I’M always amazed that Google knows where I go - to the shopping malls, wet market and even having breakfast at a Mamak restaurant.
I keep receiving this email that says ‘You’re receiving this monthly email because you turned on Location History, a Google Account’level setting that saves where you go in your private Timeline. Location History data also helps give you personalised information on Google, including better restaurant recommendations, and suggestions for a faster commute.’
Yes, I can edit and delete this data anytime on my Timeline but sometimes, I have the habit of seeing my ‘footprint’ so that I can keep track of where I have gone to, just in case my wife is curious to know where I went late at night. Big mistake.
While it is good to know and act as a tracking device of one’s whereabouts, I have come to the realisation that Google intrudes into my private life and the privacy of billions of people on this earth every time they are wired and connected to the Internet.
I have never bothered to wonder why Google is spending billions of dollars to give the connected populace free services when we search for information with its search engine.
We owe to ourselves the free will to share our locations and personal information with Google and other social media platforms like Facebook.
Alas, many of us don’t even know exactly what Google, Facebook and other mega technology companies do with the information that we give, share and part with. Ignorance is bliss, indeed. I didn’t realise until lately that a popular social media platform had used my online activities and published them to other news feeds without my knowledge.
Yes, we have been somewhat ‘tricked’ into sharing our details. For instance, our online purchasing behaviour; at which store, date and time and what products to the very last detail. Then, it tells us what to purchase in the next purchase - it reads us. It is amazing but spooky at the same time.
Like a technology expert aptly puts it, ‘we are being known but we do not know how we are being known’.
As I scrolled through the search engine (yes, we all have the knack of doing so every time),I came to realise that we have been catapulted into an era of ‘surveillance capitalism’.
Professor Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School University, in her compelling book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power”
“Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.
Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later”.
George Orwell, in his spellbinding novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four about Big Brother watching men and women in a totalitarian regime, wrote: “It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move.” Exactly.
Orwell would be smiling from his grave that his prediction has somewhat come true.
But this is not the Big Brother that Orwell had conjectured in that totalitarian society; this is “Some Brothers” who usurped power by taking advantage of free-to-market capitalism to the hilt. They ghosted into our sphere, monitored our behaviours and they knew us well in this digital realm.
It is a constant practice that surveillance capitalists utilise patented methods to extract and infer data when users like many of us have explicitly denied permission. Many a time, users don’t even realise the trickery as we have been ignorant from the beginning of what digitisation and algorithms can do to us. It is a sheer misappropriation of users’ behavioural data.
Hey, welcome to the age of Big Data where algorithms and machine learning — that spawn artificial intelligence (AI) — know us better than our parents and siblings.
As I expressed in last week’s column, AI can make better decisions than humans themselves. We will and have become dependent on AI whether we like it or not.
The worst has reared its ruthlessness in this unpredictable digitalised space.
With the combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart, we are now seeing more intrusions into our private lives. They run in cohorts and move coherently in monitoring their citizens’ social and political behaviour.
In China, for instance, thousands of cameras and CCTVs are installed in public spaces to carry out facial recognition of citizens in every nook and corner of the big cities that are potentially open to terrorists, criminals, and social deviants. Some powerful countries, with the help of surveillance capitalists, use advanced technology to spy on leaders of other nations.
But China has gone a step further. Since 2016, the Communist nation introduced a social credit system that merits and demerits its citizens depending on their social and political behaviour. They are given up to 800 credit points if they are socially and politically well-behaved.
With credited points in their smartphones, for instance, they are rewarded with wider access to travel, to make hotel reservations or rent a house.
Is this really what we desire in the 21st century and beyond? Being tracked and spied on?
Former Brazilian president Dilma Roussef told the UN Assembly (after she was spied on by a powerful country): “If there is no right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore no effective democracy.”
C’est la vie.
The writer is a former NST journalist, nowafilm scriptwriter
whose penchant is finding new food haunts in the country