This Might Be the Eye-Opener You So Badly Need.

Many of us approach online privacy with a "who would be interested in boring old me" attitude. That's the internet equivalent of whistling past the graveyard.

Check out data consultant Dylan Curran's expose on what Facebook and, especially, Google knows about you.

I’ll just do a short summary of what’s in the thousands of files I received under my Google Activity. 

First, every Google Ad I’ve ever viewed or clicked on, every app I’ve ever launched or used and when I did it, every website I’ve ever visited and what time I did it at, and every app I’ve ever installed or searched for.

They also have every image I’ve ever searched for and saved, every location I’ve ever searched for or clicked on, every news article I’ve ever searched for or read, and every single Google search I’ve made since 2009. And then finally, every YouTube video I’ve ever searched for or viewed, since 2008.

This information has millions of nefarious uses. You say you’re not a terrorist. Then how come you were googling Isis? Work at Google and you’re suspicious of your wife? Perfect, just look up her location and search history for the last 10 years. Manage to gain access to someone’s Google account? Perfect, you have a chronological diary of everything that person has done for the last 10 years. 

This is one of the craziest things about the modern age. We would never let the government or a corporation put cameras/microphones in our homes or location trackers on us. But we just went ahead and did it ourselves because – to hell with it! – I want to watch cute dog videos.

After you read Curran's plainly harrowing account, ask yourself why your government allows these companies, that pose such an obvious and enormous threat to the privacy of its citizens, to operate in our country. The Corporatist States of America are a write off, a lost cause, but surely Canada could, in conjunction with Europe, ban this sort of privacy intrusion and make Google and Facebook pay a hefty price for defying them. Collectively they have enough clout to bring the software giants to heel.  Not acting quickly and forcefully is a dereliction of their duty to us all.

Social Networking = Privacy Confiscation

Surely you had to know that posting all that personal information online would eventually lead to its confiscation.   Information is knowledge; knowledge is power; power is valuable, marketable and highly lucrative.

I am admittedly and hopelessly backward on this social media stuff.  I have a Facebook page but it serves as a repository for photo albums of motorcycle trips down the Pacific coast and the Baja peninsula.  I haven't updated it in years and tend to forget it exists.

My daughters, however, play their lives out on Facebook and Instagram, etc.   I only go there when they give me a reason to visit because I simply don't want to know that much about their lives and how they lead them.   It's voyeuristically BORING.

Now Facebook has announced its community of users will no longer have a say in how their information is used.  The social networking site recently posted a gaggle of policy changes and invited users to vote on them.   Nine in ten who did vote opposed the changes but less than 1% of Facebook users bothered to vote and the company requires a 30% threshold to be binding.

The company said it would adopt the changes despite the opposition. Among the changes is taking away Facebook users' rights to vote on future changes.

Facebook said it plans to give users other ways to weigh in on policy changes, such as an ''Ask the Chief Privacy Officer'' question-and-answer forum on its website.

The company also plans to ease restrictions on who can message you on Facebook and it aims to share information with its affiliates, including the popular photo-sharing service Instagram.

Oh well, oh dear.   Yet the reality is, and Facebook knows it, that its users won't flee from intrusions on their privacy.   They won't even notice.   They don't really care.