back to article We're ALL Winston Smith now - and our common enemy is the Big Brother State

The latest thing we've all got to worry about in this brave new world of ours is that the young, not having read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, are simply too eager to give up their information and privacy to the tech giants. Those richer in years have been forewarned by the novel and are thus less likely to get sucked into …

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    1. PJI

      Re: There's a fundamental flaw in this article and it's a big one.

      Non-state firms/business are very dangerous collectors. They treat it as their property to trade or provide as suits or required. They charge or make it difficult to know or correct what they have.

      Worse, as governments at all levels pass off more and more functions to the private sector, that sector has got your data about health, police matters whether guilty or prosecuted or not, about your travel, your work and school records, the tiff with your neighbour, the acrimonious divorce and civil action, the tittle tattle on the internet about your family, how much wine you order and your odd interest in weapons or war history or militant feminism. Or that time you were warned about noise from a late party. Or you missed a payment when on holiday and forgot or you wrote a snotty complaint.

      One day you or your child or wife go for a job or a charity activity and some jobsworth pays a checking company for a view of you. They put two and two together and come up with five.

      Oh dear, whatever went wrong? Why do police make so many enquiries at my door? Why are my children being asked at school if I drink much?

      No. Information is power and a weapon. Private companies are further beyond control even than governments, especially multiple nationals. Do you really trust SERCO or their rivals. Why would you trust an USA Google who has been forced to bow to USA and China governments and has shown a cavalier disregard for data about you all ready?

  1. JimmyPage Silver badge
    Flame

    Industry opt outs .....

    on a related note, I have recently encountered two online news sites (the Birmingham Mail is one) where the *only* way you can leave comments, is to "sign in with Facebook".

    As of 4 weeks ago, my email to their published "contact us" email address has gone unanswered.

    Now that's a private, commercial site. But how long before anyone who doesn't have a Facebook account becomes a second class citizen, and can't sign into a government site.

    The irony is, I was a big proponent of putting stuff online. I saw it as similar to the 70s when people complained that *only* dealing with people by phone was unfair on those without a phone (yes, it really happened). My argument being that internet access in the 2000s was becoming like having a phone in the 80s (I had some friends in the early 70s whose parents chose not to have a phone. They were extinct in the 80s).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Mushroom

      Re: Industry opt outs .....

      Had the same thing with an online shop that wanted me to sign in

      with a FaceCrook account before I could place an order...

      F*ck em ! I'll just take my bussiness elsewhere...

      1. JimmyPage Silver badge

        business elsewhere ...

        fair enough. However the implication is, over time, certain sites for the expression of opinions and discussions will only be used by a self-selecting audience.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Joke

          Re: "self-selecting audience"

          Sounds great !

          Makes it a lot easier to identify the morons...

        2. Dan Paul

          Re: business elsewhere ...

          Almost all the news outlets have dumped public email addresses and gone to Twatter and Farcebook for comments. Just look at the "Contact us" part of most websites.

          It's pretty obvious what they are trying to do.

          IMHO, This is a clear limitation of public "free speech" because you can't flesh out or support your arguement in 140 characters and you have to use a proprietary system to do it. The fact is that media could give a flying fuck about you or your opinion. They are only interested in soundbites that support THEIR viewpoint so they only get the results they want.

          On top of that, they get an almost instantaneous popularity poll at the same time.

    2. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: Industry opt outs .....

      The reason they want you to sign in with FB is due to a program that FB offers. The business gains access to a certain amount of intel that FB has hoovered based on a subscription level and FB gets more data.

      Avoid, Avoid, Avoid. Write an old fashioned letter (paper, pen, stamp) that you will no longer do business with the company due to their affiliation with FB.

  2. Zog_but_not_the_first
    Meh

    Not today, but maybe tomorrow

    A comment under a similarly themed article in the Grauniad summed it up nicely - "You don't have to worry about today's Government, but you may have to worry about tomorrow's".

