You need to know one simple truth: you have no privacy with regard to your electronic communications.
Nothing
you do online, via a wireline telephone or over a wireless device is
outside the reach of government security agencies and private
corporations. Your ostensible personal communication -- whether a phone
call, an email, a search, visiting a website, a credit card purchase, a
140 character Tweet, a movie download or a Facebook friending -- is a
public commodity, subject to the dictates of the security state and
market opportunists.
Corporate
surveillance has begun to raise consumer, Congressional and regulatory
concerns – a major case, Amnesty v. Clapper, is now before the Supreme
Court. One can only wonder why it is not an issue in this year’s
election?
Corporate spying takes
a variety of forms. GPS tracking over a wireless device is widespread.
Google’s efforts to commercialize its users’ keystrokes resulted in a
$25,000 fine from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Potentially more consequential, a growing chorus of criticism over its
recently introduced data-harvesting program seems to have contributed to
a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation of Google; the FTC
retained Beth Wilkinson, a high-powered outside counsel, to oversee a
possible anti-trust prosecution of the company. On March 1st, Google
introduced a new program that collects user data from its 60 services.
Google stores “cookies” (i.e., code that compiles a record of an
individual’s web browsing history) on a growing number of communications
devices, whether a home PC, tablet, smartphone and a growing number of
TV sets. These cookies track every website a person visits or function
s/he uses. As the New York Times wrote, “The case has the potential to
be the biggest showdown between regulators and Silicon Valley since the
government took on Microsoft 14 years ago.