Policy – Privacy Paranoia: Is Your Smartphone Spying On You?:
Privacy alarmism is one act in a bigger spectacle. In alarmists’ minds, something could go terribly wrong, and although it never has nor is it likely to happen, we should change the world and imposed new political and bureaucratic order to prepare for it. Privacy concerns in general are fertile breeders of this pattern, and have already inflicted on us useless and expensive laws like HIPPA and FERPA. Now, privacy alarmism has set its sights on the biggest prize: the shrinking of Big Data.
While I’m glad that the author has apparently never suffered an issue linked to a privacy infringement, the same cannot be said for an enormous percentage of the world’s population. Mass intrusion, with and without consent, into communications privacy is a prominent issue internationally because of how private and public bodies alike exploit information that is collected.
We are functionally experimenting on the entire population when collecting and applying math to enormous datasets: to say that there has been no harm, ever, to date is possible. But doing so functionally depends on ignoring the lived reality of many of the persons impacted by big data and digital technology.
Excited Pixels 