Paranoid Android
I think I may have been watching too many episodes of ‘Spooks’, but sometimes I wonder just how much ‘They’ know about me, and how easy it would be to plot me on a grid somewhere. How much of a trail am I leaving behind me with each movement that I make?
It’s not as if I’m feeling watched, per se, in the ‘we have got you under surveillance’ kind of way. It’s more that I could probably be tracked really easily over the course of the day, and not necessarily from the little bursts of data that I, myself, choose to release.
The image in my mind is of a little blinking dot, that activates to green once I leave the house. I picture myself blinking away along a Google-like map, pausing at a bustop (as indicated with by the appropriate little blue symbol), moving again as the bus comes, moving across the water as I catch my ferry.
Then the blinks slow as I manoeuvre my way into my desk, and, over the course of a day, tracks a dizzying and apparently random series of paths between desk and tea-room, desk and photocopier/printer, desk and manager’s office, before breaking free again at close of business and tracking back to the lift and down to the ferry wharf. Blink, blink, blink all the way home again, with an occasional deviation via the shops for milk or other essentials.
Perhaps the light would blink extra fast, or extra bright if I’ve had a bad day, or in time to any music I’m listening to on my iPod.
But then it would be back to amber, on standby, as I arrive home (with some more random paths tracked between kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedroom), until 11pm is, when I go into hibernation mode, one blue blink every minute, much like the light on J’s electric toothbrush.
But just think about it for a moment...is it such a far-fetched idea? CCTV cameras might not pick up my every move, but they do pick up quite a few. Plus every dip of my bus/ferry ticket, every swipe of my security pass, every payment made by a card, every online registration to just about anything that requires an email address-I’m leaving more breadcrumbs behind me than Hansel and Gretel!
I prattle on a lot in my day job about two overlapping concepts: digital reputation and digital footprint. The former is largely determined by the latter - what is the picture we paint of ourselves when all the little bits of content that we’ve liberally, widely and sometimes thoughtlessly strewn across the digital universe are sewn up together?
Occasionally, and just to scare myself, I Google my own name. It’s a good thing to do every now and again as reminder that the world is increasingly collapsing in on itself, that the walls we construct to keep This Part of Ourselves separate to That Part of Ourselves are becoming increasingly fragile and transparent.
In other words, we must now assume our various worlds will collide, and sometimes that might be a bit painful, because History can have a very long memory indeed.
Actually, it’s an interesting question, isn’t it, that privacy thing. No matter how out there we are we still hold on to the belief that what we do is private just because it belongs to us and we want it to be so. We see that in teenagers, who tell us ‘You shouldn’t have looked’ at their Facebook profiles that are subject to no privacy restrictions whatsoever. Looking might not be ‘right’ (or respectful), but the fact is I can look because it’s there, open for me to see. And if I can look, so can the rest of the world. We need to get used to it, because this is Life today. The whole purpose of the majority of these services is to make you be public, to share, to connect-that is their explicit vision. You can control that to a certain extent, and still participate and reap the many benefits (and there are benefits), but, you know, ‘Eternal Vigilance’!
I’ve been out there online since the 90s (sent my first email from Cambridge University in 1992, in the days when it was still a huge novelty), and actively participating in the web 2.0 world since 2002. I blog, tweet, upload and share photos. I do utilise the privacy restrictions where I can, but am as just as subject to not understanding them (particularly when they keep changing them ... I’m looking at you, Facebook!) as the next person.
I do this for myself, but also as part of my day job, so that one simple Google search can illustrate, sometimes quite uncomfortably, what the conjunction of the various worlds can look like. Personal statements on Twitter, lined up right next to my LinkedIn professional profile; media statements, public presentations (sometimes there without my having given approval for them to be uploaded, I might add); work blog posts side-by-side with personal ones. I was rather startled to see my newest experiments with Pinterest headlining: do I really want the world to know I’m hoping to renovate my bathroom and kitchen some day, or that I have started collecting recipes for cakes and biscuits (and thus have a rather over-active sweet tooth)?
Of course, you could ask, who could be bothered assembling the Great Big Puzzle of Me, apart from, well, me. Probably no-one. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing...the fact that I have created what is a substantial digital profile means that I have also created a significant digital legacy, a record of myself that will endure beyond my own lifetime. A boon to future historians, as well as to my own descendants.
I wonder what they will make of it all. Just as I wonder what the (hopefully) fictitious Spooks tracking me on the (hopefully) non-existent Grid might think as they see my (not-actually-real) little blinking light trudging off to work each day. Hopefully significant to them, hopefully of some interest. And hopefully painting the picture I’d like it to paint.
