The Right for Privacy in a World Where Everything is Shared
The latest revelations about “Hacking Team” (an Italian offensive-cyber company), its products (snooping SW for every type of digital communication, from email to whatsapp) and it its clientele (mostly dark regimes) seems to shock everyone. Lets’ look at the facts and see how truly shocking this is:
Governments want to have the capacity to spy on their citizens- nothing new here. since the dawn of time the ruler’s no. intelligence priority was to spy not on his enemy from abroad but on his enemies from within (opposition, subversive elements).
Governments can now do this in a scale that was incomprehensible before: they can pretty much collect and store every piece of digital communication they can get there sniffers on.
Governments can analyze and understand the information like never before- The East-German Statsi was notorious for eavesdropping on large segments of the population. They were so obsessed with this that the accumulated so much recorded material that they were never able to listen or dissect it. Fast forward 30 years- machines do it almost instantly today, identifying key phrases, mapping links between seemingly unconnected people and are rapidly gaining in machine intelligence. But….
- We share everything online- are locations, friends, images and desires
- We wear mobile tracking devices with us most times
- We are now loving the idea of having a wearable tracking devices, which we will never take off and will transmit not only our location but our vital signs
- We disregard any common sense when it comes to online safety (using same password for all our social media accounts for example).
So why are we surprised? We are simply making it easier for any nation state (be it our own or an adversary) to collect information about us. What’s the solution? We’ll, if you don’t want anyone to access a piece of information (sensitive correspondence, nude selfies) please refrain from posting it anywhere online. Otherwise- consider everything you’ve ever posted as “free for all” (regardless of privacy settings). If you still consider sharing after all this- don’t act surprised…
Yotam Gutman is Director Product Marketing at Cytegic: http://owntrepreneurship.com/
