Big Brother is watching

The good old days

I come from a sleepy little village in rural Bengal. Childhood was normal, but one thing I knew pretty early on - nobody beyond the 10km radius of my village knew where it was. So all address requests were answered with a short description of general direction with respect to other known reference point (something like "South of Heaven, West of Hell"). Anyway, as a young boy I absolutely hated it. As I grew up, I learnt to live with it and dreamed that someday I will put it on the map.

And then I grew up and the world has changed

One day, I got a rude shock though - someone had already done that. And not only for my village for all small and big towns in the world. Welcome to the days of Google Maps, Wikimapia and scores of others. The idea was, if it is on earth, it is on the map. And then came other Google products which meant not only the earth, but the sky and stars above it were waiting to be explored on your computer.

In itself, nobody could see much wrong with it. After all the great explorers of 17th and 18th centuries had been charting the waters of deep seas assiduously. What's wrong in having such cartographic data available to the finger tips (unless you are using the stylus on yuor XDA) of common man? But something hit home hard last week.

Gautam under the "bodhi" tree

I was browsing the maps in satellite mode to check out a particular location in London before I went there (talk about virtual tourism!). A curious bystander just commented "it's amazing what they have done, I can see me mum's car parked in the backyard." Well, of course he was referring to the satellite image that Google had placed on the map site. I almost reflexively said "Yeah! Bet you that someday, looking at that you would be able to say if she is at home or not".
He was ofcourse unimpressed and thought that I was a day-dreamer. And then the point hit home hard. Shit! some day, not in the distant future, the hardware and the software would be capable enough to send live streaming data for all locations around the earth, 24 by 7, 365 days a year. Like it or not, the future is more Orwellian than the past.

Imagine the possibilities

Thinking a little bit more about it, this is nothing special. This is the natural progression of things. I had seen the days where there was as many number of telephones in my village as there are moons in the night sky. Today, not only does a huge number of houses have them, a majority also has got mobile phones and some have more than one. These devices are so powerful that you can use the chip inside it to make secure payment transactions, watch live vedeo streams, act as a GPS locator and of course, make and receive phone calls. in the old days, you never knew who made a call as the whole village calls and receives calls from one single number. Today, it doesn't matter where you are and how well you are hidden, if someone wants to find out who made what call to whom and when, you can just do it.

I can give loads of examples - your debit/credit card contains more information than probably you want the taxman to know, your browser contains patterns of your browsing history which you don't want your boss to find out. With ever increasing technologicl progress, we are more and more exposed.

Is it a good thing?

As with most things in life, there is no one answer to it. It all depends on how you use it. But I guess the difficult part is what choice would people have to remain anonymous? It is not true that everybody who wishes to remain anonymous are plotting an attack, it could be just that you want an extra portion of chips when you are on a strict diet. I am not saying it is like this but imagine this - You are on a strict diet, you must avoid all fatty food, but you can't resist that portion of chips. You buy it and pay by your card. The card processor sorts your transactions and sends all food related items to your dietician. Next thing you know is that you have an angry doctor eating your head off. You don't want that, do you? So, what's wrong in being able to purchase that fries "anonymously"?

I guess the most vulnerable are the lesser informed individuals. They would give off information without knowing they are doing it, and then some of the more learned and corrupt members of the society will plunder that. With more technology being made available, there would be more such "transparency" and more opportunity for the sharks to get their kill. Probably, Big Brother is not big enough. Sadly, the losers would be the people who do not need to hack others information but do not want being hacked either. They have to learn to manage more passwords and PINs and codes all of which should be strong (i.e. gibberish to the human intelligence).