Pop 89: The Peddler in Your Pocket
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
Joan Janzen’s latest column on valuing privacy got me all riled up. I mean that in a good way; she inspired me up to take up the call to “value our privacy” and continue naming the clever ways we get hoodwinked into surrendering our personal information for someone else’s profit. She also reminded me of a quote by author Sr. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, who wrote: “We forget that, new as the future may be, its value will depend on what we bring to it. It will depend fundamentally for its character, its values, on what happens to us as we grow into it.”
Just yesterday, waiting on hold for a human being to speak with me, I was offered the opportunity to use the bank’s new “voice identification” feature. As with every technological offering by “service providers”, the “opportunity” was presented as a “security” feature. I have since come to learn that any part of my identity or private behaviours I allow to be accessed is, indeed, a gift - it’s a gift I give, not receive.
We, the citizens, are doing the giving, the rewarding, and the providing. We are relinquishing information about our daily lives that can be harvested and bundled and sold to marketers, businesses and overseers. We throw our trust to the wind every time we forfeit information about ourselves.
The other day I was sitting in a coffee shop in Swift Current, eavesdropping, as is my writer’s prerogative. I understand that some might find eavesdropping invasive behaviour; but I assure you that I don’t press my ear to walls, nor lurk in a chatroom, nor tape-record what I hear. And consider that every gadget with the term “smart” in front of its name - “smart” phone, “smart” car, “smart” washing machine - is doing just that. They are equipped with cameras, microphones and sensors designed to collect information about you and your habits.
And if you choose to disable the camera or microphone, ie: disconnect your devices from wifi and your computer, which syncs it with every other device you own, companies will claim no guarantee the device will continue to function. Shosana Zuboff writes: “Consumers are warned that to refuse to agree to terms of service can result in compromising reliability and safety.” In the case of some “smart” thermostats, that could mean anything “from frozen pipes to failed smoke alarms to an easily hacked internal home system.”
Zuboff is the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, a book many critics are calling the “most important book of the century.” The “smart” home market is part of a system of collecting “free human behavioural data”, she writes. The data can then be applied to the production of new products based on what you do “now, soon and later.” Companies are eager to lay bets on our behaviour, as well as to direct it, and create “needs,” feed addictions, anticipate and direct our every move. Why wouldn’t they? “The “smart” home market,”she writes, “is valued at 151 billion dollars a year.”
Getting back to eavesdropping. The two older gentleman whose conversation I was overhearing were talking about their cell phones. One said: “You know, I was just at the shopping centre and I couldn’t find what I was looking for and by the time I got to my truck I got an ad on my phone saying there was a sale at the hardware store on just that thing.” The other guy said: “So, what’s so wrong with that? You got what you were looking for.” To which the first guy replied: “Nope. I didn’t get it. And I didn’t get this phone to be spied on. I don’t want to carry a salesman in my pocket all day.”
Thirteen years ago I reviewed the Russell Banks’ prescient nonfiction book: “Dreaming Up America.” In it he paints a picture of a country distracted by the belief that “the ultimate freedom is the freedom to consume” and the ultimate enslavement is a lack of disposable income. “It’s this kind of moral bankruptcy that, having run out of people on the planet to colonize, allows us to colonize our children.” He continues to say: “We let the salesman in the door and into the rooms of children, to live with them night and day, selling them toys, junk food, cars and drugs. That salesman is television.”
Only thirteen years later and we don’t need television to peddle to our supposed dreams and needs. What we have now, Zuboff says in an engaging riff on YouTube, is little GPS computers people carry with them to collect information for free and we call them cellphones.” Cellphones that act like tracking devices for parole officers. Cellphones were the first “smart” devices. But as I’ve said, most new appliances come “smart”. They “think” for you; you don’t get an option. From exercise machines to doorbells to mattresses!
Once again, I’m glad I don’t have a lot of disposable income to pour into Orwellian devices burglarizing my private information just so I can “update” or download a new distraction. I agree with Chittister that we’ve been trained to expect the next version or the latest upgrade will be downright miraculous.
I recently picked up my 2004 Echo from my mechanic and he laughed at the giant dents all over it. “It’s only cosmetic” I laughed along. “But it’s a goldmine of stories. I mean, how many people, outside of Saskatchewan, can say they survived a hailstorm with stones the size of grapefruit?” Besides, I said, I like my roll down windows and cd player. I want to participate in my journey, not hand it all over to AI. “I know” he says, “old cars are the only ones I work on. These new ones are computers on wheels.”
Driving home I thought about past road trips, when my car was my sanctuary and I could get away from the world for awhile. New cars don’t give us that choice. So, guard your privacy as if it were your sanctuary, as Zuboff says. Because it is.