If you ever thought that Liza’s Henry had a big problem because he had a hole in his bucket, think again. Probably you have a bigger problem in the form of a spy in your bedroom and/or your sitting room. There is also very little doubt that in your pocket you carry a different spy. And, worse still, you are paying for the ‘service’ of a spy you hardly control.
A couple of weeks ago a US journalist posted on the web a document which tens, if not hundreds, of thousands have access to, but never read. The so-called ‘privacy’ policy of Samsung’s smart TV warned users that their spoken words “will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of voice recognition”.
The internet was immediately agog with comments that this smart TV was, in fact, a spy TV. People turned to good old George Orwell, who had warned us of all this. In his 1949 dystopic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell had written of a ‘telescreen’ in all homes constantly monitoring people living there. “There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment,” warned Orwell.
Samsung later clarified this passage of its privacy policy, telling us there are many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’. It said that the capture of personal data was very limited at best, and that its use for wicked purposes was next to nothing. That’s a very reassuring statement for anyone who takes Samsung or any one of the giant corporations that spy over us, seriously.
Samsung is not the only culprit. Facebook already knows so much about us. Besides, the possibility of using the ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons of Facebook even without going to their website enables them to see the other websites we access, thus enabling Facebook to follow us around the internet. It uses that information to better target ads and content to us.
The use of smartphone location services and mobile phone networks enable companies to know where we are at any given time. They provide companies information about our travel, leisure and work places. Are these smartphones or spy phones?
Those who use Google’s Gmail service have long since signed away any privacy in their life.
We’d better reconcile ourselves to the fact that since we live in the 21st century we’re probably monitored by half a dozen companies from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep.
We enjoy getting things free: free films, free transmissions of football matches and free premium channels. In 2010, during a discussion on the website Metafilter, someone coined the adage that “if you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” It was true then and truer now.
Google’s free range of services, for example, are just the 21st century equivalent of Eve’s apple. Google gives us free services in exchange to all sorts of information about ourselves that Google gathers, harvests and sells. When we search the internet for any kind of information we are not paying with cash, we are paying with our personal information.
Facebook already knows so much about us
It is true that users can set higher privacy levels or deactivate the tracking mechanisms. There are users who do not know of these prying techniques and the ways to eliminate them. But I suspect that most of those who know about them purposely do not turn them off. They do not consider that the constant ‘spying’ by the modern-day versions of Orwell’s ‘telescreen’ is something terrifying.
On the contrary, they are more similar to the inhabitants of London in Ben Elton’s novel Blind Faith. These Londoners believed that “only perverts do things in private”, and obsessively blogged and uploaded even the most intimate and private moments of their lives in a sort of voluntary panopticon society.
The selfie generation is an exhibitionist generation. The exponential increase in the number of people baring all, or close to all, on social networks should be evident even to moderate users of these networks. Malta is at the forefront of this generation. Eurobarometer has just informed us that until last October, 73 per cent (up from 65 per cent in 2013) of the Maltese used the internet to access social networks, compared to 60 per cent of EU citizens who do the same.
Only the Portuguese use these networks more than the Maltese. The Danes (74 per cent) and the Latvians (73 per cent) are neck-and-neck with us.
Cyberspace has become the new public space that many, mistakenly, consider as a private or semi-private space. Many are not conscious enough that what they post on Facebook can come back to haunt them whenever they least expect it. Many do not realise that their digital footprint, that is, the data that is left behind by users on digital services, does not go away with the first wave, as is the destiny of footprints on a sandy beach. It can be copied by others, shared, liked and multiplied.
The same applies to the 140-character messages posted on Twitter, the online microblogging social networking service. If you go online you can smile to your heart’s content at some of the most stupid tweets made by inexperienced interns, technologically inept employees and thoughtless social media managers that became huge public relations nightmares for their companies or governments.
I don’t know whether the tweet posted by a senior official at the private secretariat of the Prime Minister will make it to this league. However, comparing the Koran to Mein Kampf and saying the former is worse than the latter is not only obnoxious but shows shocking imprudence – hardly the characteristics one expects from such high-level political figures. It should be clear to all that tweets and twits should not mix, as the result could be explosive.
Truth be told, we have moved very far away from the world where having a hole in a bucket was considered to be a problem.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt