If it sometimes feels like you’re being watched, that just might be because you are.
A recent article at Alternet lists 13 Ways You Can Be Tracked By The US Government. Among them:
- The NSA sifts through an enormous number of emails, text messages and phone calls daily.
- Law enforcement agencies routinely track cellphone use with technology that can determine where you are, when.
- There’s a database called TIDE that includes info on more than 700,000 people, though Washington insists only a tiny percentage of them are U.S. citizens.
- The FBI, by its own admission, has GPS tracking devices on thousands of automobiles in the U.S.; the vehicles’ operators don’t know.
Toronto journalist Nora Young goes into detail on these matters in her new book, The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering The World Around Us.
Whenever you use your cellphone, you’re revealing a little about yourself. Same with when you surf the web on your Mac or PC.
It’s not all bad, as some of the data can be used for the public good. For example, Rwanda’s government used cellphone location data to determine where public latrines were most needed – an important matter in a country with serious public health concerns.
But it also means a little more opportunity for unseen parties to track what we’re doing and where we’re going.
Much of your data trail is left “passively” (i.e., without you thinking about it and giving permission); other times, you are actively and knowingly surrendering information.
When you post a “status update” or click a “like” button on Facebook, for example, that’s data someone might throw into a pile for market research.
There’s usually nothing personal about it; your data is but a drop in a vast sea of ones and zeros. Nevertheless, the watching is real and it raises serious concerns about privacy and information control.
Young closes her book with a kind of call to action. “Data activists” can unite, she says, to see that their info is employed for good more than bad.
She seems optimistic that data activists can set things right. Perhaps a little too optimistic.
Wouldn’t those data activists, after all, often be going up against very rich and powerful interests that tend to get their way? And isn’t it rather difficult to enforce rules in the modern-day Wild West that is the Internet?
I really wish I could feel more optimistic, but I’ve noticed too many instances of the powerful getting away with abusing the rights of the masses.
