The Internet Is Watching

I’ve lived in this city for 15 years and I never ate at a nearby Hardee’s until a couple weeks ago. I’ve dined at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, and perhaps one or two other fast-food franchises I can’t recall at the moment, but never at that nearby Hardee’s.

Then recently I bought a meal there and something surprising happened. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

I have an Android phone that gives me notifications that pop down from the top of the screen. A few days after I ate at Hardee’s, my phone sent me a notification from Google asking me to help them by rating that Hardee’s restaurant.

So my immediate thought was, how does Google know I ate there? Then I remembered I had paid for my meal with a credit card. The credit card company knows I ate there and somehow that information was communicated to Google. The two companies probably have an “agreement”.

Our lives are stored in marketing databases. Corporations have access to these databases and constantly update them to keep them current. They collect information about you, your family, your friends. Information about me. Information about everyone. These databases are being updated every day, every hour, every minute. I can search Google for an item I’m thinking about purchasing, and the very next website I visit will display an ad for that item. It works that fast. I’m sure we would all be amazed at everything the databases know about our lives.

George Orwell wrote a novel titled 1984, of which Wikipedia says: “The novel is set in the year 1984 when most of the world population have become victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation.”

Perpetual war? Government surveillance? Public manipulation? Does any of that sound familiar?

Considering that the book was published in 1949, I think Orwell was a bit of a prophet. Novelists write dystopian novels in the hope that we can avoid the future they describe. Have we avoided 1984’s dystopian future?

Perhaps you’re worried about government surveillance. I don’t know what lies at the bottom of government surveillance. Terrorism and crime prevention, probably. Political manipulation, maybe. Control of the populace, hopefully not but I wouldn’t rule it out. On the other hand, what lies at the bottom of corporate surveillance is surely money. In this case, money may be the lesser evil.

Money and profit may be the goal of collecting so much information about us, but when a lot of information about a lot of people is collected and made accessible, there is a danger of misuse—and this collected information about all of us is always for sale. 

In the world of surveillance, I suspect the government wishes it had the surveillance network that the Internet has become. Wiretaps are time-consuming and have legal hurdles. Monitoring every keystroke on your computer and every website you visit and every request for information you make with your phone has become effortless. The network is in place. The technology is working day and night.

Perhaps I’m overstating the pitfalls of having so much of what we consider our private information available for purchase. Or perhaps I’m understating the pitfalls. To paraphrase John Philpot Curran, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Before you use a search engine, before you “Ask Google,” before you say “Alexa, help,” you might pause a moment to consider what you are revealing about yourself. If you don’t care, then ask away.