Many people believe that they are not worth spying on. There are many reasons to protect yourself and your community including:
- you dont want to be spied on or tracked
- you support the concept of freedom and the right to protest
- you are a radical activist who may be targeted
- you deal with information that can affect your or other people’s safety
- to respect your privacy, privacy of others or comply with privacy law
- protect yourself from identity theft (to steal from you, commit fraud in your name or to run a public smear campaign)
- to protect the people you work with
- to protect yourself from future laws (that could be applied with today’s data)
- to reduce the effect your work has on future jobs, opportunities or health insurance.
- if you disagree with the Orwellian state surveillance system
- to build Herd Immunity – Your part in protecting everyone
Advances in technology and dodgy laws means the government can and is spying on everyone. From automated data retention of all your internet and phone data to building large scale police hacking teams. Big brother is watching you.
Orwell predicted the state would install a camera in every house. Today we carry our (phone/laptop/tv) cameras everywhere we go including into our homes. We spy on ourselves and each other, recording, locating, uploading, mapping relationships and even tagging people for facial recognition on facebook.
The Big Data Robbery Documentary
In 2018, Professor Shoshana Zuboff published The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a monumental book about the new global economy, where the biggest technology corporations extract, manipulate, and trade our personal information, data about our lives, and data about our personalities, on a scale never before possible. How did this happen? In The Big Data Robbery, Zuboff starts with the volatile dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s and 2000s. How did Google, a company created during that time, survive the bursting of the Internet bubble? Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin discover that the “residual data” that people leave behind in their searches on the Internet is very precious and tradable, and begin as one corporation of many, the Big Data Robbery, extracting and building huge datasets about people. Zuboff takes the lid off Google and Facebook to reveal a merciless form of capitalism in which the citizen itself now serves as a raw material.
