While everyone is understandably appalled by recent revelations that our government spies on us in the interest of national security, they really shouldn't be too surprised. Our government's involvement certainly elevates the discussion, but spying on us through windows in the on-line community has been going on for years. We are being 'spied' on - in one form or another - all the time, every day of our lives. Our information is being mined from every move we make on the Internet - every keystroke, every mouse click, every e-mail verification - and made public by data gatherers. I have lived a fairly normal, uneventful life, all things considered, but Google my name, and one of the results will be, from 'Mylife.com': 'Jared M. Glovsky is 40 Years Old and Lives in Wisconsin.'
Is this super private information? Do I care? No, but 'my life' is a funny choice of words, seeing as I took no part in this listing whatsoever; I did not place it, or contribute to it in any way. I didn't even know 'Mylife.com' existed until I came across it in a Google search, and it's wholly unnerving to think someone's out there compiling these little bits and pieces into a dossier, a kind of unauthorized biography.
It'd be a great title for a memoir, though: 'Jared M. Glovsky is 40 Years Old and Lives in Wisconsin!'
And it surely doesn't stop at our public record lives. More malicious hackers abound on-line. Smarter than most law enforcement agencies, always staying a step or two ahead, they unleash computer viruses into cyberspace that can do everything from erase specific files to purge hard drives to remotely activate webcams so they can watch you without your realizing (I keep a piece of masking tape over my webcam lens; you truly never know...). For better or worse, we live in our computers, our tablets, our smart phones these days, and they are not nearly as safe and secure as they should be, we want them to be or assume they are.
Even more sinister is when our on-line habits are turned over to some marketing database, from which a disturbingly accurate consumer profile emerges. I'm not down with this at all. In fact, if I had to choose, I'd say I'm much more comfortable with the NSA spying on me trying to foil a terror plot than I am advertisers spying on me hoping to inculcate my thoughts with sudden fancies for dark beer, dark chocolate, dark sunglasses or a low-interest consolidation loan. That behavior is far more insidious and invasive in the long run.
'Jared M. Glovsky is 40 Years Old, lives in Wisconsin, and prefers to drink Newcastle beer.' Who knows, that listing might very well exist somewhere, and it's this stranglehold Madison Avenue keeps, or tries to, that should have us all outraged.
Our entire financial lives are far too 'connected' these days as well. All the major financial institutions and banks are on-line, and that's where more and more of us engage them. We deposit, withdraw and transfer on-line, we purchase on-line, we pay all our bills on-line. It's quick and it's convenient, but it has the potential to be a financial suicide mission. We live in a world where paper money will likely become a thing of the past the way paper letters have; someday there might be only direct deposit and debit cards, no greenbacks, no coinage, nothing of physical property whatsoever, no paper trail. And if we presume that there is some kind of digital cord running between all the banks, this should make us nervous. A current Vanity Fair article talks about the world's first cyber war, between countries, with (notably) banks caught in the crossfire, going on right now. Where is our money? What is our money? Are we comfortable with our finances being merely a file on a computer? As annoying as the commercials are, maybe buying gold is a good hedge against the threat of just one well-placed bank virus.
To be perfectly honest, outside of finances, I don't operate in any capacity on-line or in my phone without the assumption that someone's going to see it. Not give a rat's behind necessarily, but see it. I assume someone's looking at my e-mails, just as a matter of course, some Google employee if nothing else, pulling a Sunday night shift, bored to tears and sifting through random e-mails just for a laugh.
It it actually happening? I don't know, probably not. SHOULD it be happening? Absolutely not. I just assume it is. Text messages too. This is because at the dawn of the Internet as we know it today - way back in 1995 or '96 - someone told me that every move we make on-line is forever. Every message that gets sent, 'transmitted' anywhere, remains out there forever, in stasis in some ISP's metadata history. I'm not entirely sure how true that is, but I accepted it as truth seventeen years ago and it's colored my on-line habits ever since.
On top of all this, we are simply being watched, monitored and recorded visually, either by closed circuit television in public buildings and on public streets, or by people we don't even know, who fancy themselves photags or budding cinematographers and at any moment might upload to Instagram and Reddit our candid moments they've decided are worthy of a world-wide audience.
It's fricking horrendous really, the over-exposed world we live in today, and the only adequate response to the ongoing erosion of our privacy just might be living off the grid entirely. Not just a nebulous life on the road, but a nebulous life period.
I may never be able to live off the grid, I may never want to, but for those sweet few months during 1/48/50, I will surely disappear into the horizon, and as much as possible, maintain radio silence.
So 'MyLife.com' doesn't know where I am!
