Whoever ‘they’ are. The use of our personal technology by
unnamed spies to silently soak up our needs and interests has moved out of the
domain of conspiracy theorists and into the realm of the average Joleen’s every
day. Jokes about Alexa and Siri joining the conversation are old hat but
perhaps we should be more concerned about how widely our personal lives have been
invaded.
Computer whizz Number 1 Son was scanning my new and rather
sexy silver slimline laptop with an anti-virus programme a few weeks ago when
an alarming message flashed up. “XYZ CORP IS WATCHING YOU THROUGH YOUR WEBCAM”,
it warned. This machine had been out of the box and plugged into the
internet for less than an hour, and my eyes bulged saucer-like. No 1 didn’t
blink, he simply clicked and tapped and did something or other before casually
saying that indeed, our phones ARE listening to us, capturing key words and
phrases for marketing purposes. And who is policing this? Who decides what is
of interest to a retailer and which conversation marks me as a potential master
criminal or revolutionary?
Actually, does it matter? It’s a damn violation of personal
rights for whatever reason.
Not long after this rude shock, a friend posted on Facebook
how weird it was that the day after a conversation, you know, one of those one
on one, face to face chats she’d had with a mate about a particular product,
her page streamed advert after advert for it. She joked that her phone must
have listened in and well, yes, it probably did.
Around the same time, I mooched into the Kameraz store in
the Mall of Rosebank and snaffled a fabulous second-hand lens for my beloved
camera. Less than 24 hours later my Facebook page was brandishing adverts for
Kameraz. Let me make it clear, I haven’t lived in Johannesburg since 2008; in
fact, I’ve lived outside of South Africa for over 2 years now. Even when I
lived in SA, the Mall wasn’t a regular haunt. I hadn’t done any internet search
for this particular lens; it was an opportunistic purchase from a super-helpful
salesman. So how did a random shopping purchase end up linking to my social
media? Easy, someone explained, they track your location via your phone. This
does not make me feel better!
But the royal icing was slapped on the scary cake yesterday.
A week or so ago we bought a packet of pasta from a little grocery store in
Diani. Diani is a tiny town on the coast south of Mombasa, Kenya, with
exquisite beaches and not much else, especially in the way of shopping emporia.
Taped to the bag of pasta was a small bottle of coconut oil, some sort of
informal shop promo. Now, all I know about coconut oil is that Him Outdoors
buys jars of the stuff for his breakfast fry-up from the cooking oils shelf and
I pick up the odd bottle from the haircare section but this bottle gave no
indication what the oil was to be used for – hair or eggs. The thought of
adding coconut oil to cooking pasta curdled my stomach, this surely couldn’t be
the intention?
The
devil finds work for idle hands so I turned to Google for help, and began
typing in the brand name.
Parachute…
And Google answered before I typed another letter -
Parachute coconut oil
Now, I don’t know about you but if I was going to rudely
finish someone’s sentence, and it started ‘parachute’ I wouldn’t finish it with
‘coconut oil’. Club, training, jumps, accidents, material, supplies..a host of
other words and phrases spring to mind. How the devil did Google link a crudely
cellotaped bottle of coconut oil, which was not rung up at the till, or
discussed within earshot of a computer or phone, to an internet search?
We can’t explain or understand it either, our best guess is
that Google used our location to presume that the parachute I was looking for
was a never-seen-before brand of coconut oil.
There is no denying it was useful to find out so quickly
that I was holding a bottle of hair oil but this ‘smart’ technology has now
overstepped my boundaries.
How to reclaim our privacy?
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