…..even if you delete your account. I said yesterday that privacy is dead. This is the very thing privacy activists warned of a decade ago and the world laughed. And joined the Matrix, forever.
These were TIME covers from the late 90s and early 2000s..
How times changed.
Judging from those news stand editions, you know that the people of the time, those crazy humans, cared about privacy and wanted to protect their information. Fast forward to the modern age.. Privacy is so 2000 and late.
Now people tell researchers that aren’t worried much about government eavesdropping or their digital life being known to the world.. As a matter of fact, the common consensus is, if we’re not doing anything wrong, why worry? Why so serious..
Here is how the Kansas City STAR reports it and why it is troubling to privacy activists (they still exist?):
Americans - more than Web users abroad, experts say - have come to accept a semi-public digital life. Private businesses make billions of dollars from sweeping up the crumbs of information digital users leave behind. In exchange for all that secret data, private businesses offer a relatively seamless and low-cost Web experience most consumers prefer.
Privacy software can be expensive and is almost always clumsy. And the government wants in: Citing security concerns, the authorities seek “backdoor” access to email accounts and phone records.
So privacy experts are stepping up efforts to convince consumers of the need for digital privacy. A fundamentally private Web won’t be a reality, they say, until ordinary Americans demand broad protection from government and business intrusion into their phone and computer use.
"If anyone in society is going to have privacy, then everybody has to have privacy," said Alan Fairless, CEO of SpiderOak, a company that offers encrypted data storage for consumers.
Some early-adopting digital-savvy consumers have started to seek out and invent privacy protection tools, he said. That work may eventually trickle down more broadly to less tech-handy cellphone users and Web surfers.
The future is now.
Privacy is dead.
SPECIAL FORCES SWARM THE SOUTHWEST TO OPERATE AMONG CIVILIANS IN ‘TRAINING’ EXERCISE
Operation Jade Helm will see 1,200 service members including Green Berets and SEALs and special forces from the Air Force and Marines in July. Soldiers armed with blank rounds will operate in and around towns in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado for 8 weeks. The so-called Realistic Military Training has some residents fearful the drill is a preparation for martial law
A website argues the case of why you and your loved ones should get off of Facebook now.. it’s a good read.
I am on Facebook, I also have a fan page for my other website on Facebook with over 100 followers at this time.
Am I worried about their terms of service? Always. Am I horrified but how Facebook destroys the humanity of people? yes.. but there are cautious ways to come at the social network.
I think more than anything else: The fact they read private message is alarming. And they do. The argument on the tech site is convincing.. read it and judge for yourself. Act accordingly. If you stay on Facebook, be smart and don’t think just because you have ‘nothing to hide’ and the prying eyes of the technocracy don’t destroy you anyway..
I think we know this already..
BUT there seems to be more than we know.. no?
This is really a fascinating REASON story.. and really frightening too.
We are not “close” to the future where privacy is dead, we are in it. The information age and been pushed aside.. hubris and selfishness and selfies have led to people releasing every possible thing about themselves on every app they can.. and all the while, alphabet agencies in the police state are showering themselves with your person information.
It’s here, baby. Welcome to your future.
From REASON, reporting no a new book called THE NAKED FUTURE: WHAT HAPPENS IN A WORLD THAT ANTICIPATES YOUR EVERY MOVE by Patrick Tucker, the money quote:
To illustrate just how naked we all soon will be, Tucker opens with a vignette from the near future in which your cellphone wakes you with a text message alerting you that on your way to work you will run into an old girlfriend who is going to tell you the happy news that she is engaged. The phone tells to you to act surprised at the news. This scenario unfolds as predicted, but instead of waiting for her to tell you, you blurt out your congratulations. As it happens, she not yet made her new romantic status public and is quite alarmed by your mistimed felicitations. The phone did warn you to act surprised.
Tucker then explores the early technologies that are combining to make this future a reality. Consider how the phone knew that you would run into your old girlfriend. Tucker discusses database investigations conducted by University of Rochester researcher Adam Sadelik to predict where people will be in the future using Bayesian software techniques. Parsing a database of 26 million tweets, of which 7.6 million were geotagged, from 1.2 million people in Los Angeles and New York, Sadelik tried to learn about the locations of people who did not geotag their tweets. He found that if non-geotaggers have two real friends who do allow their tweets to be mapped, his system “can predict your location at any moment (down to 328 feet and within a 20 minute time frame) with 47 percent accuracy.” That’s nearly a 50-50 chance of catching you, even if you think you’re opting out.
….welcome to your life.
We already knew the database was extensive.. we already knew they were collecting information. And we already assumed they had our faces.
Our selfies..
Our couplies..
And doublies..
Or whatever elseies we will be coming up withie..
