Learn the Risk

The pandemic accelerated a trend that was put in motion in mid-90s when everyone started to adopt digital technologies into their daily lives. With the launch of the World Wide Web (developed by Tim Burners-Lee), everyone to believe it would be a huge boost to the economy and stock prices shot through the roof. But it turned out to be a bigger boon to companies like Google and Facebook, and the government allowing them to track you using Big Data and monitoring everything we do all the time when we are online.

Today, this information is provided less and less via paper documents or plastic cards. Online applications gather your information from one centralized database to another releasing more of your personal information than you need to reveal and building multiple databases of millions of profiles called a “honey pot” of information that all criminal hackers want to get a hold of for nefarious reasons.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article regarding the difficulty the food and beverage industry is having finding employees, they wrote about how restaurants are digging deep into their HR system, reaching back years, to see who had applied for jobs in the past. They spam them with emails asking if they would still like a job — even five years later.

This is exactly the problem we have today with what is called retention of data and the lack of your right to be “unknown.” And its not a new problem. Nearly 10 years ago, National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden released documents showing how the agency was monitoring Americans’ communications in a massive digital dragnet. They were even caught tracking the German Chancellor through her own government secured mobile phone. There was Facebook’s scandal with Cambridge Analytica affecting the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and if you watched the Netflix documentary titled, “Social Dilemma,” you learned from former developers with Google, Twitter, and Facebook how the companies give away their applications and services for free so that you will agree to allow them to track everything you do.

Most people take the loss of privacy as a reasonable price to pay for such convenience, but what they don’t understand is that by enabling these companies to capture their data, they use it to make huge revenues and grand corporate valuations by selling the data to advertisers and market research companies. It’s not even limited to the free products. Millions of people use the latest in surveillance devices such as Amazon Echo, Google Nest, and Amazon’s Ring facial recognition doorbells.

Have you been sitting around just chatting with your friends about everything under the Sun and a couple of days later some ad pops up in your Facebook feed directly relevant to your discussion? You think about it, and you know you didn’t search or post about your conversation then. This type of stuff is just happening. In her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff talks about this as a new form of economic oppression that has crept into our lives.

The concept of surveillance capitalism is how advertising companies, first led by Google’s AdWords, realized the opportunity and financial rewards of using personal data to target you more precisely. Zuboff explains how surveillance capitalism exploits and controls human nature to capture your attention and motivate you to act with as little thought about the purchase or action as possible. In other words, they know you so well they can turn your wants into needs so you will buy immediately. So, why should you care? As both the Netflix documentary and Zuboff have illustrated, if you use these free apps and services, then guess what? “You Are The Product.”

We should not like the idea of living in any version of totalitarian China and if you’re reading this in Europe, you are already required to validate your COVID-19 status with an application if you want to eat in a restaurant… drink at a bar… stay at a hotel… or get on a train or plane. The same restrictive measures are not far off in America. This may be good for fighting the pandemic, but more importantly to freedom and privacy loving people, it also sets a dangerous precedent and provides a slippery slope to more invasion of privacy.

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Have a great weekend, Gordon

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