Privacy is one of those words that will have a different meaning to the coming generation. Precisely because the coming generation will have none. To my surprise the ad at the top of my Gmail account this evening referred to "Mormon Underwear". Yes, I am a Mormon, and yes I wear underwear. In fact I wear Mormon underwear as many of you who are Mormon or know Mormons may understand. Mormons and their beliefs are a topic for another conversation. Regardless of your beliefs and whatever type of underwear you subscribe to, privacy is a right that is quickly disappearing. I've never sent an email about my Mormon underwear, I've never Googled Mormon underwear, in fact I don't think I've ever discussed my Mormon underwear with another human being. So how has Google tallied enough information about me to know about my Mormon underwear? When will Google quit reading my mail? I thought they only did that in oppressive or communist countries. And when will Google stop tallying my searches in an attempt to understand my most inner thoughts? I think the short answer is never. Maybe even more appalling, when are people going to care that this is happening? The short answer to that is likely...once it's too late to do anything about it. I gave a report on Google in a university English class several years ago, and for fun mentioned that if Google wanted to they could put together all your email transactions from Gmail, all your searches through their search engine, and every Youtube video you've ever watched and paint a picture of you that is terribly detailed, perhaps more detailed than most of us are comfortable with. I said it just to make a fun point to the class, but I honestly didn't really worry about it then, because I thought Google would never do such a thing. How naive I was and how quickly science fiction is coming true. Someone once told me that poor people in 3rd world countries aren't really so bad off, because they don't know anything different. It doesn't seem so bad to them. So maybe losing our right to privacy won't be so bad because in a generation of two most humans will never have known anything different either. Welcome to 1984, and yes, I know Blogger is in fact owned by Google too.
No comments:
Post a Comment