Have we surrendered our privacy for the fleeting moment of vain attention? Or is this just a product of the future being now?
It’s a big big world in a biometric land..
We are strangers in it.
I hope you smile!
You’re on camera.
Just think, a random person walking down the sidewalk wearing Google glass look at you and completely ID you, know all there is to know, thus ending privacy once and for all. It’s not science fiction it’s now.
YOU’RE NOT SO PRIVATE LIFE..
Dig it. The dancing queen.
The world has a new one!
A woman known days ago as the bus stop dancer has been identified as 35-year-old Ellie Cole.
Internet users have spread her around, laughing and mocking her situation, but she lucked out: She is getting a high out of her 15 minutes of fame—plus she just got a new job, landing a role in a local play.
The story is being offered up as a feel-good story with a happy ending, something we don’t get often from the media. But what else is in play here..?
Go down this merry journey with me and see if you’re still smiling at the end.
Ellie Cole was minding her own business—sure there is no expectation of privacy on a street—but the fact that surveillance video of the bus stop was somehow uploaded to Facebook, seemingly to make a fool out of this person expressing a little happiness—is interesting. I did locate an article explaining that a restaurant owner across the street was doing the filming.. I suppose he or she is the one that put the ABBA music overtop of the dancing..
Media isn’t asking many questions about the moral appropriateness of an innocent person meandering through life and suddenly being made famous by a creepy person a distance away with a camera..
This reminds me of a couple things. First off, I tell anyone who emails me People of Walmart to stop emailing me them.. there may be some humor to watching sad human beings shop, but it’s creepy that they are watched by others and photos are taken without their knowledge, uploaded to the net, and spread around the world like wildfire. Other sites similar to People of Walmart are popping up.. everyone wants to make a fool of someone else. Few photographs are taken of the cameraman in a mirror. Instead, it has become fashionable to mock unknowing innocent people shopping.. but where is a line drawn? Children? Elderly? MOCK EM ALL!
This also reminds me of something from the late 20th century. Years ago, the Late Show with David Letterman was forced to settle a lawsuit with Jane Bronstein, a then-fifty-five year old woman that Letterman would often show. There was footage of her at a tennis game sloppily eating a peach, and Letterman used that footage often on the show when it first went to CBS. At one point, Letterman put the video on the large Jumbotron in New York City of Bronstein eating the peach. It turned out that the woman Letterman was mocking had actually become disfigured by childhood polio and a thyroid conditions.
Fast forward to the year 2013, and it’s now the world’s newest game: Shame innocent people for acting themselves in public. The camera is always watching..
People lament the power of Big Brother—with his NSA spying and his FBI fusion centers collecting so much data that they probably don’t even know what to do with it all.. While people fear Big Brother’s power, what about the actions of the sheeple? Happily analyzing through hours of hidden camera footage for that just right person to ridicule… watching Earthcams from the comfort of their dark basements.. Setting up surveillance to watch neighbors. Hell, buying drones to patrol their homes! And yes, forwarding until their tired emails of people shopping at Walmart wearing colostomy bags and walking around with their shorts too low and an enlarged stomach hanging out.
This is what we have become.
The tale of Ellie Cole is being told by newscasters with a smile. It’s the quirky story that they play after sports, a nice way to end the night, they think..
But I don’t.
I think it’s a creepy example of a surveillance state gone too far. And most of the time it’s not the government doing a thing, it’s We the People who apparently think we’re so perfect that mocking others is the only form of entertainment that exists online..
Secret demands mark escalation in Internet surveillance by the federal government through gaining access to user passwords, which are typically stored in encrypted form.
And just think.. we are worried about our privacy on Facebook. HA!
As an aside during testimony on Capitol Hill today, a National Security Agency representative rather casually indicated that the government looks at data from a universe of far, far more people than previously indicated.
A friend of a friend of a friend of a friend…heard it from a friend who heard it friend who heard it from a friend you were snooping around..
Suzanne Moore: The internet is being snooped on and CCTV is everywhere. How did we come to accept that this is just the way things are?
Oh sheeple. You are all so funny. And fraught with dangerous thinking.
Fisa court submissions show broad scope of procedures governing NSA’s surveillance of Americans’ communication
Normally government dumps info on a Friday. In this case, the government is probably dreading Friday GUARDIAN runs. Each time the information being revealed about the United States spy program becomes more and more interesting..
So this is how to start your vanishing act: Make yourself Ungoogleable.
It’s Snowden-slime time.
Get ready.
He leaked big information about what the government does to surveil people. And now embarrassing photos are being sent online of him in 2002 (when he was much, much younger) .. if this is the worst they got?? well.. that’s not bad. But I am sure his calls were traced and recorded too. So get ready for that.
