A Paean for Privacy and the Accidental Authoritarian Tomorrow

I lost my phone the other day. I retraced my steps around town before giving up and going home – where I could fire up Google on my laptop and quickly locate the device. Not just to a local area, but to the exact hedgerow where it had fallen out of my pocket – right down to the individual shrub. Blessed be! With a quiet and fervent prayer of thanks to Google, I got on with my day – safe in the knowledge Google was tracking every movement I made.

It didn’t take long for my gratitude to turn sour. Of course, I’ve known all along: Google can track me. Law enforcement have been pinging cell towers to track suspects since the 1990s. Yet something about the precision strike on my location felt different. Google doesn’t just know what block I’m on – it knows which couch I’m sitting on.

The End of Individual Freedom

It’s not just Google. An industry handles the data that Google collects, and it’s shared with the government and military under the PRISM project. It’s hard to have any faith that SHA-256 encryption or and Google’s cybersecurity practices mean our data is only handled in just and proper ways. Only recently the company deleted an entire pension fund. Oops.

This is not a polemic against Google, they’re just a useful example. Surveillance capitalism powers most major tech corporations, their market cap riding on the data they process and harvest every centisecond: location data, online interactions, and creepy psychological profiles based on that.

When I praised the ability to find my device, glad that Google was watching, I exemplified the attitude of consumers who have for decades now ceded autonomy to zaibatsus in exchange for the services they provide. Yet the relentless data breaches, lawsuits, and system outages are starting to make society question, rightly, how senseless this ultimately was.

Are you comfortable having your preferences tracked to have good and appropriate products advertised to you? Are you any naturally less comfortable with the idea of major corporations being able to construct a better profile of you than your psychotherapist could? Privacy is now a battleground of the individual against the corporation. Our future society depends on the battle.

Wiretapped

You – dear reader – no longer have the right, or indeed the ability, to protect your personal privacy. Google quite literally knows more about you than your family and friends do. After all, does your husband or wife know where you are all the time? And if they had the ability to find out, how comfortable would you be if they kept on tracking you? Probably not; you’d probably file for divorce. Google – and their NSA partners – already know. As would anyone who hacked their systems, or any Google employee with the right access.

This spectre of panoptic rule by corporations is somewhat diluted by the sheer weight of information we produce. It takes sophisticated algorithms to rapidly index the copious amounts of information being vomited forth every second and make it, as per Google’s credo ‘organised and accessible’. Without the AI, invasions of privacy would have to be tailored, slowing our corporate adversaries. However, the advent of LLMs, AIs, better data indexing tools, and ever more sensory equipment dotted around thanks to the “Internet of Things’ – such complete intrusive oversight of our lives, all our lives, is on the verge of complete reality.

“The USA Patriot Act of 2001 authorized unprecedented surveillance of American citizens and individuals worldwide without traditional civil liberties safeguards” – it was a scandal at the time and it’s gotten so much worse since. The size, scale and sense that our lives are being recorded has only grown. Do you really believe Alexa isn’t listening? Do you think that our phones are not recording? Do you think Microsoft bought Discord because of the revenue it generates? Many people have had the Baader Meinhof effect where they talk to a friend about an anime series and then see merchandise for that series advertised to them. If that’s happened to you I am sorry to say you’ve been wiretapped.

Authoritarian Angst

We’ve all been wiretapped. Constantly. For years. We broadly put up with it with various excuses: “the data I produce isn’t actionable”, “the NSA wouldn’t do anything bad with it”, “we need to stop terrorists”. But the truth – practically and neurologically – is that we addicted to the devices that surveil us. The rise of AI means all that data is actionable. An interviewer will pay a tech corporation for an online profile of you for every job you apply to, and have an LLM review all your recent online activity for red flags. A bank may refuse you a loan because your phone location went to the casino twice this month. Police may visit you if your political leanings are suspect.

This is just the tip of the authoritarian spear. Western propaganda points fingers at China as a fearful vision of an authoritarian future, where facial recognition is common. But do they realise the megacorps of mostly the USA that are architected modern digital surveillance? I am delighted that you found my phone, Google – all it cost me was everything. It is essential to restore privacy to technology, and to create systems where the user controls their data, their applications and their devices – but I fear we may be too late.

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