Me and Dave were talking the other about how ‘privacy’ is an almost laughable conceit these days. Every time you write an email, send a text or visit a website whatever you type and whatever requests you make are logged somewhere along the line in some kind of networking system, black box or other thing (I’m being a bit vague here, because technology baffles me). They have to be, otherwise they wouldn’t work.
When there was all the brouhaha about the government wanting access to all your email records, internet activity and phone logs it was largely predicated on ignorance of the fact that all this stuff is recorded anyway. How else do you think you get your itemised bill? And that’s just the raw stats. While recording phone calls might take a certain amount of technology (to whit: a tape recorder) emails, web visits, search history and tonnes of other stuff are recorded as a matter of course. Every time you skip over that big chunk of legalese when placing an online order or using your broadband, you’re merely acquiescing in some company storing what they like. All the government were doing were formalising that stuff still further to ensure that such records were kept as a matter of legal requirement and available to the police and security services.
Now, this is fucking pointless activity, for all sorts of reasons (and you really should follow that link to learn why) but really no change to the status quo. What you do online or by the phone is out there in the ether for anyone smart enough to collect it. Yes it’s worrying that the government can access some stuff, but there are geeks by the truckload who could leaf through your personal correspondance, recover your passwords and insert themselves into your life in a heartbeat if they really wanted to. All this guys down in tech support that you laughingly call “friendless losers” or whatever could find out exactly how many cyber-affairs you’re carrying out with a little application.
And then there’s the things you do yourself. I was reading on a forum from a woman in shock because she’d been using a sex website to meet people, confess to her proclivities and all the rest and then found herself being collared at an event she participated in by a total stranger who knew all this stuff about her. Well I Googled her username and she was using the same identity for her online sex life *and* her personal interests *and* the forum where she was expressing her fears! So I had pictures of her, some idea of her interests, her real name and where she was in the world after 2 minutes of half-hearted effort. Had I been a neighbour or acquaintance or harboured a grudge, who knows what damage I could have done?
The answer: accept it and be as careful as you can, or just get offline.
BTW: The Times reports on the Government’s fucking dreadful attitude to its own ‘privacy’. Whereas everything that you do is fair game, they are still trying to shroud every aspect of their activity in as much secrecy as possible. Your data belongs to them… their data belongs to them: what a bargain we’ve made! What the Government fail to realise is that we are in era where maintaining secrecy is like pushing custard up hill. It would be to the benefit of us all – government included – to publish everything about it’s affairs as a matter of course. It’s a lesson they’re only going to learn when an enterprising hacker or disgruntled employee decide to press a few buttons.