Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Beware ! You are being watched


“You are under the watch of our CCTV cameras” read the boards hanging on the ceiling of the shopping malls.

There was a huge uproar in Bangalore recently, when the worshipful Mayor of the BBMP went ahead with his ambitious plan of CCTVing the lush green parks of the hi-tech city.

I was getting a bit uncomfortable these days when this realization hit me. And so I’m back here, to let my floating thoughts spill over on my blog.

The trigger for this thought process was none of the above two events. The ones listed above are physical security apparatus being used to keep an eye on the crowd in a defined boundary. The capacities of such devices are limited to its area of focus. If you stay away from that area, you are nobody.

What concerned me was the news item that flashed the newspapers a couple of weeks back which said that Facebook has decided to follow the footsteps of its rival/competitor Google, to infringe on the privacy of the netizens!

For the uninitiated, tracking the netizens means accessing the web cache in your “Smart devices”- such as Lappy, Tabs etc to get to know the seemingly-unharmful data about you such as, the sites that you visited, the ads that you clicked etc. The monstrous algorithms of the tracking company will then analyze you (I hate to admit this). It creates a “virtual you” in its database using which it can uniquely identify you, your tastes, your interests etc. (I’m no computer whiz kid, so cannot put in more details here. Nor I claim that this is exactly how they track). This data will then be used by the tracking sites to “deliver the relevant Ads for you”.

Google was the first one to declare it publicly that they will start tracking the people. This is precisely the reason why they implemented single sign on for all of their products – Gmail, G+, YouTube, BlogSpot etc. (you thought it was to increase your comfortability?) Thus, based on the type of videos you see, you will get similar ads when you next open the Gmail inbox or Googling for something. The news created huge noise in the social media and other forums. People cried about losing their privacy. But the all-powerful corporate lobby prevailed in the US. Silicon Valley maintained its silence on the breach of ethics by software.

I was using technology for bare minimum during then. I wouldn’t have recounted this incident at all if not for the recent incident of similar kind. This time the company to do so was the most popular social media networking platform– Facebook. What surprised me this time was not the news but the silence of the same set of people who had raised their voice during Google’s case. One thing was clear now. Breach of online privacy has now got no immunity. People are so hooked to the smart gadgets that virtually we have become slaves in its hand and may find it next to impossible to think anything about breaking free from them!

I am not the kind of person who blames the technological advancements by referring only to their flip side. But what I’m concerned is about the fading of the line that demarcates the good and bad uses of it. The above incidence proves that with time, the bad uses gets legitimized and the state of mind of people thus gets changed – people who protested at first instance of breach of ethics get now silenced out of confusion. We lose the wisdom to think between the good and bad.

When I take a look at the various apps out there in Android OS, I see that most of them try to help us get the work done online. Bank transactions, e-commerce etc are hot cake apps. My concern is, down the line when I ask my son/daughter to get my work done in the bank, I don’t want them to fiddle with their smart gadget and tell me with an expression less face that it is done. Not that it is wrong to do it thru smart device. The fact that they become more and more confined to the home, with no interaction with people from various walks to life, is what my concern is. That definitely brings up an obvious question - what if the kid is extra-ordinarily talented and walking out to places like banks/offices and talking to people is like walking on a cake for him? This is definitely a possibility. That is the reason why I feel that one should stop debating on what is wrong and what is not. Instead let’s look at what is the best way to do the things. If I’ve the luxury of a chauffeur driven car and, if I have nothing productive work to be done, why not go out myself and do my shopping? Or contrastingly, if I’m hard pressed for time (which is with most of the people) and has lots of other work that requires my attention, why not use the smart technology and get the work done in easier way? One laments at the fact that due to mobile phones, one doesn’t remember at least a couple of phone numbers also these days. But the other side of the fact is that due to mobile phones, you are able to carry around so many phone numbers that you don’t cry at the time of emergency that you remember only 2 numbers.

Going out to places, meeting various people, talking to them, learning one new thing a year like new form of art or if you are tech savvy then learning new platform or programming language, getting along with relatives etc. keeps the mind active and open for fresh ideas. If you know how to do the things without the help of your smart devices then, you don’t panic when your device fails at the time of emergency. Otherwise a disaster will happen due to your own folly. As the device gets more and more smarter, human’s IQ gets lower and lower. So be smart. Decide for yourself how much you want to depend on the technology. Think what is good for you – using the IQ of your phone’s smartness or develop the IQ of God given grey cells in your brain? Stay out of snooping from the digital terrorists. Give power to your own physical form and become strong instead of creating a weaker virtual “you” in the digital world who surrenders himself dumbly to the D-Terrorists.