Meta like it or not
Your mobile phone tells those that monitor its output a lot, most of it about you…
A typical user without any privacy orientated apps may wake up and grab their phone, switch on data or wifi so their device gets assigned an Internet Protocol (IP) Address and connect to the internet. The backbone and life line to their personal world is now open. All the sites that you look at are recorded by your internet service provider (ISP) or mobile provider. You send some friends a text, the information in that text, along with who it was with is logged by your mobile provider. You take a call, your mobile provider logs who that call was with, and for how long.
How does that make you feel?
Your phone at any one point has many unique identifiers e.g. IP, IMEI, Make, Model, Operating System, Apps Installed, GPS Location. As you use your mobile phone throughout the day, connecting to different masts, wifi access points or data cells completing your day to day routines and actions your mobile phone is pumping out information about you and your habbits in the form of metadata and in some cases direct content.
Now consider if all the metadata and content was analysed. What would it say about you? Would it tell me where you live, where you work, who your friends are, what you’re in to, who you’re in to, what you buy, what your views on religion, politics, and the government are?
Maybe at this point in time you’re happy, you feel like you don’t have anything to hide, you see the benefits of such a system and the people in power are working with your best inerest at heart. But what if that information was stolen and used against you? What if that information is stored away and the new government in place decides it wants to know more about it’s citizens and starts to produce policy and laws to stops certain behaviours and thought paterns. What if your friend is beaten or killed based upon wrong analysis?
Similar activies are also occurring when you access your PC, Laptop and Smart Gear.
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights: a right to respect for one’s “private and family life, his home and his correspondence”, subject to certain restrictions that are “in accordance with law” and “necessary in a democratic society”.
“in accordance with law” and “necessary in a democratic society” in open to interpretation.
Our digital lives are being watched.
Apps and Actions:
Modern technology has given those in power new abilities to eavesdrop and collect data on innocent people. Surveillance…ssd.eff.org
