Ref Link: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41483723
The quote:
I think that we hear all too often this sort of blase remark that ‘I don’t need to be worried about surveillance because I’ve done nothing wrong and I have nothing to hide.’
For every single one of us, there is some pile of aggregated data that exists, the publication of which would cause us enormous harm and, in some cases, even professional and personal ruin.
Every single one of us has a database of ruin.” – Ben Wizner, of the American Civil Liberties Union
When even the self-proclaimed defenders of our constitutional rights is overtly giving up the fight, it becomes clear that we are left to our own devices (pun intended) to protect our privacy in an increasingly rapacious and largely subtle online world.
So many people have so deeply entrenched themselves in predatory networks that the idea anyone could possibly understand what they’ve lost AND just how pervasive the profiling about them is shrinks, it seems, by the moment.
It very quickly becomes exactly the situation I outlined in my piece on “A grocery store analogy” – though it seems no one is going to realize, understand, or care about it until it harms them and, frankly, by then it’s far, far too late.
What a world. It is sad to me that with all the luminous and amazing possibilities that technology presents to us, it is just as inevitably subverted for profit, politics, and pretty much anything except an ethical ideal of non-predation.
For all we pretend to superiority, we’re still playing the same old dominance and power games that are part and parcel of the human animal.