They Know You better than You Know Yourself

They know When You've Been Sleeping, They Know When....

I was already up early running to the airport to see the wife, daughter, and grandson off for a vacation North, and thinking about “privacy rights”, and just how much information I was giving away to the unknown authoritarian state on this small trip.

When I got home only to see this headline in the “New York Post”

UNAMAZIN'

Mets used facial recognition to profit on unsuspecting Citi Field fans: suit

You see as I was unloading the bags for the wife and daughter at the airport, hugging everyone goodbye, and driving away leaving them to get to the gate, I worried pulling away that they might leave something in the car, and I’d be called to double back through.

And it hit me.

My phone is “pinging” to some cell tower right then, the path of this particular trip is mapped out somewhere. Were anyone to care enough to use current technology they could see the trip in its entirety. They could even see the stop for gas, and with access to credit card information see how much I spent. They could see the subsequent cash withdrawal outside of the Publix, where I need cash to pay to have the storm shutters removed from the windows in the home that aren’t “hurricane impact glass”.

Every waking minute of our lives today is an open book to someone who can profit from that information.

One might say in response to that thought, “who cares, I’ve nothing to hide”, but that misses the point completely. Others might say, “what is so interesting about your particular life that anyone would care to view your comings and goings”.

And that completely misses the point.

The point is, they are selling off your privacy to those who believe they can exploit you. Me.

Which should feel like a violation of our privacy rights. Our private lives should not be “for sale”. Outside entities should not have the ability to track our moves, track our spending habits, listen to our conversations 24/7, and gather data on our behavior, the culmination of which results in our being targeted by corporations for exploitation.

And please, don’t tell me that “they” aren’t listening 24/7. My wife’s name happens to be “Cynthia”, and I call her “Cindy”, or I might just yell “Cin” throughout this small house to get her attention. And lo and behold the phone will respond “I didn’t get that”. The phone mistaking my ridiculously low class Baltimore accent in pronouncing “Cin” as “Siri”, and thinking I’m calling out to the phone to gather up some needed information on my behalf.

It happens all the time. I sit at my desk, call out “Cin”! and have to hear Siri respond.

Would that not indicate that the phone is sitting at the ready listening, listening, listening? And if it is listening for me to call out “Siri”, would it not hear all else?

I’ve said before in this space that future generations who study our times and the advent of the beginning of the internet will marvel at how we gleefully and voluntarily just gave away all our rights to privacy. Willingly. Many installed a device in their home so they could use it as an assistant. So they’d have the convenience of making dinner, and being able to just call out “Siri, turn on Spotify”, or “Siri, turn on Disney Channel for the kids”. And Voila! It happens on command.

How convenient when knee deep in potato peeling that you don’t need to stop dinner prep to find “Moana” for the kiddies.

But at what cost?

The cost of having all conversation in the home recorded.

At this point you’d be foolish not to tie in the fact you’ve gone online and are hit with back ads all down the sides of your search coincidental to the conversation you had earlier with the wife about how much your struggling today with back pain.

Or asking the wife what car she thinks might be best to buy in replacing the older vehicle sitting in the garage. And then online every ad is a car ad for a week.

These are not accidents of chance. Your conversations are being sold out. Your private conversations.

I didn’t install one of those “Siri”, or Alexis” devices in the home for that exact reason, however, just having an iPhone has the same results. This phone that sits at my side at all times. Listening, listening.

Let me ask you, could the wistful conversation with the wife as she stands in the kitchen making a cup of coffee, where I claim that I’d love to spend Thanksgiving in New Orleans for four or five days, but we are too broke to go right now, be used somehow by credit rating agencies to review my credit score? Could I be doing damage to my own credit score by an offhand and not quite true conversation over a trip we never intended to take?

As the article on the “Amazin’ Mets” demonstrates, somehow the collection of information on your attendance at a game, and your behavior inside the park, is profitable enough to ownership to go through the expense of installing expensive facial recognition software.

It wasn’t enough you purchased a ticket to the event, it wasn’t enough you paid the exorbitant fees for food and beverage, and bought some overpriced logo’d merchandise, ownership wasn’t satisfied with all that cash flow. They decided to sell “you” for a profit as well. And I doubt they discounted the sixteen dollar a beer price because you smiled at the camera and willingly gave up your location, and all financial data in an instant.

