I’m no expert on basically anything. In fact I’d call myself pretty fucking dumb but it occurs to me that we are rapidly losing the war for our own basic privacy. It’s not some big conspiratorial thing either, it’s been eroding for the past couple decades. And while I’ve kinda accepted that I’ll never get my privacy back that doesn’t mean I don’t try to control it where I feel I can. I want the next generation to live in a perfect world, I truly do. A world that isn’t boiling, where their very existence isn’t being tracked for the financial interests of billionaires.
There have been millions of Meta Glasses sales at this point. That’s fucking disgusting numbers for a product that doesn’t just trade your privacy but the privacy of everyone you happen to walk past while recording. There’s a cottage industry of removing the recording light on said Meta Glasses for like £60 and we’re gonna pretend that isn’t being used by perverts and nonces? Fuck off.
Speaking of nonces. Tracking apps like Life360. How any parent trusts a private company with 24 hour location access to their children I’ll never understand. Life360 may not be doing anything nefarious with the data but data breaches have been on the rise and now you’re handing another private company access to the location (and potentially historic location data). What if they get breached? What if they have been and don’t know yet? That’s gonna make it really easy for a nonce to stalk your child and give plausible information for knowing them through the family. And I get it. You want to know where your kids are in case something bad happens or they get lost and I’m not going to pretend to have a solution but I don’t think private tracking companies are the best solution.
Then you have the invasion of privately operated “AI” cameras such as Flock who provide police access without warrant, provide private companies access to data that can track your face, what you wear even potentially your gait. Even if they don’t do it today. What about in 5 or 10 years? Even next year? They have one bad quarter where they didn’t grow quite as much as they wanted to so they retroactively change the terms and send a software update?
As I said. I don’t really have a solution to this beyond writing to MPs, making shifts in habit where you personally can and voting in favour of politicians that are pro-privacy where possible. You definitely shouldn’t take some Gorilla Heavy Duty Expanding Foam at £10 a can to “AI” cameras you find.