Privacy, devices and data

                                           Privacy, devices and data 

The invasion of body usurping devices By Marianne Díaz Hernández: Don't ask what Amazon can do for you, ask what you are doing for Amazon. 

 

Your smartphone knows how many hours you sleep, which social media platforms you waste your time on, and which sites you visit. There are refrigerators that not only know what they contain, but are able to make the shopping list for you. If you take distance classes or exams due to the pandemic, the platform that your school or university has decided to use may want to know how many times you move your eyes and if you have them fixed on the screen during the entire class. The new Amazon bracelet not only records your exercise or your hours of sleep, but also has opinions about your voice, your body and your lifestyle. 

 

It seems that a long time ago, as a society, we decided to overcome the false dichotomy between privacy: we have decided that, the more data devices, applications and platforms have on us, the easier it will be to make purchases, synchronize all things and make as few decisions as possible.

 

This characteristic - which is called "function creep" and describes the fact that a given system is used for a purpose other than that for which it was originally designed - is typical of modern technologies, which by "being able" to carry out certain functions or collect certain data (such as a person's location, their speed of movement or even, in the case of the Halo, their temperature) they end up looking for later what new functions can be offered with the data collected, and not the other way around.

 

The most important thing is that this data is collected by companies like Amazon with the primary objective of "adjusting their recommendations", that is, to sell you more things, since their business is based on the pretense of wanting to know the user even more 

 

Isn't it serious that, as users, we don't have the agency to exert resistance when faced with the implementation of technologies such as facial recognition and gaze tracking in the education sector? Isn't it serious that we have normalized the fact that a "health" or "menstruation" application has intimate information about our bodies and can sell it for advertising purposes? The pandemic, like any crisis, has been the ideal breeding ground to make it easier for society to more quickly accept surveillance measures that are offered as lifesavers, such as coronapps, favoring the installation of solutions that push back the borderline of privacy in a way that will be extremely difficult to restore later.

 

It is not only necessary, but also urgent, to rethink the order of priorities that, as a society, we have assigned to our privacy and to the data that exists about our body and our online activity. In the age of the public, in which more than ever we seem to be living connected to a camera, it is not true that privacy is a thing of the past that we must renounce: on the contrary, it is increasingly essential that we rescue the private, the space where our humanity, and therefore our democracy and our civic culture, can flourish more freely. 

 

 Source: https://www.derechosdigitales.org/15044/la-invasion-de-los-dispositivos-usurpadores-de-cuerpos/