If that is indeed the case, then a visit to an interesting new website – Social Cooling – might be instructive. (Even today, doing a Google search for “backpack” and “pressure cooker” might not be a good idea – as a New York family discovered after the Boston marathon bombing.)īy now, most internet users are aware that they are being watched, but may not yet appreciate the implications of it. Another research project found that people’s Google searches changed significantly after users realised what the NSA looked for in their online activity. After the Snowden revelations, traffic to Wikipedia articles on topics that raise privacy concerns for internet users decreased significantly. It affects, for example, what you search for. Throughout history, surveillance has invariably had a chilling effect on freedom of thought and expression. The idea that being watched on this scale isn’t affecting our behaviour is implausible, to put it mildly. We have solid research, for example, which shows that Facebook “likes” can be used to “automatically and accurately predict a range of personal attributes including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and gender”. We are being watched 24x7x365 by machines running algorithms that rummage through our digital trails and extract meaning (and commercial opportunities) from them. All this activity is leaving digital trails that are logged, stored and analysed. Or the 3.5bn searches that people type every day into Google. By comparison, our current experiment is cosmic in scale: nearly 2 billion people on Facebook, for example, doing stuff every day. There is lots of evidence about this from experimental psychology and other fields, but most of that comes from small-scale studies conducted under controlled conditions. One thing we do know, though: we behave differently when we know we are being watched. And we have no idea what the long-term implications of this will be for our societies – or for us as citizens. Without really thinking about it, we have subjected ourselves to relentless, intrusive, comprehensive surveillance of all our activities and much of our most intimate actions and thoughts. Given how central the network has become to our lives, that means our societies have embarked on the greatest uncontrolled experiment in history. “Surveillance”, as the security expert Bruce Schneier has observed, is the business model of the internet and that is true of both the public and private sectors. His argument was that he and his colleagues were at least subject to some degree of democratic oversight, but the companies, whose business model is essentially “surveillance capitalism”, were entirely unregulated. What bugged him (pardon the pun) was the unfairness of having state agencies pilloried, while firms such as Google and Facebook, which, in his opinion, conducted much more intensive surveillance than the NSA or GCHQ, got off scot free. During the hoo-ha, one of the spooks with whom I discussed Snowden’s revelations waxed indignant about our coverage of the story.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |