Smart phones are tracking the private details of our lives. Take most apps on your phone, and they're recording where you are, what you're doing, what your interests are, and whom you're getting together with.
According to Bloomberg, if someone were to break into your phone, they would have a near-clone of your life--not just personally, but professionally. Use a map, your phone is recording where you're going; use a hear monitor, your phone is recording the passing of every beat; have a new iPhone with finger ID, your phone has a record of the very thing that identifies who you uniquely are.
According to Time Magazine, the top 10 most popular apps of 2015 track everything from who your friends are (and all the details of their lives as posted on Facebook), what you listen to, what you are watching, what information you're retrieving, where you're going, where and what you eat, and your favourite photos. Think about this.
Would you let a video camera follow you around throughout your day, the capture from which would be uploaded in real time to the internet? Would you like records of your conversations and the locations of your family members uploaded to Twitter? Would you like medical and insurance companies to have access to your medical files without your consent? While there is a minority of people who would, many would answer no to these questions.
In spite of living in a time of transparency, people still want to maintain a semblance of privacy. While this may be desirable, however, how we behave with our phones reveals how badly we want our lives to be public. As Tim Cook claimed, "There's probably more information about you on your phone than in your house." Think about that.
According to the Wall Street Journal, marketing companies collect information about you through apps; and they use that data to create sophisticated dossiers about you. Would you give out personal information to a stranger, such as where you live, where your kids are, and where you're travelling next week? Well you already are.
Why are we doing this? Do smartphones really provide us with so much value that we're willing to give our very finger prints over to it? Does the value of having a smartphone warrant the divesting of intimate information about you to strangers?
As a civilization we are still very new to these technologies. We don't understand or appreciate their sophistication, their complexity. And we don't understand that the value of the information we give out far outweighs the benefit we might receive from the device itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment