One of my long time favorite quotes has been "just because your paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you!"I read that in my doctors office on a poster as I awaited my first female exam. I immediately adopted the saying and made it mine. To this day however I couldn't tell you who the author was, just that I owned it and have always appreciated the authors sense of ironic humor. I wonder if you have experienced letting your mind wander over the subject involving large internet tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter and our willingness to open our private lives for them to see as we interact socially. We trust that our passwords keep our information safe. We believe that these companies care about out privacy and will do all they can to protect us. How many of us even really take the time to read the privacy policies and terms of use agreements we sign? I imagine more of us read these now than in the past due to the uprise in stories being released about our email being poured over for information about our interests, for purposes of advertising campaigns. Not to mention the monitoring of email by our government in an effort to prevent something like 911 from ever reoccurring.
Stories about our privacy being pretty much non-existent in this day and age are getting to be fairly commonplace, and I would venture to guess that most of you feel about it as I do. Even though, we don't like people looking over our shoulders we realize and accept the need for certain types of monitoring. We are willing to allow an acceptable amount of prying as long as it's for valid reasons like preventing terrorism. Even the advertising schemes, I don't approve or condone, but I am able to understand it and it does make the advertising more interesting on a personal level. I can almost even accept that someone from here out will be poking their noses into my private life on a fairly regular basis as long as I am assured that the information is being used for corporate purposes and is not collected nor compiled in a personally targeted manor. The day I read something I said to my neighbor in a private email being published publically with my identity exposed is the day I walk away from any form of electronic communications. My hopes are that it will never get to an unprofessional level such as that.
On the darker side of things I am aware of what the Holy Bible teaches about end times. I am also aware that there is talk about those times being linked to something that people now refer to as "The New World Order". This is a mixture of what we know (the Bible) and what has either been dreamt of by social radicals or is information that people have come across and shared with the rest of us. On this type of issue we won't know until we get past those times. However, imagining this type of event and others that have already occurred or are occurring in our world today. We have witnessed the holocaust. The American people have twice now been shocked to discover the false sense of security we lived under when first Peril Harbor was bombed and then when we lost the Twin Towers, saw the Pentagon attacked and lost countless American lives in the 911 terrorist attacks. There have been enough world events to convince any rational person of the possibility existing of horrors yet to come. With that said I will let this unpleasantness go with this simple statement, I don't know what the future holds aside from what is told in the Bible. But I do know that I believe there are reasons for the stories that circulate and I believe that they are not all misguided paranoid rantings. Knowing that I as do others, believe that these things are possible it is difficult at times not to imagine the role that this electronic age might play.
Computers have become a household necessity. We all have one or we all want one. We pour more and more information daily into our PC's, Mac's and mobile devices. The more these smart objects assist us with our professional, social, and day to day lives the more we lend power to its information system. There isn't much about us if you stop to think about it, that isn't recorded and stored somewhere on someones server, hard drive, or information cloud. From the food that we eat and buy with credit cards and club discount cards to clothing, furniture, and the other day to day living items we bought the same way to our birth, death, educational history, marriage, and medical records there is an electronic record of every detail about us. It is possible now to track every move we make through our smart phones and other handheld devices. Who we talk to and many of those conversations have become a permanent part of the electronics information warehouse. I don't think and I could be wrong, but I don't believe that anyone is paying all that much attention to these information trails. At least most of us are not of interest to anyone yet. As long as we aren't doing anything illegal or otherwise I believe our information is just being stored as a just in case for a rainy day. As long as we live decent lives we have nothing to be concerned about. And most of us will. But for those about to embark on a criminal lifestyle, good luck to you as you will definitely be up against it more so than any of the criminals of yesterday. And that is good news right? Yes, it is. As long as our worlds government isn't being run by some of the evil types we've seen in leadership in past years. If it's held to President's that didn't inhale and never had sex with that woman, we should be fine. This is where troubling thoughts of information abuse come in.
But you say that I am talking about the corporate world,not the government that has this information,right? Even I am not that naive I don't believe my readers are either. We are all aware that on more than one occasion the two have held hands pretty tightly. What is even more frightening is when I read stories like the one I saw today in CNET's report about Facebook and the confession they made about what they have been up to. It's titled "Facebook's mood study: How you became the guinea pig." Not only is it an invasion of privacy but it links back to the days of psychological tests being done without the permission of the subjects. There were some studies that got way out of hand and became very dangerous for the subjects. Even balanced professionals can get out of control under the right circumstances. It is sad to see this kind of atrocity being repeated. Even though, no one was injured by this study that Facebook did the unconscionable act of studying another human without consent or permission and manipulating his private information is in every sense of the word wrong. Not to mention it is a gross miss handling of trust so many give them,regardless of the terms of use and privacy policy that are in effect. Prior permission should always be obtained by anyone who is going to be submitted to controlled psychological testing.
Studies that seek many similar types of information as what facebook professes to have been looking for are done all the time. But they are done by marketing companies who obtain the individuals permission to study them and usually offer a mice monetary reward as well for your time. They are not done on unsuspecting people who have placed their thoughts and feelings along with a great deal of personal information in the trust of a company that would misuse their power in such a slimy way.
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