It’s not as if I’m feeling watched, per se, in the ‘we have got you under surveillance’ kind of way. It’s more that I could probably be tracked really easily over the course of the day, and not necessarily from the little bursts of data that I, myself, choose to release.
The image in my mind is of a little blinking dot, that activates to green once I leave the house. I picture myself blinking away along a Google-like map, pausing at a bustop (as indicated with by the appropriate little blue symbol), moving again as the bus comes, moving across the water as I catch my ferry.
Then the blinks slow as I manoeuvre my way into my desk, and, over the course of a day, tracks a dizzying and apparently random series of paths between desk and tea-room, desk and photocopier/printer, desk and manager’s office, before breaking free again at close of business and tracking back to the lift and down to the ferry wharf. Blink, blink, blink all the way home again, with an occasional deviation via the shops for milk or other essentials.
Perhaps the light would blink extra fast, or extra bright if I’ve had a bad day, or in time to any music I’m listening to on my iPod.
But then it would be back to amber, on standby, as I arrive home (with some more random paths tracked between kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedroom), until 11pm is, when I go into hibernation mode, one blue blink every minute, much like the light on J’s electric toothbrush.
But just think about it for a moment...is it such a far-fetched idea? CCTV cameras might not pick up my every move, but they do pick up quite a few. Plus every dip of my bus/ferry ticket, every swipe of my security pass, every payment made by a card, every online registration to just about anything that requires an email address-I’m leaving more breadcrumbs behind me than Hansel and Gretel!
I prattle on a lot in my day job about two overlapping concepts: digital reputation and digital footprint. The former is largely determined by the latter - what is the picture we paint of ourselves when all the little bits of content that we’ve liberally, widely and sometimes thoughtlessly strewn across the digital universe are sewn up together?
Occasionally, and just to scare myself, I Google my own name. It’s a good thing to do every now and again as reminder that the world is increasingly collapsing in on itself, that the walls we construct to keep This Part of Ourselves separate to That Part of Ourselves are becoming increasingly fragile and transparent.
In other words, we must now assume our various worlds will collide, and sometimes that might be a bit painful, because History can have a very long memory indeed.
Actually, it’s an interesting question, isn’t it, that privacy thing. No matter how out there we are we still hold on to the belief that what we do is private just because it belongs to us and we want it to be so. We see that in teenagers, who tell us ‘You shouldn’t have looked’ at their Facebook profiles that are subject to no privacy restrictions whatsoever. Looking might not be ‘right’ (or respectful), but the fact is I can look because it’s there, open for me to see. And if I can look, so can the rest of the world. We need to get used to it, because this is Life today. The whole purpose of the majority of these services is to make you be public, to share, to connect-that is their explicit vision. You can control that to a certain extent, and still participate and reap the many benefits (and there are benefits), but, you know, ‘Eternal Vigilance’!
I’ve been out there online since the 90s (sent my first email from Cambridge University in 1992, in the days when it was still a huge novelty), and actively participating in the web 2.0 world since 2002. I blog, tweet, upload and share photos. I do utilise the privacy restrictions where I can, but am as just as subject to not understanding them (particularly when they keep changing them ... I’m looking at you, Facebook!) as the next person.
I do this for myself, but also as part of my day job, so that one simple Google search can illustrate, sometimes quite uncomfortably, what the conjunction of the various worlds can look like. Personal statements on Twitter, lined up right next to my LinkedIn professional profile; media statements, public presentations (sometimes there without my having given approval for them to be uploaded, I might add); work blog posts side-by-side with personal ones. I was rather startled to see my newest experiments with Pinterest headlining: do I really want the world to know I’m hoping to renovate my bathroom and kitchen some day, or that I have started collecting recipes for cakes and biscuits (and thus have a rather over-active sweet tooth)?
Of course, you could ask, who could be bothered assembling the Great Big Puzzle of Me, apart from, well, me. Probably no-one. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing...the fact that I have created what is a substantial digital profile means that I have also created a significant digital legacy, a record of myself that will endure beyond my own lifetime. A boon to future historians, as well as to my own descendants.
I wonder what they will make of it all. Just as I wonder what the (hopefully) fictitious Spooks tracking me on the (hopefully) non-existent Grid might think as they see my (not-actually-real) little blinking light trudging off to work each day. Hopefully significant to them, hopefully of some interest. And hopefully painting the picture I’d like it to paint.