Here’s how it went. You picked up the handset as your teenage circle gathered ’round. You dialed, literally, using the holes to rotate the wheel on the face of the chunky, black device. The numbers were chosen at random.
"Hello?"
"Hi, is your refrigerator running?" you asked.
Upon hearing an affirmative answer, you squawked, "Well, you better go catch it!" then hung up quickly as your friends chortled and snickered at the silly juvenile prank.
You couldn’t do this today.
What with caller ID, even on old-fashioned land lines, you’d be busted immediately. With cellphones, IDs are a given so users can address callers straightaway (Hi, Chelsea, how was your facial?), or not, if you want to dodge the caller.
If that caller had available technology at hand, you wouldn’t be able to avoid them for long. Cellphones are easily tracked with precision these days, so if someone, say law enforcement authorities, wanted to find you, they’d just triangulate your location.
Enhanced communication technology and the prevalent use of same has led us to circumstances in which an expectation of privacy is nullified by the very thing so many find so useful.
As with sensors, readers, drones and cameras everywhere — on police cars and in retail stores, on street corners and at government buildings — the portal of the Internet captures an enormous amount of information about you and me.
Most data collection can be categorized as benign monetizing, such as when Googling for heirloom tomato seeds generates Web ads for heirloom tomato seeds for months afterward. Or when a peek at a certain book at Amazon prompts a load of email shilling reading material you have no interest in.
These inconveniences pale when put up against the National Security Agency’s collection of information, as described in The Washington Post this week.
The Post’s latest installment of articles — culled from files purloined by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contract worker, and other sources — laid bare the huge dimensions of data collection by the NSA, detailing how it gathers hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal email, "buddy lists" and instant messaging accounts around the world.
The NSA, the Post reported, collected 444,743 email address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from other service providers — all in a single day last year. It does this through facilities outside the U.S., technically staying within the law, but because data exchanges know no lines on the map, information about millions of Americans is swept up.
Data collection itself isn’t necessarily harmful, and as the saying goes, "If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about." But compiling information about people and their relationships and connections, tenuous and incomplete, can be misinter- preted and produce a false image for suspicion.
There is also no way of knowing how information, kept for uncertain periods of time, will be used in the future or in circumstances yet to be confronted or defined.
Americans have been largely reliant on their government’s compliance with privacy rights, but the notion that nothing’s going to happen to them rests on thin ice. Nothing happens until it does.
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Cynthia Oi can be reached at coi@staradvertiser.com
