Privacy

There was a time you could walk down the street anonymously where no one would know who you were. I was alive during that time. I was too young to appreciate it, but I lived it unknowingly. I wish we lived in that time again.

There's been a lot of news coming out about how we as a society are always being recorded.

You have the Flock cameras reading our license plates or tracking us. You have towns and police forces now trying to switch to services like Axon in hopes we won't notice. Police forces want these tools that skirt the 4th amendment, don't require a warrant or probable cause, and are often abused. And there's still plenty of questions as to how much crime they actually prevent or catch.

We now also have the pervert glasses that Meta are releasing into the world. They're being used to harass and annoy people. And for those who just want to claim that the light lets you know when they're recording...$60 can fix that. And while it's not an official application (yet, anyway, Meta has patented it), college students were able to add face recognition to the glasses to allow users to instantly look up anyone you look at.

I read Kashmir Hill's Your Face Belongs to Us several years ago which went into Clearview AI's facial recognition business. It was creepy as all hell reading about the future we were starting to delve into then. It feels even worse now, and it probably is. The little bit of privacy we've been holding onto is disappearing before our eyes.

Thinking about the Meta pervert glasses, we already know they're being abused. This a societal issue, but one that these glasses supercharges. You have some creep at a bar, the gym, or wherever. He goes up to some girl and without her even necessarily realizing it, is recorded and now the asshole knows where she lives, and far more than she might be comfortable giving out to some stranger she just met. Women already are by far the targets of stuff like this, and now these glasses are going to make it even worse. This is probably one of the many reasons Google decided this was too dangerous to pursue.

This doesn't even touch our digital life. It doesn't even look at how much data the websites and applications on our phones hoover up. Every website we go to, every app we download, tries to track us and what we do, what we click, where we are, what we're listening or watching. It's fucking creepy. Meta, Google...it's like they read 1984 and saw it as a how-to book. I use Firefox as my web browser. I have EFF's Privacy Badger as well as uBlock Origin to block as many ads and trackers as possible. But even I'm not naive enough to think that protects my browsing. I've been trying to limit what applications I download. Those that I do download, I try to limit what permissions I give them, especially when it comes to location data. Again, I'm not so naive into thinking that's really doing all that much.

I value my privacy. I think we all should. Too many times I hear excuses like "I'm not doing anything wrong" or "I have nothing to hide" and seem to brush off the privacy violations done by both our governments and private companies as no big deal. But I think it is a big deal. I think privacy should be important to everyone. I think it should be protected for everyone.

Think about something like a medical diagnosis. You're either diagnosed with a condition or maybe you're just trying to figure out what might be causing the symptoms you're experiencing. You start searching the web, visiting various sites, all of a sudden various sites who share the same trackers know something you probably didn't mean to share.

You've heard the story about how Target figured out a father's daughter was pregnant before he did. It's an older story, but the technology and methods they can track you are now even more granular and harder to block. It's amazing how much of your life can be figured out by monitoring basic internet traffic.

Now I obviously share parts of my life and what's going on. Maybe some of it would be better off private, but I should be the one to decide what I want to share, who I want to share it with, and when.

Privacy is important for all of us. It is important to remember that when we think of what we should consider to be acceptable in society. Are we okay with private companies offering 24/7 video recording of us and giving it to the police without a warrant? I would argue we should not be and should be petitioning our local governments to not allow it. Are we okay with people walking around and being assholes with their glasses. This is a little more nuanced of course as I'm not certain we can expect the same level of privacy out in public. Though I'd argue it's one thing to happen by chance to be in someone's photo or video as you happen to be walking around versus being instantly facially recognized by someone trying to surreptitiously take your picture while hiding their pervert glasses.

There are tradeoffs for everything. Privacy shouldn't take a back seat for everything.