14 DAY TRIAL // On Friday, somehow bored and in search of an editorial topic I was surfing the Internet. I am talking about the aimless surfing in which you jump from site to site looking for something interesting. During my virtual trip, I got to a popular Internet statistics site. Anxious to see the first position in the top, I clicked (what was I to do, open the door?) on the link.
The Internet highway (to use a common expression) took me to http://www.deathclock.com/, a funny yet sad website. In fact it's a paradox, because the idea that makes it funny is also responsible for the sadness I was telling you about.
The users are given here a clock, a death clock to be more precise. The site's presentation sounds like this: "Welcome to the Death Clock, the Internet's friendly reminder that life is slipping away... second by second. Like the hourglass of the Net, the Death Clock will remind you just how short life is."
That's interesting, I thought, so I need a site to tell me that life is passing away and I will end up as worm food and a place to put flowers on (or in an urn put away on some shelf).
I won't be ranting about the inaccuracy of the date, the parameters used by the DeathClock being the BMI (body mass index, which offers a statistical base for different diseases likely to occur in life) and the user's fondness for cigarettes.
Personally, I was intrigued by the idea of virtual clock that tells you something obvious.
But I was more than intrigued, I was happy because I had found a topic for my weekly material.
I started to think about all the Internet news I wrote about and where we're going, I mean the Internet users and those who are addicted to technology. I realized that in a way we are digging our own privacy hole and that we've become hooked on the virtual environment, from searches to unproductive instant messenger conversations about nothing that last for hours (and this is happening while we are sitting alone in a room mesmerized at the 'monkey box', see monitor, and using our fingers to hit the cembalo - my grandpa had his own idioms to describe computers and peripherals-, see keyboard).
What am I talking about? I am talking about recording all the information regarding an individual, centralization in databases and the technology's increasing popularity among people.
We are all ecstatic at the search engines' amazing capabilities and we act like children when we manage to find some rare or taboo information, but we completely forget that all of our actions are metered and stored. Location does not matter, Mountain View, Redmond or Sunnyvale, you name it, it's the principle that matters. While we are rubbing our hands in delight, somewhere in a modern building, certain servers are restlessly working. We are told of course that they are working to our benefit, what did you expect to be told, that they are working against our privacy?
And, as usual, man proves to be ignorant. By the time something really fishy gets to the media, most of the people mind their searching peacefully. There have been some shouts against the limiting privacy, but apparently they haven't been taken seriously. It took something really bad to happen, such as a subpoena issued by the Department of Justice which forces companies to turn over their records to support a law. Only when we find out that MSN, Yahoo and AOL have complied with the subpoena and that Google is the only search engines to have opposed it, there is a shadow of a doubt among users (I know I've felt it).
But Google is no saint either. This company is also recording data about us and although it's commendable that it has refused complying with the US demands, the Mountain View giant made a move a few days ago which I found rather hilarious. Fearing the Chinese authorities and the communist government's methods, Google moved its records from China to the United Stated. That's great, you might say (as I said the first time I heard about it!). The paradox is that it moved them to the US, where the company is currently fighting the DOJ for refusing to turn over users search query data to the American authorities.
You have to admit that this is rather odd. Even if you're not an IT expert, moving data from one country where you fear the authorities to another one where you are just being asked to turn over data is rather strange, to say the least. If Google had wanted to do something radical, it would have moved all the records to Jamaica and would have buried them.
And all these stored data go hand in hand with the progress of the RFID technology and the dangers associated with it, that of robotizing the human race to ease tasks like finding the keys to your car and apartment.
The RFID system is based on the identification of each object which has a RFID label attached to it. In order for the label to be identified, a RFID reader, which can be placed in any area, is required. No RFID label is identical to the other, like in the case of barcodes and that is why the first RFID systems were introduced in buildings where high security levels were required. But the technology applies to any object, even moving ones, and that is why it didn't take long for the distribution networks to become interested in," Softpedia wrote in an editorial in 2005.
For me, the combination between these two represents the perfect cocktail to reduce privacy to a pile of virtual rubble (after all, who needs it anyway?) and I think that sometimes technology should go on vacation and allow us to go to the bathroom and flush the toilet without having to pass our RFID embedded finger over the lavatory's basin.
