This week, Google Maps could not find me, and it seemed really pissed off.
I switched all of the location-access buttons on my iPhone from “While Using the App” to “Ask Next Time,” causing my most useful app to launch a series of increasingly desperate pop-up entreaties, begging me to make my life easier by letting it automatically locate me (rather than giving it access to my location only when I type in where I am and where I want to go).
I cannot imagine its stalker rage if I had clicked “Never” allow the app to track my location.
Tough luck, Google Maps. Because, as 2019 ends, I am breaking up with opt-in by taking up a well-worn Silicon Valley bromide as my digital mantra: Only the paranoid survive.
That was, of course, the motto made famous by Intel’s legendary founder and former chief executive, Andy Grove, who later turned the line into a book that was actually about being hypervigilant as inevitable “crisis points” occur at your company.
Mr. Grove saw much trouble in becoming lax, especially after triumph. “Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction,” wrote the canny entrepreneur who immigrated from Hungary having escaped Nazi death camps and later Soviet oppression. “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure.”
It’s still a good piece of advice, but these days it seems as though there is an entirely new way of reading that line when it comes to a different issue in tech: The surveillance economy that continues to spread like a virus worldwide, even as consumers are less aware than ever of its implications.
That includes me, who should know better. I have two-factor authentication. I cover my camera lens on my computer. I redo all my security settings regularly. And, if you read any of my columns this year, you know I am wary of — you might even say mean about — various consumer abuses by giant social-media companies, search behemoths and testosterone-jacked e-commerce companies.
Still, as much as I know about tech, I’m often lazy and use its tools without care, even as each day seems to bring new headlines about privacy incursions sometimes done for commercial reasons, sometimes for malevolent ones, and sometimes just as a result of tech’s latest changes.
The common denominator? The data we generate every day that they then suck up like Dyson vacuum cleaners on steroids.
Source: Read Full Article
Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Be Paranoid About Privacy
Opinion | Be Paranoid About Privacy
This week, Google Maps could not find me, and it seemed really pissed off.
I switched all of the location-access buttons on my iPhone from “While Using the App” to “Ask Next Time,” causing my most useful app to launch a series of increasingly desperate pop-up entreaties, begging me to make my life easier by letting it automatically locate me (rather than giving it access to my location only when I type in where I am and where I want to go).
I cannot imagine its stalker rage if I had clicked “Never” allow the app to track my location.
Tough luck, Google Maps. Because, as 2019 ends, I am breaking up with opt-in by taking up a well-worn Silicon Valley bromide as my digital mantra: Only the paranoid survive.
That was, of course, the motto made famous by Intel’s legendary founder and former chief executive, Andy Grove, who later turned the line into a book that was actually about being hypervigilant as inevitable “crisis points” occur at your company.
Mr. Grove saw much trouble in becoming lax, especially after triumph. “Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction,” wrote the canny entrepreneur who immigrated from Hungary having escaped Nazi death camps and later Soviet oppression. “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure.”
It’s still a good piece of advice, but these days it seems as though there is an entirely new way of reading that line when it comes to a different issue in tech: The surveillance economy that continues to spread like a virus worldwide, even as consumers are less aware than ever of its implications.
That includes me, who should know better. I have two-factor authentication. I cover my camera lens on my computer. I redo all my security settings regularly. And, if you read any of my columns this year, you know I am wary of — you might even say mean about — various consumer abuses by giant social-media companies, search behemoths and testosterone-jacked e-commerce companies.
Still, as much as I know about tech, I’m often lazy and use its tools without care, even as each day seems to bring new headlines about privacy incursions sometimes done for commercial reasons, sometimes for malevolent ones, and sometimes just as a result of tech’s latest changes.
The common denominator? The data we generate every day that they then suck up like Dyson vacuum cleaners on steroids.
Source: Read Full Article