There is no denying that all online activities are being tracked. Either by the governments, or by companies. Data is the future oil, and the more companies have it the better their chances of survival.
There are several factors as to why it is so easy for companies to get the data and make money out of it. Below are the reasons that I think contributes to easy leakage of data.
People Do Not Care About Privacy:
- This is true, people use technology for convenience and 99% of the products which provide solutions that customers (We The People) desperately needs, then they are willing to give up their privacy.
- On top, if it’s free and provides with solutions that everyone needs then privacy word doesn’t matter.
- There are tons of examples of where this scenario is applicable.
Products Can Not Be Trusted:
- All the software out in the market: You can’t trust them when it comes to privacy and tracking
- Real Life Scenario:
- On my smartphone, location is disabled
- Specific apps don’t have permission to use location when not being used
- Many times after I park my car and walk out, I get a notification “Why worry about parking hassle when you can take Lyft”
- This just shows how I simply cannot trust both the hardware (smartphone) and software (apps)
- Also, there is no way to solve this other that using a brick phone
Data Logs:
- Delete words doesn’t exists and doesn’t opposite of what it should in software data world
- Google Maps, without an argument the most used location app and by default it knows where you have been, how long you have been, what route you took where you parked, whose home you went to etc.
- Google does provide options to disable logging of such information.
- However, can we really trust such features? Does delete really means deleted because it’s not visible to us?
- What’s if after deletion of data, it’s still retained forever? Facebook does.
Privacy Tools Do Not Work:
- One of the most preached tool to protect privacy and fight tracking (after encryption) is VPN.
- Problem with VPN is that it’s like giving your data after paying for a service.
- Yes, arguments can be made that VPNs don’t log your data because they say so.
- However, this is simply not true as VPNs may save you from hackers trying to steal data but VPNs provides in no way can gurantee they don’t use your data to make money out of it.
- This basically means (at least to me) that VPNs are surveillance tools too, just that it’s one that people pay for.
All the above helps create Total Information Awareness systems that companies and governments can build easily without much effort. It will be fair to say that any product you use, doesn’t matter whether it is hardware or software, is in itself a Total Information Awareness tool.
If you are more curious about privacy and mass surveillance, then do watch The Last Enemy which showed how mass surveillance works in modern era well before Edward Snowden went public.