Few things upset me as much as hearing from a friend, “who cares”, “I don’t care what information they think they have about me, I’ve got nothing to hide, let them collect all their little data”.

What a poor deluded fool.

I’m older, facing sixty-seven in a few weeks. The privacy I enjoyed as a young man, my rights to privacy, no longer exist.

My phone pings a cell tower the minute I leave the house. Almost every red light between here and my destination has a camera that takes my picture. Possibly my speed. The car itself has “lane assist”, and could possibly be transmitting every data point about my drive to the insurance firms. How many times I went “out of lane”, how fast I was going, how far over the speed limits. How many times I swerved, or drove recklessly. Every stop I make the location is noted. Concurrently every transaction is seen. Right down to every grocery item purchased.

Would the agency providing my health insurance like to see how many calories I am consuming, would they frown on the two half-gallons of ice cream purchased on sale? Could their knowledge of my caloric intake raise my health care rates, in the same way the auto insurance company could decide that I am a bad risk for speeding everywhere I go, and therefore either have to pay some new exorbitant fee, or find another firm?

Is it “fair” to me, to us all, that by gathering this information insurance companies who are supposed to be in the “risk business”, can determine those who are least risk, and drop coverage for all those they deem high risk? When you choose only to insure the low risk and none other, are you really an insurance industry taking a risk, or are you a company that has created a “cash machine” that just pumps out profits based on extreme knowledge of the driving habits of those you insure?

It used to be as long as you avoided speeding tickets and accidents the insurance company couldn’t accurately measure your risk potential. They had ideas based on aggregating information about age and accidents, age and speeding, and even location information about the total number of accidents within some radius of where you might live. They made an “educated guess” as to your potential to be a “bad risk”.

But today, especially with every idiot who voluntarily installed one of those “snapshot” devices onto their own car and gave up all driving habit information willingly, the companies “bet” on you as a risk has become more perfectly honed and measured. The predictability of you as a client becomes much more clear to those betting the risks.

And guess what happens then?

You’ve participated in giving up all the information they need to either raise your rates, cancel you, or embrace you as being in the “very good zone” of risk and a customer every company would love to have.

Far, far too many of us take a rather casual approach to the collection of their data.

If it has value, if your habits have value, why then don’t you benefit?

The owner of the “Amazin’ Mets” benefits. The credit card companies are benefitting greatly. They know everything about you. They can predict your spending habits a year out and more. It is March, time to book that vacation at Kiawah again, just as you have the last six years running.

Or perhaps not, maybe ads for Reynold’s Plantation, or The Boca Club, or some other high end resort flooding your online searches come next March could entice you away from Kiawah this year. Or, perhaps Kiawah should send a side ad, keep you in the fold.

Either way, your habits are for sale.

I prefer a fight that is more fair, I prefer the old days, when my driving habits were my own business, and it was up to the insurance companies to use their tables and charts to determine where I stood as a risk. They didn’t have access to my entire annual trip habits, speed, and how often I violated in “lane departure”.

The game now feels rigged against me. If risk is known completely in advance then profit potential is secure. Which makes the very idea of insurance a lie. Under perfect knowledge there is no risk.

No one should be privy to the fact I got up early to go to the airport this morning. Unless I wish to share that information with others. Say, 200 readers in a day.

Just as no one needs to know you skipped out on work to go to a ballgame such is your devotion and love of the “Amazin’ Mets’. They don’t need to ping your phone about a pretzel and beer and short wait time in concession lines “right now”, when they see you have a history of getting up in the sixth inning for a bathroom break, and snacks.

That isn’t good business, it is preying on your proclivities.

Fat girls don’t need cupcake ads sent to their mobile phones when they are approaching the bake shop.

Alcoholics don’t need to see a bourbon ad as they drive past their liquor store.

What you might see as some convenience, the ad sent about the exact car in the make and model of your choice just ahead of your decision to purchase a new car, I see as exploitation.

Privacy is dead. And we all helped murder it.

The cell phone we all think of as our friend, is in reality a vicious enemy, selling us out by the hour, the minute, the second.

Somewhere in the bowels of the Mets stadium a computer is saying “hey look, there is Bob, he always buys at the concession stand, let’s send him a cell text about that new popular sweat shirt”.

Is that a convenience, or exploitation?

Personally I think the profit motive tells the answer.