There's actually a term for this category: LOVEINT, when intelligence officers use their access to surveillance tools to spy on the human objects of their affection. It's happened at all levels of the government, from NSA employees who accessed email and phone data of romantic partners to local police officers who have snooped in DMV databases to get women's home addresses.
In 2008, a couple of academics decided to study how long it would actually take to read all the privacy policies the average American agrees to in a year. Their estimate? More than 200 hours. That's 25 workdays, or a month of nine to five reading. To prove how ridiculous it was to expect consumers to read these agreements, one gaming company added to its online terms of service a claim to “the immortal soul“ of anyone who placed an...
Privacy isn't just about what people know about you, it's about how that knowledge gives them control over you.
This is the challenge of protecting privacy in the modern world. How can you fully comprehend what will become possible as technology improves? Information that you give up freely now, in ways that seem harmless, might come back to haunt you when computers get better at mining it.
Google created a blurring option to pixelate houses in Steet View photos to make them unrecognizable. Pro-tech vigilantes sought out the blurred homes in the real world, the locations easily ascertainable from Google Maps, and egged them, leaving notes in their mailboxes that read, “Google's cool.“ Those who chose privacy over progress thus became the villains. Evidently, there would be no hiding in this new rabidly transparent world.
Most people think that the sheer existence of a privacy policy means a company protects their data, but, in fact, the policy exists to explain, in lengthy legalese, how the company may exploit it. It would be more accurately termed a “data exploitation policy.“
In 2016, researchers at Microsoft released a public data set with millions of photos of “celebrities,“ explicitly to help people working on facial recognition technology. Most of the people included were actors, but there were also journalists and activists, some of whom were prominent critics of face recognition. They had no idea that their own faces were being used to improve it.
Periodic surveys in the last decade have asked people what they'd rather sacrifice for a year: their smartphone or sex? In every survey, nearly half of the respondents chose abstinence over the loss of their touch screens. How did computers come to be such a dominant part of our everyday lives, so essential an appendage that some regard them as more necessary than a romantic partner?
Darwin was very nearly rejected from the voyage that yielded his groundbreaking theories because the ship's captain was an amateur physiognomist who didn't like the cut of Darwin's jib. “He doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage,“ wrote Darwin in his autobiography. “But I think he was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.“
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