Increasingly, surveillance is being normalized and integrated in our lives. Under the guise of convenience, applications and features are sold to us as being the new better way to do things. While some might be useful, this convenience is a Trojan horse. The cost of it is the continuous degradation of our privacy rights, with all that that entails.
As appalling as it is, the truth is the vast majority of software companies do not consider privacy rights and data minimization practices strongly enough, if at all. Most fail to implement the principles of Privacy by Design that should guide development from the start.
Whether this comes from ignorance, incompetence, greed, or malicious intent can be debated. It matters little, because the result is the same: Technologies collecting (and monetizing) a shameful amount of data from everyone.
This horrifying trend ends up facilitating and normalizing surveillance in our daily lives. It is the opposite direction of where we should be going.
The more we accept this normalized surveillance, the harder it becomes to fight back. It is critical that we firmly and loudly object to this banalized invasion of our privacy.
There are countless examples of this growing issue, but for now let’s focus on three of them: Airport face scans, parking apps, and AI assistants.
This is separate from A-GPS. Google seems to be using WiFi rather than Bluetooth, but the broader point remains the same. No one is stopping any vendor from crowdsourcing the location of every BT device… which is what Apple has done, for Airtags which don’t have the battery capacity to run a GPS chip.
Sure without GPS it wouldn’t be very effective to rely on only nearby devices to guess the current location. But an attacker only has to get lucky once to get your home address. So the only safe approach is to hide nearby devices/networks from unauthorized apps.