    I still believe that the foundation of social democracy is (relatively) strong in the UK and that currently, checks and balances protect the average citizen. But like a house built on an eastern-coast cliff top, it's suffering from an accelerating rate of erosion as the post-war consensus disappears into history.

  3. User McUser

    A Fair Trade, Except When It Isn't

    Sure, you can track my web visits if doing so means that I get free searches of the accumulated wisdom of mankind.

    Fair enough, but suppose Google tracked you and collected data on you and your behaviors without you ever using their service?

    Google's ubiquity in the online Advertising market means that even if I intentionally avoid ever going to Google.com directly, my browser and all the web sites I go to happily exchange all sorts of information on me and my habits with Google. And in exchange for this information, they give me what exactly?

    1. Mark 85

      Re: A Fair Trade, Except When It Isn't

      In many ways, they do track you without you using them knowingly. The place ads on sites and those ads do the tracking in the sense that data is collected and sent back to the mothership where it is collated. If El Reg is the only website you use, you're being tracked by the ads as to stories, comments, etc.

    2. Dan Paul

      Re: A Fair Trade, Except When It Isn't

      Interesting tidbit, those grocery loyalty cards that get you a slight discount in exchange for your purchasing habits are the biggest ripoff as that data is worth thousands to the grocer over a few years.

      This came from a fellow who used that database to tell the grocer what to buy and when. This info is apparently worth enough to pay for a complete modern point of sale system including card swipes, cash registers and computers and leave lot's of money left over.

      And in answer to the last question, bupkiss, nada, zilch, nichts, not a frikkin thing. And they owe you THOUSANDS for that info.

  4. chris lively

    Yes, the usage of the information collected by business vs government is very different.

    However, the invasion aspect isn't. Any data collected by a business can be obtained by the state. The very fact that this is not only possible, but verified to be happening, means that your conclusion that data collection by businesses is not as dangerous as that collected by governments is ignorant at best.

    It doesn't matter if google collects your browsing habits in order to serve up more targeted ads. Nor does it matter if AT&T tracks the location of your phone and it's usage in order to make sure they have enough cell towers in the right areas. What matters is if the state can "request" access to that data at any time and for nearly any purpose.

    This means the very collection of that information, by any entity, is therefore a massive intrusion into your privacy and may very well be used against you either personally or in general. I see only two ways to fix this: either guarantee that a States cannot force a company to hand over it's data OR for those companies to be barred from collecting it in the first place. Unfortunately neither is ever likely to happen.

    Ultimately it doesn't matter if the kids today haven't read 1984: they have no control over it. Simply living in a technology driven country means you have "opted in" to giving up any semblance of traditional privacy. I appreciate what Snowden has done. At the same time, anyone paying attention for the past 30 years should only be surprised that things haven't gone even further.

    1. (AMPC) Anonymous and mostly paranoid coward
      Boffin

      @chris lively

      There are other ways to make information gathering less intrusive>

      1) Make all collected personal data more anonymous and collect only what is needed.

      By all means, let AT&T gather and collect cell phone usage data to improve service, just ensure it can not be easily collated later and linked back to an individual.

      This is slightly tricky but workable if the phone companies begin to police themselves. Google et al are already becoming proactive with encryption policies. It is high time that other businesses storing our personal data begin doing the same.

      Personal data could be maintained separately for law enforcement purposes and billing. But this should only be for a reasonable amount of time (see below) and accessible only with a search warrant (remember those?).

      We can also ensure that collected Personally Identifiable Data is assigned a fixed shelf life. Data owners (you and me) can then opt for either a) data persistence or b) data correction or deletion.

      In fact, with a bit of effort, privacy, like security, can quickly become part and parcel of a good service/product design. Of course, it will require that policy makers and service providers speak and interact with some privacy experts.

