Kenny Farquharson writing in Scotland on Sunday manages to get himself confused on such matters as identity fraud, identity cards, Facebook and the significant difference between compulsory and voluntary. First off, he admits to being a Facebook addict:
I’m not alone. An estimated 150,000 Scots are Facebook users. The site’s Edinburgh network alone has 34,000 members and is increasing in size by 10% every fortnight. This has not gone unnoticed by some employers. Last week it was revealed that companies including Standard Life have blocked office access to networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Managers said some employees were pottering around on these sites for up to three hours a day when they should have been working.
Yeah, I’d noticed. Glancing along the computers at my erstwhile place of work I would see screens showing various Facebook pages. Against company policy, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped people doing it. So what?
There is, however, a more fundamental objection to Facebook. It’s the reason why some of my real-life friends have rebuffed invitations to join me as online Facebook friends. They are uncomfortable with the whole concept of putting personal details about your life – anything from your occupation to your favourite band of the moment – into the public domain.
Ah, yes. Now here we have a choice; we can choose to indulge or not. The guys who invented Facebook produced a product – we can take them up on it or not as the case may be. Personally, I have not. Not because I am paranoid about my personal information but because I really can’t be arsed. Well, it is true that I would prefer not to share the kind of embarrassing personal information that some of my former colleagues chose to, though. That, however is not why I have refrained. If I did decide to take it up, I would be careful about just how much information I shared – that, after all, is simply plain common sense.
By “they” and “them”, he means the array of corporate and governmental organisations who glean tiny details about every aspect of our lives as we make our way through a normal day. Our Tesco Clubcard logs our preference for Mackie’s ice cream over Häagen Dazs, and the extent to which we are willing to pay through the nose for organic veg.
Again, we can choose, can we not? I don’t have a Tesco club card, Boots Advantage card or Nectar card – I don’t like loyalty cards and choose, therefore, not to have one. If I really, really wanted to avoid absolutely any form of tracking of my shopping habits, I could pay by cash.
CCTV cameras catch us at every corner and, if we are driving, vehicle registration recognition keeps tabs on our progress. Oh, and our mobile phones – even switched off – can be used by the security services at any time to pinpoint our exact location to within a couple of yards.
Sigh, this bloke thinks like Neil Harding. I can switch my phone off, should I so please. When in an area where there is CCTV, I pull my hat low over my face purely for the devilment. There’s not much I can do about ANPR and it is something that disturbs me. What Kenny is struggling with here is that the significant difference between mobile phones, Facebook, loyalty cards et al and ANPR, CCTV and identity cards is that the former are voluntary and the latter are compulsory. It isn’t difficult to figure out – a child could do it. Kenny clearly can’t.
I know all this to be the case. I know that to some people it is a fundamental issue of personal liberty. (There are still those among us for whom Big Brother is a portent of totalitarianism from a book written in 1949 and not a reality TV show.)
That is because some of us value our liberty – or in this instance, to be precise, our privacy.
I know it… and I have decided to ignore it. I have come to the conclusion that it’s not worth worrying about it in the slightest, or giving it a moment’s extra thought. And I would urge you to do the same for the good of your mental health.
There is nothing wrong with my mental health – despite buffoons who support increasing state interference in our lives attempting to assert that there is. I simply wish to be allowed to live my life without the state being able to track me. Kenny’s decision to ignore it is not the pragmatic thing to do for his mental health; it is simple denial – as a self confessed addict, he should understand the term.
Resistance is futile. Anonymity in the 21st century is an impossibility, unless you are willing to spend the rest of your life in the gloom of a Highland cave eating barbecued squirrel. The price of living in the information age is surrendering some information about yourself, and accepting that it will be available to people who want to keep an eye on you or sell you something. Get used to it.
Bollocks! I will not get used to it. People who invade my space for whatever reason will get short shrift. I will continue to keep my private life as private as possible. I will continue to avoid clicking on spurious links, uninvited emails and surveys. I will continue to block any attempts by anyone to obtain any more information that I believe is necessary for us to do business – if I do not wish to do business, then they get no information from me. What information I share here is that which I choose to share and no more – and there is plenty I choose not to share.
This is why I refuse to get unduly worried about identity cards or entitlement cards, even though people I know and respect tell me that such developments are an affront to my personal freedom and my human rights. My simple reasoning is that I cannot see an alternative. The technology that allows such information gathering cannot be uninvented.
They are an affront to our freedom. They will either work perfectly and therefore be used by the state to crank down on our liberty or they will be an almighty fuck-up and make our lives a misery as we become non-people unrecognised by the state or worse, incorrectly labelled as a criminal. Fortunately, some of us, unlike Kenny, are not prepared to roll over and be steamrollered by the state. Some of us are rather more concerned about the encroaching authoritarianism of the state while facile fuckwits such as Kenny are busy idling away what little freedom they still have with Facebook and big brother or whatever…
Some of us are not prepared to get used to it, so get used to that.
“I can switch my phone off”.
Two points;
1. This guy in the Scot on Sun reckons you can be located even when the phone is off – I don’t know about that, is he right?
2. Like the vast majority of people, you have probably never switched your phone off for ‘privacy reasons’ and don’t pretend you have, so your argument about voluntary/compulsory, as I have pointed out before, is complete rubbish.
The thing is, there are lots of people out there who want this new technology to improve our lives and we are not going away either, so get used to it. May the best argument win!
Yes and no. The tracking facilities being marketed rely on a signal on which to triangulate. If the phone is switched off, it doesn’t log onto the system; no signal, no triangulation. However, it is possible to send a command code to a particular phone thereby putting it into maintenance mode. That said, it’s hardly straightforward. The only way to be absolutely sure of preventing that would be to take the batteries out. I can’t say that I am too concerned by this one, though. Nor, for that matter am I that worried about commercial tracking facilities as they require permission from the person being tracked.
Then you would be wrong. Mine has been switched off for most of the past 24 hours. These days I have very little use for it. You still don’t get it and probably never will – there is a world of difference between voluntarily giving information to a company in exchange for a service and being forced to give information to the government. It is so simple a child could grasp it – indeed, when it was first explained to me I was a child and I did grasp it.
I will not get used to it and will resist until my dying day. Other people can do as they please – I will not be tracked without my express consent, I will not have an identity card and I will not comply with your idea of a better world, because it is an anathema to me. You will have to get used to that.