The Death of Digital Privacy
When I look to the horizon of the future, one of the issues I am most worried about is the tentacles of tech. I am worried about the slow crawl to total surveillance and the transformation of humans lives into literal commodities composed of raw data. Sound extreme? It’s actually not. Both governments and large corporations have been not only commoditizing us but swallowing up the last patches of privacy that are in existence.
The invasion of tech is not a neutral development; it is not merely the addition of useful devices and services into our lives. Technology abandons this facade of “useful neutrality” at precisely the moment that it is employed by people. More specifically, by people in power.
What we have on our hands, then, is a predicament whose base nature is political — whose battlefield is drawn between the elites and the masses. In many ways, the tentacles of tech are challenging the basic precepts of the U.S. Constitution, if not outright disobeying it. What’s interesting, however, is that modern technology is thrashing against the dictums of the Constitution and that few people seem to notice — or care.
There is a reciprocal relationship that strings the abilities of tech and our own freedom together. The more technology improves and the more of it we add, the less it seems we own our own information. This happens on two fronts:
