Been awhile again since I've cleared my cookies, this time all the ads on YouTube are offering me a criminal pardon.
For what I wonder? Clearly my browsing habits are suspect, or my musical tastes put me in a dodgy demographic, and I wonder what specifically I've been accused of...Bank Robber? Drug Dealing? Sexual Predator? The ads aren't that specific, only that I should apply now and get a full pardon...
It makes you think of the larger picture, the society we live in, where we share so much, on facebook, twitter, tumbler, you name it, we're voluntarily baring an artificial staged version of our lives to the world. And behind the scenes, Big Data, as revealed by Snowdon, is assembling an even more thorough picture of us than we can imagine. Even George Orwell never imagined anything like this.
Our every search and click on the web is tracked and saved by our ISP's, our every online purchase, our every email, photo, posted online, is copied and stored in mass data facilities, even when we're not online (and that is rarer than we think), the EULA (End User License Agreements) often bind us to ridiculous agreements we'd never consent to if we took the time to read them. Few of us do, look through your Windows 10 EULA (you didn't upgrade, did you? Well, you read the EULA first, I'm sure...) and find that even your offline activities are tracked and shared...
Cell phones, every photo, text, tweet, phone call, download, is stored and archived, along with geophysical and temporal data - where and when you made the call, and to whom, even when turned off they track our location, and all of this data is warehoused in giant banks of servers, offshore, Utah, Edward Snowdon tried to wake us up, the government arbitrarily declared him a criminal.
GPS data, collected even when you've turned your phone off, triangulated via cell towers, leave your phone at home and your vehicle will now report back your location, the continuing integration of technology in our lives makes it increasingly impossible to escape it's pitfalls...
Algorithms sort, collate the data, developing a picture - precisely - of who we are. Better than many of us know ourselves. And while the data is vast it only awaits the right person (or wrong) to ask the question, and all the answers are at their fingertips...
This information, distilled and made available to corporations in abstract, aggregate forms, helps them to decipher and predict our behaviors, target us better, prey upon our needs and wants, to direct, extort, exploit us, the data, the product...
And the police, already, bill C-51, wanting access to it, the government's far too compliant, it's an easy leap to imagine this information being used to implicate people in thought-crimes, - wait - it already has, think terrorism, Minority Report, the web, internet, not only serving us but engaging us, leading us further in wrong directions, this constant, targeting of us, assisting, predictive texting, and ultimately betraying...
...And now I begin thinking of crimes to commit...