My reading habits have taken a strange turn lately, but it’s not really my fault. My Kindle has been bossing me around.
It started when I discovered and downloaded a mystery novel about a small-college librarian named Charlie who solves murders when not walking his Maine Coon cat around town on a leash. Then there was a whole series of books about Charlie and his cat.
The Kindle algorithm, armed with the knowledge that I might both enjoy mysteries and like cats, then recommended a different series in the same vein. And, since I kept downloading them, another and another.
You’d be amazed — or perhaps not — at how many novels there are featuring felineophile (OK, I made that word up) amateur sleuths.
I might have made a slight mistake in judgment in confessing this minor idiosyncrasy to a few loved ones, who seem to find it a source of much amusement. “We’ve always known you were eccentric,” my sister said. “We didn’t need Kindle to tell us that.”
But I console myself with the realization that I have stumbled onto a dark secret of which my friends are blithely ignorant: Kindle is not the only technological wonder that bullies me, and a lot of other people.
Amazon knows everything we have ever ordered and “suggests” similar things we might “consider” buying. Google orders our search results based on our search history. Lord only knows what information those lovable “Echoes” in our living rooms are collecting.
And every hour of every day, all of our smart devices are collecting knowledge about our habits and patterns, billions and billions of bits of information available to any person or group powerful or clever enough to make use of it.
In this digital age, writes security technologist Bruce Schneier for wired.com, vendors like Google, Amazon and Apple are becoming our feudal lords, and “we are becoming their vassals” who pledge allegiance to them. We look to them for the convenience of downloading, the ease of constant backups, the ability of universal sharing, for automatic synchronizing and record-keeping. And in turn we trust them to keep our information secure.
Trust is our only option, he warns, because we have “no control over the security provided by our feudal lords.” Our lords “own us” and “ultimately they will always act in their own self-interest, as companies do when they mine our data in order to sell more advertising and make more money. These companies own us, so they can sell us off — again, like serfs — to rival lords… or turn us in to authorities.”
Eric Rosenbach and Katherine Mansted, in an article for the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, worry about the way sophisticated technologies of the information age are being weaponized against democracies by authoritarian regimes, threatening “to jeopardize democracies’ ability to govern and protect their national security, and to undermine people’s trust in democracy as a system of government.” Governments such as those of Russia and China are finding ways of using the Internet to control their domestic information environments even as they labor to add to the doubt we citizens of free countries have in the reliability of information we receive.
I have been among those members of older generations fretting that millennials and the even younger members of iGen have lost all sense of privacy.
Perhaps the rest of us also ought to give a little thought to what use will be made of all the personal data we are increasingly willing to give up.
These dystopian visions might well be too alarmist. But they’re something to mull over the next time we’re “guaranteed anonymity” if only we’ll fill out another online survey.
But I must now return to my latest mystery. The protagonist is zeroing in on the wrong suspect, and the cats are worried.
Leo Morris is a columnist for The Indiana Policy Review. Contact him at [email protected]. Send comments to [email protected]
Leo Morris is a columnist for The Indiana Policy Review. Send comments to awoods@aimmedia
indiana.com.
