Surveillance is the business model of the Internet for two primary reasons: people like free, and people like convenient.
You can load your own documents onto your Kindle, but Amazon is able to delete books it has already sold you. In 2009, Amazon automatically deleted some editions of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from users’ Kindles because of a copyright issue. I know, you just couldn’t write this stuff any more ironically.
Already law enforcement agencies make use of predictive analytic tools to identify suspects and direct investigations. It’s a short step from there to the world of Big Brother and thoughtcrime.
Opting out just isn’t a viable choice for most of us, most of the time; it violates what have become very real norms of contemporary life.
US government secrecy has exploded. No one knows the exact number – it’s secret, of course – but reasonable estimates are that hundreds of billions of pages of government documents are classified in the US each year.
Or we fear terrorists more than the police, even though in the US you’re nine times more likely to.
And before any of that can happen, there must be some major changes in the way society views and values privacy, security, liberty, trust, and a handful of other abstract concepts that are defining this.
In 2015, a petabyte of cloud storage will cost $100,000 per year, down 90% from $1 million in 2011.
The nature of computerized systems makes it easier for the attacker to find one exploitable vulnerability in a system than for the defender to find and fix all vulnerabilities in the system.
The UK company Cobham sells a system that allows someone to send a “blind” call to a phone – one that doesn’t ring, and isn’t detectable. The blind call forces the phone to transmit on a certain frequency, allowing the sender to track that phone to within one meter.
But when it comes to governments, unhappy as I am to say it, I would rather be eavesdropped on by the US government than by many other regimes.
The bargain you make, again and again, with various companies is surveillance in exchange for free service.
US law requires financial institutions to report cash transactions of $10,000 or larger to the government; for currency exchangers, the threshold is $1,000.
We need to resist the urge to do something, regardless of whether or not the proposed action is effective.
Buzzfeed is an entertainment website that collects an enormous amount of information about its users. Much of the data comes from traditional Internet tracking, but Buzzfeed also has a lot of fun quizzes, some of which ask very personal questions. One of them – “How Privileged Are You?” – asks about financial details, job stability, recreational activities, and mental health. Over two million people have taken that quiz, not realizing that Buzzfeed saves data from its quizzes.
Given current laws, trust is our only option.
Data is the exhaust of the information age.
We saw this in late 2014 when Apple finally encrypted iPhone data; one after the other, law enforcement officials raised the specter of kidnappers and child predators. This is a common fearmongering assertion, but no one has pointed to any actual cases where this was an issue. Of the 3,576 major offenses for which warrants were granted for communications interception in 2013, exactly one involved kidnapping – and the victim wasn’t a child.
The overwhelming bulk of surveillance is corporate, and it occurs because we ostensibly agree to it. I don’t mean that we make an informed decision agreeing to it; instead, we accept it either because we get value from the service or because we are offered a package deal that includes surveillance and don’t have any real choice in the matter.
By 2010, we as a species were creating more data per day than we did from the beginning of time until 2003.