How to resist
Big Brother 2.0 — Don Tapscott
As the Net becomes the basis for commerce, work, entertainment, healthcare, learning and much human discourse, each of us is leaving a trail of digital crumbs as we spend a growing portion of our day touching networks.
The books, music and stocks you buy online, your pharmacy purchases, groceries scanned at the supermarket or bought online, your child’s research for a school project, the card reader at the parking lot, your car’s conversations with a database via satellite, the online publications you read, the shirt you purchase in a department store with your store card, the prescription drugs you buy — and the hundreds of other network transactions in a typical day — point to the problem.
Computers can inexpensively link and cross-reference such databases to slice, dice and recompile information about individuals in hundreds of different ways. This makes these databases enormously attractive for government and corporations that are keen to know our whereabouts and activities.
George Orwell’s iconic text Nineteen Eighty-Four described the dystopian society where a totalitarian state rules in its own interests and everyone is under constant surveillance by authorities. This situation was often correctly alleged about the totalitarian East Bloc countries during the Cold War.
It is unfortunately increasingly true of Western democracies today. In the name of national security, governments are collecting real-time information from us, sampling phone calls, emails and social networks, and taking our biometrics at airports and a growing list of other places.
We have little idea what governments are doing with this flood of personal information. And the aftermath of 9/11 should remind us just how quickly our civil liberties can be undermined in the name of national security.
Recently the New York Times reported that: “Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight.”
The Times reports that this practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, as carriers market a catalogue of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location,Posts with Hospital rtls on IT Solutions blog covering Technology in the Classroom, trace phone calls and texts, or provide other services. Sure, you could argue that it’s becoming difficult to restrict the information that governments can collect, and yes of course we need to be vigilant about how that information should be used. But we still need to resist attempts of governments to collect unnecessary information. We still need to fight for the basic privacy principle of “data minimization” — of limiting the information collected to clearly definable and socially helpful purposes.
There should be no tapping of phones or anything else without due process. If a government agency proposes setting up a video camera in your neighbourhood, you need to decide if the benefits of possible crime reduction outweigh the possible dangers of unknown governments being able to watch you constantly.
Or increasingly, governments want to collect biometrics information about you — like fingerprints, retinal scans and even DNA. We each need to make choices. Sometimes this benefits you with better government services or faster movement through airports. But what are the long-term implications should a government agency or individual become malevolent? The average person must be cautious and vigilant,We looked everywhere, but couldn't find any beddinges. and even resist the collection of unnecessary personal information.
To me, it’s not so likely that the future will resemble Orwell’s 1984, or Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison, or an East Bloc police state during the Cold War. Those are dystopic models from another era that depended upon a single, all-knowing malevolent power seeking control.
The appropriate metaphor for the growing loss of privacy today is found in Frank Kafka’s The Trial: The central character awaits trial and judgment by an inscrutable bureaucracy for a crime that he is not told about,Stone Source offers a variety of Natural stonemosaic Tiles, using evidence that is never revealed to him, in a process that is equally random and inscrutable.
In like manner, we, too, will be judged and sentenced in absentia by unknown public and private bureaucracies having access to our personal data. We will be the targets of social engineering, decisions,Posts with Hospital rtls on IT Solutions blog covering Technology in the Classroom, and discrimination,Trade organization for suppliers and distributors in the promotional products industry. and we will never really know what or why.
In the private sector, companies want to know more and more about what makes each of us tick — our motivations, behaviour, attitudes and buying habits. The good news is that companies can give us highly customized services based on this intimate knowledge — and build trusting relationships. Sometimes it is great to have highly customized ads.
As the Net becomes the basis for commerce, work, entertainment, healthcare, learning and much human discourse, each of us is leaving a trail of digital crumbs as we spend a growing portion of our day touching networks.
The books, music and stocks you buy online, your pharmacy purchases, groceries scanned at the supermarket or bought online, your child’s research for a school project, the card reader at the parking lot, your car’s conversations with a database via satellite, the online publications you read, the shirt you purchase in a department store with your store card, the prescription drugs you buy — and the hundreds of other network transactions in a typical day — point to the problem.
Computers can inexpensively link and cross-reference such databases to slice, dice and recompile information about individuals in hundreds of different ways. This makes these databases enormously attractive for government and corporations that are keen to know our whereabouts and activities.
George Orwell’s iconic text Nineteen Eighty-Four described the dystopian society where a totalitarian state rules in its own interests and everyone is under constant surveillance by authorities. This situation was often correctly alleged about the totalitarian East Bloc countries during the Cold War.
It is unfortunately increasingly true of Western democracies today. In the name of national security, governments are collecting real-time information from us, sampling phone calls, emails and social networks, and taking our biometrics at airports and a growing list of other places.
We have little idea what governments are doing with this flood of personal information. And the aftermath of 9/11 should remind us just how quickly our civil liberties can be undermined in the name of national security.
Recently the New York Times reported that: “Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight.”
The Times reports that this practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, as carriers market a catalogue of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location,Posts with Hospital rtls on IT Solutions blog covering Technology in the Classroom, trace phone calls and texts, or provide other services. Sure, you could argue that it’s becoming difficult to restrict the information that governments can collect, and yes of course we need to be vigilant about how that information should be used. But we still need to resist attempts of governments to collect unnecessary information. We still need to fight for the basic privacy principle of “data minimization” — of limiting the information collected to clearly definable and socially helpful purposes.
There should be no tapping of phones or anything else without due process. If a government agency proposes setting up a video camera in your neighbourhood, you need to decide if the benefits of possible crime reduction outweigh the possible dangers of unknown governments being able to watch you constantly.
Or increasingly, governments want to collect biometrics information about you — like fingerprints, retinal scans and even DNA. We each need to make choices. Sometimes this benefits you with better government services or faster movement through airports. But what are the long-term implications should a government agency or individual become malevolent? The average person must be cautious and vigilant,We looked everywhere, but couldn't find any beddinges. and even resist the collection of unnecessary personal information.
To me, it’s not so likely that the future will resemble Orwell’s 1984, or Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison, or an East Bloc police state during the Cold War. Those are dystopic models from another era that depended upon a single, all-knowing malevolent power seeking control.
The appropriate metaphor for the growing loss of privacy today is found in Frank Kafka’s The Trial: The central character awaits trial and judgment by an inscrutable bureaucracy for a crime that he is not told about,Stone Source offers a variety of Natural stonemosaic Tiles, using evidence that is never revealed to him, in a process that is equally random and inscrutable.
In like manner, we, too, will be judged and sentenced in absentia by unknown public and private bureaucracies having access to our personal data. We will be the targets of social engineering, decisions,Posts with Hospital rtls on IT Solutions blog covering Technology in the Classroom, and discrimination,Trade organization for suppliers and distributors in the promotional products industry. and we will never really know what or why.
In the private sector, companies want to know more and more about what makes each of us tick — our motivations, behaviour, attitudes and buying habits. The good news is that companies can give us highly customized services based on this intimate knowledge — and build trusting relationships. Sometimes it is great to have highly customized ads.
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