Nothing to Hide

An app on your phone is accessing your location. The fear that one's location, behavior and interests are being tracked and measured makes one feel uncomfortably exposed. The anxiety stemming from this is understandable, and to those who find their way to this blog entry, I will do what I can to reassure you that you are not at such risk as your fears make you believe. It is not to say that your fears are completely without justification concerning the risk of technology, but as is the case also with other phobias, this fear is likely misplaced or else hugely exaggerated. Where to begin....

Is the fear that someone else has access to our data? Our location? Our relations? Perhaps the company controlling the technology has no regard for your privacy, and sends their hourly-paid minions to learn how best to exploit you. For sake of brevity, I consider just the most frequently trafficked technologies and platforms (Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.). Your privacy is in fact most assured by your being mingled among crowds of other users. That is to say that, in a very real way, the company's interest in you is rather in the crowd to which you are an incidental member. As an analogy, the human body's immune system pays no mind to each bacterium it happens upon--it only spares resources to respond to critical elements it deems to be a threat to the ecosystem as a whole. Yes, in this analogy you are a wee bacterium. So far as you are a nice little bacterium, it is in your best interests that such a system is capable of tracking down threats quickly and effectively. While technically also under its surveillance, most bacteria in the body are pretty much ignored, as is ideal for the shy ones.

Perhaps the fear is in a particular someone accessing your data--a stalker gathering your personal details. One should recognize that in this scenario, a fear of technology is to some extent a transference from a fear of another person. Even so, there remains a real concern that a dangerous person is enabled by such technology. One might hold a similar fear of knives for example, since one can be worried someone will use them for harm. Personally, I remain wary of just such accessibility of knives, and the like, since the severity of crime increases with the convenience of the crime and the availability of tools enabling it. Since crime is potentially enabled by the data our technology collects, it is important to prevent this as far as possible. A company should (and in practice, do so quite effectively) prohibit the abuse of this data to harm its users. We should recognize that the same technology which we fear will be abused stands to also be the greatest means of remedying that abuse--a weapon in the wrong hand, and then a scalpel in the other.

Who else is there to fear around our use of technology? Ourselves? In fact, yes! This last one--the threat to the ego--may be a genuine problem I would acknowledge remains an authentic, and very real threat in our use of technology. In our involvements in social media, we cannot help but come across so many other users who act as mirrors of our own thoughts and behaviors, such that we inadvertently struggle to maintain our fragile senses of self. Despite the fact that it consistently harms ourselves and those around us, our egos remain a sort of crutch for our emotional well-being, bolstering our capacity to cope with hardship, sometimes unbeknownst to ourselves that this is the case--the confiscation of this crutch is one which I remain hesitant to prescribe.