No place to run, no place to hide: Tech 2.0 continues to track you
The black art of gadgetry keeps us better connected, informed and entertained than ever before. But it also makes us more visible. Each one of us today is part of that great virtual commune that we call the internet. That means that we the netizens are all effectively leading a public life now, whether we like it or not. It’s not due just to the form of voluntary exhibitionism we sometimes indulge in when online — by contributing our share to the global juggernaut of likes and shares and tweets. It also has to do with the growing impossibility of covering our tracks, or protecting our identity, when surfing the net. Privacy is the lost asset in the age of technology, and if we ever achieve our dreams of a techno-utopia, one thing is certain: in it there will be no places to hide. blocking/reporting them — they’ll know you’re doing so. Perhaps the biggest outrage in the history of technology were those little tick marks you see at the bottom of your message on WhatsApp: one tick signifying that the message has been sent, and a double tick meaning it has been read. And the “last seen” feature on this app only makes matters worse. But the story of WhatsApp’s less-than-stellar showing in the annals of tech privacy doesn’t end here. In the results of a survey conducted by The Electronic Frontier Foundation earlier this month, WhatsApp scored the worst in privacy rankings globally — yes, a measly one star out of five. The study was entitled “Who Has Your Back”, and it looked into parameters like user data protection, data retention and content removal policies of some of the leading tech firms. Turns out WhatsApp doesn’t have our backs. company’s “strict real name policy”, as the BBC put it in a news report, demanded that the author register himself as “Ahmed Rushdie”, Ahmed being his real name. Like most social media controversies, this too fell in that same category: of the unspeakably ridiculous. But this doesn’t mean that the crisis in online privacy is to be taken lightly. Barely a couple of weeks ago, researchers at Facebook’s artificial intelligence lab revealed an experimental algorithm, which will enable machines to pin you down without even having to look at your face. Aldous Huxley couldn’t come up with that! This indeed is a step above those face-recognition algorithms which are now becoming popular among tech firms like Google and Facebook. The brand-new no-face technology, as reported by New Scientist, will enable machines to “look for other characteristics, such as hairdo, clothing, body shape and pose”. option of downloading their entire search history — an existing record that goes all the way back to year zero of Google itself — it sounded like a pleasant little stroll down memory lane. Except that the taste of nostalgia isn’t always sweet. Users can download their past queries entered on a Google search engine through its website’s Web & App section. The idea, according to the company reps quoted in recent news reports, is to have users move their data “out of Google”. A fundamental question arises: what’s the point in doing so? Why would people have their internet search records migrated out of Google into a hard drive in the first place? In fact, why would they even want see those records again? Unless, of course, their objective is — as it is with so much of our engagement with technology — to do it for the novelty of the thing. Let’s not even mention the embarrassment (for reasons that are better kept private) revisiting old search queries may cause to an average internet user. Google has a proviso, though: don’t do it on the public computer, because privacy is important. Good point. But Google, it’s partly because of you that all computers we use now are, to all intents and purposes, public computers.