  5. Al Jones

    Maybe it's just me, but "the government" couldn't piggy-back on big-data's surveillance if that surveillance wasn't so pervasive. I'm far more concerned about the implications of higher health-insurance premiums because big data has developed a profile that fits some high-risk category (analysis of my spending patterns, or cell-phone location information showing where I eat or socialize). I'm more concerned that a future potential employer will pass me over for a job because they've bought a "job-candidate-profile" score from some spin-off that analyzes my social network footprint and decides that I have too many or too few of the right kind of friends, and has nothing to do with my technical skills or otherwise. These are commercially driven invasions of my privacy that aren't "opt-in". Different attitudes to privacy might mean that EU citizens would have some degree of protection from this type of thing, but if there's a way to monetize it, US citizens will definitely be subject to this type of profiling.

    Even in the ultra-partisan political environment of the US currently, "the Government" doesn't care about me, and just doesn't have any incentive to slice and dice the data to get at me. Yeah, the knowledge that spending a lot of time looking for certain topics on the internet is going to raise flags has a chilling effect, but that was true before the internet too. But so far, the sort of "social control" that people seem to be afraid of doesn't come from deep-data analysis - Kansas gets Creationists on the local school boards, Colorado votes for pot, Arizona votes for a Cactus Curtain largely by very broad brush "old media" campaigns.

  6. Hurn

    Orwell spoke too soon

    "Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were 'explore every avenue' and 'leave no stone unturned', which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. "

    George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946 (Linked to at bottom of article.)

    Too bad these phrases didn't stay dead. Politicians now use them daily.

    Need more jeering.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    actually

    more shades of "Brave New World". Some unholy mixture of the two. We have the Orwellian control state, with the lies and manipulation, with the orgy-porgy, dope-'em-all, distract and bury them with entertainment of Huxley. I suspect the "breed 'em for the job" thing is slowly coming along as well.

  8. Eugene Crosser

    Bravo, but..

    Thanks Mr. Worstall for spelling the word of reason! Data gathering in the interest of commerce has indeed quite different implications from data gathering in the interest of the state.

    But, monopolization of commercial data gathering greatly simplifies state data gathering, and for this reason is dangerous. I share the view that we'd be better off if more of our Net life happened in distributed systems (similar to email) and less - in centralized (similar to Facebook).

  9. Wanderingone56ish

    A better book

    For a more relevant - and more chilling - analogy read The Bellringers by Henry Porter.

  10. Frank Bough

    Wilfully naive

    The problem is that it's far easier for governments to gather data on us by raiding Google, Facebook, Apple et al than bothering to do it themselves. Look at the road pricing / car tracking installations slowly being built all over the UKs major road network. Before it's finished, it will be hopelessly outmoded compared to the data extracted via Android and iOS mobile phones. And the CIA could have never dreamed of profiling the population to the extent Facebook does.

  11. zanshin

    The separation of concerns seems very thin

    Other posters have mentioned this, but I'll pile in. If some company like Google has a wide-ranging amount of information about my interests, my communications and my movements, it's not much consolation to me that these private companies don't want to abuse that power where the state government might. The reason is that the government has the power to demand that information from the company (or to take it without their knowledge) for the sake of whatever it is the government might want to investigate me over.

    As we've seen with the Snowden releases in the US in particular, the very act of the government tapping corporate intelligence stores can be contrived to occur in such a way that almost no one outside the channels that make it possible knows about it, and anyone involved who would like to make it public is under threat of severe criminal prosecution should they try.

    It's fine and well that our governments have not not, seemingly and so far, meaningfully the abused civil rights of their citizens using the information they now have access to. That is not a sufficient defense of the practice. The reason democratic nations have historically sought to reign in the knowledge freely available to a government's apparatus about the people governed is to limit the *possibility* of government abuse.

    Quite simply, if a system that can be abused is left in place long enough, two things happen. One is that many of the governed people become inured to it, assuming it's OK because "it's always been like that". The other thing, which often comes only after the first is established, is that someone *does* abuse the system. It's human nature - either someone eventually won't be able to resist committing abuse, or someone will seek a position of power *specifically* because they recognize the potential for abuse they can execute.

