Rodrigo Neely - December 6th, 2008 in Commentary 0 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

This post is taken from my old blog, and its a couple of years old.

But it came up with a friend who is aware of this blog, and I thought everyone might enjoy the discussion.

So here goes, with a little editing:

THE END OF PRIVACY

My friend Mazyar showed me his iPhone the other day. The one feature he was impressed with the most is the way the iPhone can show you where you are on a map at any given time. I suspect this is G.P.S. technology. Which means it is very hard for iPhone owners to stay lost.

I know there are cameras all over my school. There are cameras on the stoplights on the way home. There are cameras in all the stores I shop at. Even places like state parks, which are supposed to provide isolation, require payment and thus detection for patrons of the park. With Google Earth anyone with a computer can watch your house.

If you are on myspace you already provide a lot of information about yourself that would allow any person who closely monitors your page to decipher a great deal about you. You may have security features on your page, but hackers exist, and some work for industry and governments.

So what’s next.

We can still engage within certain activities in our own homes without anyone knowing about it. Can’t we?

What about drug tests at many jobs?

What about drug tests required by workman’s comp if you get injured on the job?

Well at least our sexual activities are still mostly hidden.

Well that’s true if you don’t use the internet for sexual activity. If you look at Suicide Girls on your computer, anyone trained in psychology could accurately discern a lot about your sexual fetishes and predispositions. And I’m told its not hard to decipher to which websites a computer has gone to. If I am not misinformed, that’s precisely the reason why we all need a firewall since autonomous computer programs designed to harass us with advertisement based on our web-browsing history.

Well your sexual behavior is private if you don’t look at internet porn. Isn’t it?

Not if you have ever purchased sex toys or lingerie with plastic.

I think the ladies who read my blog will agree that it says a lot about a girl’s sexuality if she buys her lingerie at Victoria’s Secret vs. Fredrick’s of Hollywood vs. a lesser known lingerie outlet (which always have the trashiest stuff).

Let’s just say I personally need no less than a Fredrick’s of Hollywood girl, I think I would scare a Victoria’s Secret girl.

What about our private social relationships.

Well social relationships have never been very private. They are often only private to the extent that they are boring. If you are doing something worth talking about, and if you’ve talked about it, you can be pretty sure somebody you haven’t told is talking about it.

I saw on PBS’s show Frontline that the phone companies revealed that they have assisted the federal government in recording vast quantities of phone calls. In general I reject conspiracy theories, but this one has been fessed up to by the phone companies. Our phones are really, really, easy to tap. If it hasn’t happened to you its only because no one has wanted to.

My final word on this blog is simply this. Technology is only getting more sophisticated.

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