Opinion | The Apps on My Phone Are Stalking Me - The New York Times - 0 views
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There is much about the future that keeps me up at night — A.I. weaponry, undetectable viral deepfakes
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but in the last few years, one technological threat has blipped my fear radar much faster than others.That fear? Ubiquitous surveillance.
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I am no longer sure that human civilization can undo or evade living under constant, extravagantly detailed physical and even psychic surveillance
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as a species, we are not doing nearly enough to avoid always being watched or otherwise digitally recorded.
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our location, your purchases, video and audio from within your home and office, your online searches and every digital wandering, biometric tracking of your face and other body parts, your heart rate and other vital signs, your every communication, recording, and perhaps your deepest thoughts or idlest dreams
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in the future, if not already, much of this data and more will be collected and analyzed by some combination of governments and corporations, among them a handful of megacompanies whose powers nearly match those of governments
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Over the last year, as part of Times Opinion’s Privacy Project, I’ve participated in experiments in which my devices were closely monitored in order to determine the kind of data that was being collected about me.
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I’ve realized how blind we are to the kinds of insights tech companies are gaining about us through our gadgets. Our blindness not only keeps us glued to privacy-invading tech
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it also means that we’ve failed to create a political culture that is in any way up to the task of limiting surveillance.
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few of our cultural or political institutions are even much trying to tamp down the surveillance state.
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Yet the United States and other supposedly liberty-loving Western democracies have not ruled out such a future
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like Barack Obama before him, Trump and the Justice Department are pushing Apple to create a backdoor into the data on encrypted iPhones — they want the untrustworthy F.B.I. and any local cop to be able to see everything inside anyone’s phone.
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the fact that both Obama and Trump agreed on the need for breaking iPhone encryption suggests how thoroughly political leaders across a wide spectrum have neglected privacy as a fundamental value worthy of protection.
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Americans are sleepwalking into a future nearly as frightening as the one the Chinese are constructing. I choose the word “sleepwalking” deliberately, because when it comes to digital privacy, a lot of us prefer the comfortable bliss of ignorance.
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Among other revelations: Advertising companies and data brokers are keeping insanely close tabs on smartphones’ location data, tracking users so precisely that their databases could arguably compromise national security or political liberty.
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Tracking technologies have become cheap and widely available — for less than $100, my colleagues were able to identify people walking by surveillance cameras in Bryant Park in Manhattan.
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The Clearview AI story suggests another reason to worry that our march into surveillance has become inexorable: Each new privacy-invading technology builds on a previous one, allowing for scary outcomes from new integrations and collections of data that few users might have anticipated.
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The upshot: As the location-tracking apps followed me, I was able to capture the pings they sent to online servers — essentially recording their spying
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On the map, you can see the apps are essentially stalking me. They see me drive out one morning to the gas station, then to the produce store, then to Safeway; later on I passed by a music school, stopped at a restaurant, then Whole Foods.
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But location was only one part of the data the companies had about me; because geographic data is often combined with other personal information — including a mobile advertising ID that can help merge what you see and do online with where you go in the real world — the story these companies can tell about me is actually far more detailed than I can tell about myself.
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I can longer pretend I’ve got nothing to worry about. Sure, I’m not a criminal — but do I want anyone to learn everything about me?
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The remaining uncertainty about the surveillance state is not whether we will submit to it — only how readily and completely, and how thoroughly it will warp our society.
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Will we allow the government and corporations unrestricted access to every bit of data we ever generate, or will we decide that some kinds of collections, like the encrypted data on your phone, should be forever off limits, even when a judge has issued a warrant for it?
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In the future, will there be room for any true secret — will society allow any unrecorded thought or communication to evade detection and commercial analysis?
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Can human agency survive the possibility that some companies will know more about all of us than any of us can ever know about ourselves?