    As a species, we humans like to live under the conceit that conditions we enjoy now will persist into the future without bound - that because no historically decent government will ever change to be otherwise. I think this is imminently foolish.

    I'm hardly a doom-sayer, but it's hardly impossible for me to imagine future situations of civil disorder, most believably due to some natural disaster or resource constraint (water, power, food, etc.), where governments of what are today democratic and free societies might resort to more totalitarian means simply to try and keep things under control. (Martial law.) In situations like this I believe you very much would not want to mix in such abuse-prone tools such as a way to track basically everyone all the time (pervasive cameras, facial recognition, cell phones, centrally managed driverless cars, etc.) It's unwise to trust leaders with such tools to do the right thing in situations where civil rights are so specifically curtailed History does not show good precedent.

    On that note, one thing I'll disagree with in the original article is the notion that we owe Orwell for the caution of people my generation and older. While 1984 certainly stood out for some time and doubtless influenced many readers, for cautious people I know it is real, historical events that serve as more sobering reminders of what abusive governments can do with the power of extensive information about the people they govern. The examples set by the Soviet communist party, Nazi Germany, and the Red Scare in the US are much more frightening to me than any fiction. Imagine those regimes or movements with access to the information they could gain on their citizens today, especially if those citizens were raised to use the internet with limited caution.

    Hope for the best, but plan for the worst. Enabling pervasive surveillance is unwise, even if it is not the government who directly surveils us..

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The separation of concerns seems very thin

      "[...] where governments of what are today democratic and free societies might resort to more totalitarian means simply to try and keep things under control."

      Read the "The Old Men at the Zoo" (1961) by Angus Wilson. Looks like the 1983 TV mini-series adaptation is on DVD - and extracts are on YouTube.

      In that plot the catastrophic tipping point is a Middle Eastern country unexpectedly attacking London with their nuclear missile. When a survivor asks what happened next he is told something like: "That country is now a cloud of radioactive dust floating round the atmosphere". The result is a totalitarian Government.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It seems very naive to assume you can opt out. Google has my address, and knows when I talk to my friends because they use Android, my opting out has no impact. Facebook uses pictures of my children to sling ads (yuk , creepy) because friends post them, and I can't stop it without becoming the crazy guy with long straggly grey hair and a twitch.

    It would beggar belief to think that Google is not taking some of the many millions it charges the US govt, to use its search engine to check every Gmail for verboten/interesting words/phrases, and forward them to the govt.

    This is a straightforward commercial application of the search hardware, quite legal under the Ts&Cs, and very much what Google is in business to do. The only credible reason they might not be doing it, is if the spooks don't want to tell google what they are interested in.

  13. Chris G

    Prism

    Prism pretty much blows any idea that corporate information gathering about us is any safer or different from the State gathering it. Since the NSA paid at minimum Google and Yahoo millions for their compliance in passing on information about their customers and we have seen articles in this last week about BT and Vodaphone receiving payments for their passing on of customer info, it seems that there is little difference in who we opt to take our details as it is all likely to end up in the same places.

    The main concern is what and how different data mining programs can be used to our detriment; insurance companies will be looking expressly for those facets of our lives that they can capitalise on, health providers similarly, marketing companies will be interested in our consumer related interests and of course government will be looking for anything that can show anti govenrment, anti social or criminal tendencies etc.

    It is not who you allow to take information it is where it is likely to end up! Then again if you are doing nothing wrong................

  14. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Gimp

    The difference between the real monopoly and the virtual monopoly

    Note that governments don't just the data they demand from us to do business with them (and promptly sell/loose with astonishing regularity)

    They also want all other data for "security"

    The "oh you can use another provider" but how many people realize that Google has invested billions in hardware to deliver it's service and how deeply it's API's are dug into how many websites for content management?

    This is known in monopoly theory as the "Barrier to entry," and it's high.

