Happy New Year! Welcome to 1984!

    This television commercial, directed by Ridley Scott is widely considered to be the best ever made. It introduces the MacIntosh computer as the first personal computer with a graphical interface. This ad depicts a woman destroying the iconic "Big Brother" from George Orwell's iconic novel 1984, which is a criticism of government intrusions upon personal privacy. The woman in this ad represents Apple's new computer. The implication is that Apple and their computer are cool because it stands against conforming to "the man". Since then Apple has come along way, making some very ingenious products and literally creating whole new styles of life. They have also become a company that assists in the very thing they were attacking in this ad.

     Based upon the recommendation from the This Week in Google podcast (HODOR! #253) I recently viewed the episode of Frontline entitled The United States of Secrets on YouTube. I have included l both episodes at the bottom of the page. While this is not the documentary that Hannah and I chose this week it was very informational and highly recommended. It also informed the documentary that we did choose, which was called Terms and Conditions May Apply. This film was very good and serves as a supplemental to what we have already learned from whistleblower Edward Snowden.
   Terms and Conditions May Apply was written and directed by Cullen Hoback and discusses two major points; First, we often do not know what we are signing when we agree to the Terms of Service put out by major media companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple and AT&T among many others. The second point is that while we might trust that these corporations might not have malicious intent, the government likely also has access to this information.

    Let's consider Google as an example of what this is documentary is trying to say. Google is arguably the most useful of these companies that we come into contact with on a daily basis and it is 99% free of charge. Google Search is free. Google Maps are free. The personal assistant mobile app Google Now is free. So is Google Drive, Gmail, Google Scholar, Google Calendar, Google Translate, Google News, Google Wallet and YouTube. If you use Google Plus you get excellent and yet still free automatic photo editing. You are reading this blog thanks to a free Google service.  This is not even scratching the surface of the the Android ecosystem which is a major component in the growing economies of the third world. In return, we hand over a truly frightening amount of information to Google that they then use to tailor make ads for us. For instance, if you use a smartphone, Google most likely knows where you are 24 hours a day. They know where you live and how much money you make. They know your phone number and who your best friends are and what their phone numbers are. It is estimated that the amount of data we give to Google is worth (to them) somewhere between $500 and $5000 depending on your usage. Most of this is common knowledge because Google has generally been very upfront about gathering and storing information about us.  What many people do not know however is that almost all internet companies are doing the exact same things and are not being nearly as upfront as Google has been.

      For instance, Apple also tracks locations in every iPhone ever made. Facebook knows where you live and quite literally knows everything about your friends. Yahoo Mail also "reads" or electronically scans your email in ways identical to the way Google does so. 

     What is much more frightening (at least to me) is that the government also has access to this information. This documentary was released a month after Edward Snowden made his disclosures about the National Security Agency and therefore did not make any mention of him. The Frontline documentary went into much more detail about Mr. Snowden and the links between internet companies and the NSA. Terms and Conditions May Apply did assert many of the same things that were later proven by Mr. Snowden. Specifically it asserted that the NSA had backdoors into major internet providers like AT&T and Verizon and that they were actually copying information as it passed through their internet hubs. This film also discussed the now infamous National Security Letters that forced companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo disclose user information without a warrant and without the knowledge of the user.

      Whatever you might think of Google, Facebook and Apple they have now become necessary. If Google were to have a worldwide failure across all its services for even one day we would see a major economic impact. We can literally no longer live without these companies. The National Security Agency wiretapping is another matter. Whatever you might think of this, one thing is clear; we no longer have any sort of privacy. Happy New Year, welcome to 1984. We must now assume that all our digital traffic is being tracked and stored, we must assume that our phone calls are being listened in on. Both Terms and Conditions May Apply and the Frontline United States of Secrets are recommended viewing and I hope we will take these issues under consideration the next time we have an opportunity to vote.