We Are All Winston Smith

Thirty years after 1984, the title year of Orwell’s novel, we are living in an altered state of Ingsoc. Oceana is all around us, and it didn’t take over by tyranny. We sought it out, and signed up willingly. For convenience. To save a couple of bucks. Our privacy and freedom was bought cheaply. Actually, we waited in line and paid for the technology to make it easier to give away our privacy. Somehow, we want that technology, and are obsessed with it.

I don’t have a giant telescreen on my wall. I carry my smartphone with me wherever I go. It has GPS, and keeps record of my location wherever I am at. It conveniently gives me the weather in my current location, and shows me advertisements for local business. For that convenience, I have disclosed by location to anyone who could access the data. I can’t access the record of where I have been, but it is backed up for my phone manufacturer.

I carry a member card to the hardware store, the pharmacy, the grocery store and even a loyalty card to the local pub. If you access that data, you can see where I shop. What I eat, when I have gone out to dinner, when the toilet is broken at my house and I bought supplies to repair it. I get 1% cash back at the pub, sale items at the store and personalized coupons. The price for my habits and data was measured in pennies.

If you have access to a person’s facebook and twitter account, you can see whatever thoughts they wanted to share. Thoughts and whereabouts that they planned to share with only their “friends” and “followers”, but the digital data is there for the taking. Pictures of a person and their family and friends. Who they know, who they are with. A digital record is there of all of it.

If you access my Amazon account, my ITunes account, my Spotify account, you can see what music I am listening to. What books I am reading, what television shows and movies I am watching. Amazon tracks these things to make “recommendations” of things I might like to buy. I signed up for online shopping, but gave away my likes and dislikes the big companies’ data.

My health insurance wants me to tell them my habits. So they can suggest to me what to ask my doctor about. To head off health problems before they become expensive. It seems innocent, but I would be telling them what I weigh, what I eat, what I drink, If I smoke, how much I sleep. It is one step away from finding a way to charge me more money for health insurance, because my “lifestyle” isn’t up to their standard. Universal digital medical records would make my information available to anyone digitally, and may save lives, but kills a great deal of privacy.

Edward Snowden would say that the government already has access to all of this data, all of my phone calls, any digital footprint I have left in this world. People are okay with the government having this ability, if they are looking at the bad guys. The boogie men. The terrorists, the killers, the ones out there in the night trying to hurt our children. In the name of keeping us safe, we agree with the government knowing whether a suspected terrorist looked up “jock itch” on his web browser, shopped at the pharmacy for antifungal cream, paid for the visit with a credit card and called his friend to tell him he can’t make the ball game this week. Who he has talked to, where he shops, where he sleeps. If it is the bad guy we are tracking. The problems start with who is given the task of deciding who the bad guys are.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers?

There is NO SUCH THING AS PRIVACY anymore. Everything I have done in the digital world is there for when someone decides to look at it. The only thing giving the illusion of privacy is that I am one of millions of people. Any phone call I make on a VOIP phone can be accessed. Every call I have made or received at work is recorded. Some marketing company is charging by boss for referrals from their website, and gives us a recording of every call they charge for. Which means someone has sifted through all the calls to see which should be charged for.

Every month or so it seems there is a new story of a large retailer that has had a break in cyber-security. There was a breach, and their customer’s information was obtained by someone. Credit cards, pin numbers, email addresses for MILLIONS of customers, all at the same time were compromised. Sometime in the last few MONTHS. Please change your password and check your bank statements. Oops.

The storage of information on the cloud is convenient, but my letters, my writing, my music, my movies, my playlists, how many times I listened to each song, what I have shopped for but not bought, what I did buy, where I am in the book I am reading, what I searched for on the internet, it is all there in digital form. Ready for taking, and maybe already has been taken. Maybe I am of no interest at this time.

But if and when there is an interest, I have given all my privacy away. For a few dollars off my groceries. For a really cool smartphone. For easy access to my movies, books, and music. For fifty cents off a bottle of shampoo.

2 + 2 = 5. No one needed to torture us. They sold us phones that play games and music and take pretty pictures. Look around at how many people have their face buried into their phone.

I would have thought my price would have been higher.

6709 Smith W