In the Orwellian regime that ruled Oceania, the “Telescreen” played an important role. This two-way television was a fantastic piece of technology that was in almost every house and allowed people to easily receive content without any effort. However this device gave no benefit to their users since their were not in control of it. It couldn’t be turned off and people were limited to watch the Government’s channel. Citizens could be controlled in two different ways, just through that gadget.
1984 may be fiction, but if we take it metaphorically it sure fits today’s world. In the last two decades TV played the most important role in every family’s evening. By sitting in the couch just absorbing the streamed content, people were giving away their freedom. This is the first way in which the “Telescreen” would control people’s mind: selecting and filtering the content each home has access to. The USA and Japan may have not experienced such restriction, but in Europe and other developing countries there were very few channels, and the major ones controlled by the Governments. And censorship was not the only problem, being the responsible for creating the content is also another restraint for the consumer.
This problem is not new, it exists since the beginning of societies. In ancient Greece, only free-born males could gather in the Agora, the place where politics and culture were discussed. In the Medieval Age, the Inquisition would convict anyone that wouldn’t share their beliefs. During the World Wars, the newspaper censorship played the same role, limiting the freedom of the people. Luckily this is changing with the Internet, that allows everyone to be the author of the content, and we are not locked to the Government’s or Corporates’ ideals.
Of course the freedom brought by the Internet is not yet mainstream, and it may never be as long as we are attached to the physical world. Advertising is such a powerful weapon that what people visit on the Internet is tightly connected with what is advertised in the traditional media (outdoors, radio, TV, magazines, …) and then again owned by the large companies.
The second control 1984’s “Telescreen” gave the Government was the ability to watch citizens all the time. Not that they did watch them, but the fear of being caught doing something that wasn’t normal. And normal is not what was allowed by the law, but what may be suspicious or just not like what everyone else does. This is the kind of control companies and governments own when we use technologies like the internet. Being anonymous in the Internet was one of its main advantages, but although it may work with small entities, at a global scale you can’t near hide who you are. Hackers and cryptography may claim for freedom, but in the end Governments can see who talked with who, accessing ISPs logs. And regarding the content, it is just a matter of time until the cryptographic techniques used today are broken.
Taking all these things into consideration, in the end you have no privacy online. What stops your email provider (likely to be a corporation with many interests in your data) from reading your emails? What stops your Internet Provider to record your internet usage and use it to improve their marketing towards you? Would it be wise to share secrets, both personal and professional, in this kind of communication?
Well, it isn’t that different from traditional mail since there are several techniques to read mail without opening the envelopes; or tapping the telephone lines. This kind of control is not new, and people lived with them. I don’t believe this is such a great problem, as long as people are aware of it and that’s where the problem is. Regular users don’t care about how things work, and what are their limitations. If they do the basics of how their tools work, they may know what is private or not, and who or what company can access their data.
Another problem inherent to users is trust. This is a fundamental concept in everyone’s life. When you create a bank account, you are trusting them with your own money and usage of that money. It’s not hard for a bank to make a timeline of your expenses since you became their customer and even map where you were. This may become useful to help the Police fighting crime, but may also be harmful if illegally used. But then again it all falls back to whether you trust your bank or not. Whether you trust your ISP or whether you trust your email provider or whether you trust your search engine.
To sum up, if you want to live in this world, you can’t expect whatever you do to be anonymous. Even when you’re alone, only your thoughts are yours only and everything else may be accessible to others that you can trust or not. Just keep that in mind every-time you exchange sensitive information over the web.