financial reporting, banking, reading and watching.
I wear a WHOOP device on my wrist, connected to an app on my phone, connected in turn to a computer at MIT that measures me 24/7. It’s a tool to help me better manage my exercise, rest, sleep, heart rate. And, everyone knows there are no-stick blood measurement devices for people with diabetes – connected to an app on their phone, connected in turn to some super-computer somewhere. All good, right? Sure, in the right hands. But in the wrong hands, it’s like having Google ad buyers knowing what you’ve ever looked at sending you a notification when you walk by a store selling just that thing.
Technologies we are on the cusp of, or already passed, innovations that make the Jetsons look like
passé versions of the cartoons they once were – beyond Buck Rodgers, Gene Rodenbury, or Ray Bradbury’s wildest imagination.
We are part of, and complicit in, every aspect of Big Brother.
The challenge for those who want to keep our private business private while benefiting from a society made better by everything 5G promises and beyond. Only the remote places on earth are without connection and inhabited by people who don’t want links to any form of contact.
The ethical divide is whether we surrender our information in exchange for something of value – like better health care, longer life, and better opportunities. It’s easy. We give those providers everything about us. The reality is, the anonymous and covert ‘they’ collectively already have our data – and most of what they have cannot be retrieved or blocked by changing our passwords or installing malware-stopping apps …
What’s the answer?
What’s the question?
Be careful.
Big brother is watching.