Becoming (more) Afraid To Post Online

Introduction

I've always been cautious about posting online. It's a bit odd to say, given the 2,700+ posts on this site¹. But, it's true.

Though, I suppose it's more accurate to say I've been cautious about what I post. It's mostly what I consider common sense. Don't post shit about your boss if you had a bad day. Don't post shit about your workplace in general², etc...

I also tend to avoid political posts. Issues are complicated. Trying to sum up thoughts in way that benefits a conversation in a couple hundred characters is tough. Taking the time to really research and write out a longer piece rarely seems worth the effort.

There's also a fear that starts to come into play thinking about the internet mob. That low, background reminder that any given post, by any given person, on any given day, could trigger a group of folks dedicated to fucking up your life.

I'm not that worried about it happening. Odds are, it won't³.

A new, bigger fear looms much larger. The fear of a government that punishes people for what they post online.

Obligatory Orwell

One of the most unsettling things about George Orwell's 1984⁴ is that characters never knew when someone was watching. Cameras were everywhere, but weren't always monitored. Someone could always be watching. Most of the time, they weren't.

With the growing proliferation of AI and Machine Learning tools, we're entering a changed world. It'll no longer be necessary for someone to be watching. It'll be omnipresent AI systems watching everything we do. That gets scary fast.

Imagine everything you post being sucked into an AI to create a loyalty score. A single number said to determine your patriotism. If your number's high enough, you get a certificate. Low enough, you get moved to a camp.

Now, imagine the political party you belong to is out of power. The opposition is in control of the government and the algorithms that power the AI. They decided what patriotism looks like. Who gets accolades and how gets disappeared.

Orwell would shit himself.

~ fin ~

Endnotes

The term "Artificial Intelligence" (or "AI") is misleading. There's no intelligence involved. "Machine Learning" suffers a similar fault. There is no consciousness that "learns".

AI and Machine Learning tools are programs that run on computers. Just like any other software. They mainly differ in the size and scale at which they operate. Something that gives them the capability of producing results that feel like intelligence or learning is behind them even though there's not.

There's more to be said about that, but it's the topic for another post.
I'm mentioning AI/Machine Learning in this post specifically. It's important to point out that the U.S. Governement (among others) is already doing mass survailance. Check out the Wikipedia page on global surveillance disclosures and the Five Eyes contries for more about that.

AI/Machine Learning systems are almost certinally being used along with simpiler algorithms for threat detection. What I'm pointing to is the possibility of a single loyalty or patriotism score. Something akin to a credit score, but used to decided what rights and freedoms you have.
This post talks about online monitoring. The stuff you post on social media, etc... There's a lot of other sources being used to monitor us. For example:
- Every web page you visit
  
  See: Web Analytics, Device Fingerprinting, and Web Beacons for examples. Tracking technologies are also built directly into browsers themselves (e.g. Google has the power to update Chrome to keep track of and report every page you visit)
- Every email you read or write
  
  Whoever provides your email address has access to all your email. There's no way around this. Your email has to exist somewhere and the system is set up like having a box at post office where everything gets delivered. When you want to read your email, your device visits this virtual post office box and shows you what's there.
  
  A key difference is that sending email is more like sending a postcard than sending a letter. That is, anyone who helps deliver it or anyone at the post office can read it at any time. (Unlike a letter which wraps the contents in an envelope.)
  
  There are ways to wrap emails (via encryption) that make them more like letters in envelopes, but they virtually never get used.
- Every app you open and what you do on them
  
  Browsing the web provides some limits around what data can be collected. It's a lot, but it's not quite everything because browser software only allows certain things to work. That's not the case with apps. They can track anything and everything you do in them. And, if you give them permission they can do things like track your location at all times.
  
  See Top Mobile App Analytics Tools (2024) for some details.
- Everything that appears on your TV
  
  One of the grossest technologies I know of is Automatic content recognition. It's embedded in Smart TVs and monitors and reports on everything that shows up on the screen or is heard by a microphone.
- Everything you do on a computer
  
  Microsoft recently introduced a feature called "Recall" that give you the ability "to quickly find and jump back into what you have seen before on your PC". It does this by recording your screen every few seconds and analysing what it sees with AI algorithms.
  
  Computers have always had the power to spy on what you do with them but not Microsoft is actively announcing that they are recording you. There's some benefits to this and right now it's optional, but over time the ability to it to make money by selling the data are inevitable.
- Every place your phone goes
  
  Both Google and Apple offer "Find My Phone" type services. This is to say nothing of the other ways your phone can be tracked. See: Electronic Frontier Foundation - Mobile Phone Location Tracking for more info.
- And more
  
  See the Electronic Frontier Foundation Atlas of Surveillance for more details. It's "a database of surveillance technologies deployed by law enforcement in communities across the United States" and covers drones, body-worn cameras, automated license plate readers, facial recognition, and more.
Some of these sources started out mostly being used by the advertising industry to try to better target us with ads. Increasingly, there are "data brokers" that are collecting and packaging them up to sell not only to advertisters, but to government agencies.
If I could coin a word for all this surveillance it would be:

digopticon

A portmanteau for a digital panopticon.

Footnotes

1 ⤴

There really are more posts

I'm in the middle of updating the software that builds my site as I write this. You can't get to most of the posts right now, but they'll be back soon. Maybe even by the time you read this.

2 ⤴

I had it pretty good

There will always be ups and downs with any gig but most of the time my job was about as good as one could hope for. I had different managers of varying quality, but was lucky enough to end my gig with one of the best bosses you could hope for.

3 ⤴

Playing the game of life

And, yeah. I'm a straight, white dude playing life on easy mode who's still wary of the mob. I can barely imagine how much more intense that feeling would be for folks playing on hard mode.

4 ⤴

1984 by George Orwell

Written in 1949 thinking about 35 years in the future. Orwell didn't predict the specific tools for mass surveillance, but he certainly got in the ballpark.