Not much of the content in this article from the Los Angeles Times surprised me, but it did serve as a nice reminder of the massive surveillance grid that has grown steadily over the years thanks to our addiction to electronic devices and all the fun and convenience they bring to our lives.
First off I want to point out that I’m no luddite, nor do I advocate taking on that type of attitude. I was thrust into the world of high-tech long before it was so fashionable when I was hired fresh out of high school by a large computer manufacturer. That was during the late 1970’s when most people envisioned giant, room-sized behemoths with spinning tape drives when the word computer was mentioned, and at that time, that wasn’t far from being accurate.
Technology has raced ahead at break-neck speed since I mounted my first magnetic tape on a tape drive back in the day and to make the comparison to what we have available today to what was available then is like comparing a go-cart to an F-35 fighter jet.
The downside to all this technology is that many of us have placed virtual electronic collars around our necks. Just about everything we do that has anything to do with computers or smart devices allows the companies behind those devices to track us. I don’t know about you, but the idea of being tracked doesn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Not long ago we talked about how GM’s OnStar feature was being used to track the movements and various behavior of drivers with vehicles so equipped. Well, that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, folks.
The article from the L.A. Times examines how technology is helping companies track various aspects of the lives lead by the Hartman family. Digging a little below the surface of what happens when they use their electronic devices reveals some tidbits of info that might make some of us squirm a bit in our seats.
The article describes how the iPhone that Eric Hartman (man, I bet that poor guy hears a lot of bad South Park jokes!) carries around with him silently tracks his location and sends the data back to the Central Scrutinizer at Apple, Inc. AT&T, the company that provides the voice and data service for his iPhone may also be collecting and storing his location data, but the company seems a bit tight-lipped about that.
Then there’s the online world – a virtual landmine of websites, applications and games that also want to track your surfing habits in order to serve up advertising that’s most likely to align with your interests.
Of all the privacy threats on the web, Facebook has to be the 800-pound gorilla of them all. The information Facebook users post on their pages boggles the mind. How do some of these kids think that a photo of them in a drunken stupor at a house party is going to do any good for their future? These are the kinds of places employers are looking these days to get the skinny on potential employees, and in many cases they are discovering a gold mine.
I’ve got an easy answer to the whole Facebook thing. Stay off it. I flirted with Facebook a little a couple of years ago and although I used my real name, most of the other data I put in my profile was fabricated. I’ve since deleted the account, which really didn’t have much of anything on it anyway. I don’t plan to sign up again, but if I was someone that just had to have a Facebook account, I’d sign up with a fake name and be sure just about everything else in my profile was fabricated as well. As long as my “friends” knew what name I was using, they should have no problem communicating with me, but again, I’d rather just avoid Facebook entirely.
I realize that providing Facebook with false information is probably against their “Terms of Service” or whatever, but frankly I couldn’t care less. What are they going to do, delete your account? They’d actually be doing you a favor in my opinion.
The article then goes on to talk about set-top boxes. You know, those nifty devices you get from Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, DISH Network, DirecTV and other pay-TV providers that allow you to get hundreds of channels of TV entertainment.
The very day I connected my DISH Network DVR to my broadband internet connection, I knew there was a possibility they would be collecting data about our TV-viewing habits. Hell, before we had the broadband connection it was connected (and still is) to a telephone line so that the system could – as the company claims – verify that we were using the equipment at an authorized location, in other words, our home. I guess they don’t like people taking their DVR to their vacation home.
Now that we have an idea of some of the companies that may be tracking our physical movements, internet habits and television-viewing preferences, I’ll tell you how I deal with these issues.
As far as cell phones go, I have one but I use it rarely. It spends the vast majority of its time sitting in the shelf with its power switched off. I take it with me when I go out in case I need it for an emergency, but even then I sometimes leave the power off unless I want to make a call which is hardly ever. That should prevent them from tracking my movements.
We’ve already talked about the privacy nightmare that is Facebook. I don’t use it. End of story.
I do however use Google. A lot. And Google isn’t known as a great protector of privacy by any sense. They have the ability to see every search you ever typed in and store it in a database if they so choose. My solution to this problem is something called Google Sharing. It’s a free add-on for the Firefox browser that annonymizes all of my Google searches by mixing them in with all the other users of Google Sharing so that Google cannot tell who actually conducted any particular search.
There also Scroogle, which is a site that takes your Google queries, forwards them to Google for you and then delivers the results by way of their website, which also keeps Google from determining that the search came from your computer.
Things brings us to set-top boxes, which I have to admit, I do not have any good answers for. Compared with the other privacy issues outlined here, this is the one that probably worries me the least.
Do I care if DISH Network knows that I like to watch Deadliest Catch or Mythbusters? If I had a choice, I’d probably prefer that they didn’t know, but for now I don’t have a good solution for this one. I suppose I could invest a bunch of time trying to sniff the outgoing traffic coming from my DVR that is destined for DISH Network servers and attempt to decode it, but I don’t envision taking that on any time soon.
I’d be far more concerned about doing something like confessing to stealing my neighbor’s power tools (no, I didn’t actually do that) to a friend on Facebook or having Google store my search on “how to get away with murder” (no, I didn’t actually search for that) than I would be about the possibility that DISH Network knows that I like to watch The History Channel.
This is certainly not intended to be an exhaustive list of measures one can take to stymie the privacy invaders by any means, but I hope that it will at least get a few people thinking about privacy and how they feel about what’s going on out there in that vast digital world we all seem to be plugged into these days.
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