If you want privacy, don’t put it online

“Hey, Siri,” I said to my cell phone. “Yes?” the cell phone replied. So did my laptop and my desktop. I had assumed both of them were turned off. Or at least dormant. I was wrong.

Now I wonder how much else those microphones are picking up when I think I’m alone.

CBC’s Marketplace program hacked into a scammer’s computer in India. It was able to turn on the scammer’s camera, remotely, and show Canadian viewers the man actually making his phone calls.

I’m suddenly uncomfortably aware that my iPhone scans my face for recognition, without warning me, “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!”

And now I wonder what else my cameras may be revealing when I don’t realize they’re on. To whom? And why?

As I have written before, there’s no such thing as privacy on the internet. But now I’m worried that there may be far less privacy than I had thought.

The man who invented the cell phone 50 years ago, Martin Cooper, agrees: “We don’t have privacy anymore because everything around us is now recorded someplace and accessible to anybody else who has enough desire to get it.”

Canada has followed the lead of the U.S. and the European Union in banning TikTok from government-owned cell phones. But that doesn’t stop government employees, federal or provincial, from having it on their own phones. Which may be on their desks. Or in their pockets, while they’re in highly sensitive meetings.

I don’t have TikTok. Or Instagram. Just Facebook. And even that, I beginning to realize, not only reminds me of birthdays of people I haven’t seen in years, but also tells me where they’re travelling and who’s chatting with them.

TikTok is apparently far more intrusive than Facebook. Sean Kilpatrick of Canadian Press researched its capabilities: “TikTok can access personal data including contacts, calendars, which device you’re using, keystroke patterns, battery state, audio settings, connected audio devices, and your location. Your exact location.”

Robert Potter, co-founder of a cybersecurity firm, compared TikTok to other social media and found TikTok was “an outlier in the sheer amount of data it collects.”

It is able to identify “the objects and scenery that appear (in your videos,) the existence and location within an image of face and body features … and the text of the words spoken,” Potter stated.

Beyond that kind of data, media experts suspect that TikTok can also transfer your “algorithm” – that unique collection of data that helps search engines feed you the information you want. Maybe you look for sports scores or store discounts. Or maybe you explore porn sites, child abuse networks, or bomb-making instructions, any of which could be used to blackmail you into changing your vote. Or pressuring you into illicit activities.

Government banned TikTok for its Chinese ownership. I think that’s (pun intended) a red herring. China is not the only agency involved in data mining. Remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018? The company collected data on 87 million Facebook users, and used it to meddle in at least 50 political elections.

Cambridge Analytica was, ahem, a reputable British firm with Canadian connections.

In all the froth and ferment about

TikTok, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced not one, not two, but three investigations into Canada’s digital vulnerability. As a CBC report stated, “The prime minister said he’s tasked the country’s two intelligence review bodies – the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians and the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency – with investigating the issue.”

That’s on top of appointing a still unnamed “special rapporteur” who will investigate the issue to decide whether it should be investigated.

I won’t second-guess Trudeau’s decisions. But I already know what the rapporteur and the two agencies will conclude. There is no way that anyone – individuals, corporations, or governments – can retain control of information once it goes into cyberspace.

Whatever TikTok can do, any other platform can also do. Or can be trained to do.

Governments cannot easily legislate against data abuses. If Canada’s laws limit data mining, just move the server to a more lenient clime. If the server is in Singapore, say, it operates under Singapore’s laws, not Canada’s.

Granted, there is one alternative. The government could require the corporations that control wireless transmission in Canada – Bell, Rogers, Telus, and Shaw – to set up stringent controls on every message.

Which could curtail individual freedom of speech. I could have my columns censored by some mindless computer algorithm in Toronto. Why, it could cut me off in mid