    I think it's pretty clear Google have been taking lessons from Microsoft.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Orwell did not predict the power of trans-national corporations

    What George Orwell did not predict was the possibility that the power of trans-national corporations would become comparable to that of states, in some cases greater. Yes, information is power, and the ability of these corporations to play across jurisdictions, especially on the internet, in order to aggregate personal data should ring alarm bells everywhere.

    1. VinceH

      Re: Orwell did not predict the power of trans-national corporations

      "What George Orwell did not predict was the possibility that the power of trans-national corporations would become comparable to that of states, in some cases greater."

      Quite. If a novel like 1984 has a valid place in an article about data collection, then so too do novels in which corporations have become all-powerful - and when you look at the likes of Google today, and it's not too much of a stretch to see a path leading from here to there. A long one, thankfully, which would most likely not be completed until I'm nothing more than ash, but the potential path is there.

      In that future, Orwell got it half right - so dismissing the private corporations' collection of data as not being Orwellian is missing the point, or rather the possibilities.

    2. Dan Paul

      Re: Orwell did not predict the power of trans-national corporations

      Try reading the "Unincorporated Man" where that subject and it's implications are covered.

      This has been a theme (Corporations becoming Nation states) of several dystopian novels and none of them were too "friendly".

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The rebuttal to Mr. Worstalls screed is here:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/23/the_internet_of_things_helps_insurance_firms_reward_punish/

  17. Allan George Dyer
    Joke

    Allow me to upvote your dissing of the "utterly terrifying concept of Newspeak". Commentards would flame anyone who used it.

  18. big_D Silver badge
    Holmes

    Wilt

    not that some book-selling site knows we have a penchant for books featuring pneumatic blondes.

    Ah, you've read Wilt as well?

  19. Roj Blake Silver badge

    Just because large corporations aren't as big a threat to freedom as governments, it doesn't automatically follow that they're no threat.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We need viable alternatives...

    "Another way to put this is that the NSA or GCHQ monitoring everything is what we should be worrying about, not that some book-selling site knows we have a penchant for books featuring pneumatic blondes."

    ..........Agree to a point.. But as corporate shopping sites aggregate info it may in time offer up juicy profile data. Remember that this is still a young science. If so, expect the NSA to come calling whether by stealth or by force...

    "Google takes too much information? Use DuckDuckGo. Facebook too much? MySpace is still around, isn't it? We have choices here and each of us can make our own. Unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four, the entire point of which was to detail what happens when the state won't allow us any choices at all."

    ..........But until enough people switch to alternatives like DuckDuckGo or until there are real alternatives to Facebook, people won't switch. Hell I'm still waiting for Diaspora! Ultimately we need a series of non-US based alternatives...Preferably in regimes that are not pro-US, and where the NSA can't come creeping. Look at how hard MS fighting to protect Office 365 data in Dublin data right now!!!

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Google ~~~ NSA

    As a US company, Google is required to share all its data with the US government.

    So any distinction between them is illusory.

  22. frobnicate
    Thumb Up

    "books about pneumatic blondes"

    This must be a reference to Huxley. Brave New World is certainly at least as relevant as 1984, but alas, lacks the cheap thrill of terror.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oblig Grammer Nazi

    "hoover" not "hover" - referencing the Hoover © Company floor-care manufacturer, as in sucking up everything like a vacuum cleaner.

    1. gazthejourno (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: Oblig Grammer Nazi

      We cannot vouch for inferior, sub-editor free web publications like the Telegraph. But we can stick a sic in there to make clear it's their typo and not ours.

  24. captain veg Silver badge

    just for bucks

    "Those guys slurping the Big Data streams couldn't give a hoot how we get our jollies, nor what our political beliefs are. They're just out to make a buck or two by getting us to use their services."

    Certainly they are in it for the money, but it ain't as benign as just getting us to use their services. The reason for trawling so much personal data is to analyse your behaviour in order to change it. It's really not just about paid advertising.

    -A.

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