Surveillance is important.
Whether it's to protect your house and the things in it with a fancy new doorbell like Nest, or to make sure things like this don't happen at your place of business:
Whatever it may be, surveillance exists for a reason, and in the case of protecting yourself from theft or anything the outside world may throw at you, surveillance is a good thing, but when is too much of a good thing a bad thing, and do we always now the reason we're being watched?
After reading the Tufecki piece It's almost like were living in George Orwell's 1984 where big brother is always watching our every move. And as someone who doesn't necessarily like to err on the side of wanting a ton of government control and involvement in my life, I'm weary when thinking about how much a stranger could know about me and my online search habits.
It's crazy to see how Mark Zuckerberg was forced to testify before Congress on the amount of personal information Facebook was able to extract from its users. To me, it's funny that Facebook was the one who got in trouble, when I bet the government can know about and track our every move online without anyone really batting an eye or keeping them honest.
It's even become a joke at this point how much the government probably knows about our private lives.
These types of memes have become popular in the past few months and they play on the fact that everything that is done online is tracked for whatever reason. While this may come off as a major invasion of privacy, it's also kind of nice knowing (or hoping to know) that someone looking up how to cause mass harm to others can be stopped just because their Google searches may warrant an investigation.
While we're told over and over that we live in a free country, I'd like to argue that isn't the case when looking at things like street-level surveillance and that machine you have to stand in at the airport. I like the idea of being safe from terrorism, but we don't really give the benefit of the doubt anymore. After 9/11, it seems like the government is forced to assume everyone is a terrorist.
I certainly like this feeling of safety, but one thing I could do without is constantly having things I’ve talked about with my friends or done quick searches for come up in my Instagram feed. It’s cool to think that I can have a custom-tailored internet experience every time I open my laptop of phone, but it freaks me out when I talk about a pair of shoes briefly with my friends and the next thing I know I have a million ads waiting for me on the side of Facebook.
Are they listening to me? I know people who believe they're constantly being watched by someone so they cover the camera on their laptop to assure they can't be seen.
It's hard to know just how much or how little we are actually being watched and for that reason alone, I think it's best to stay low-key online. While I'm sure I'll still continue to to get ads for clothes I've shopped around online for, I wouldn't expect anything less than someone knocking at my door if my Google searches started becoming things like, "How to join Isis" or "How to build a bomb."
Honestly, they'll probably be after me just for typing that.