I feel we're sleepwalking into a future where all our online or digital behaviour is tracked in some way. And we're not stopping to think about the implications.
Our online behaviour is already tracked and recorded to a large degree. Analytics software is everywhere and growing. The tracking is often not anonymous either; it's far more valuable to companies and organisations when tracking can be tied to an account or email address.
More and more companies are encouraging schools and students to use their digital products and online services. This trend is likely to grow (Google's presence looms particularly large). Tracking data anonymously and aggregating it can have benefits. But to evaluate a service properly, we need to know what is being tracked, how it is aggregated, who has access to that data and how long that data is kept. These are things that companies simply do not reveal. And something that a lot of individuals never ask about in the first place.
Oh, thats not so bad. I'd worry about discovery process in legal matters. "Oh, she read and re-read mommie pr0n over and over in lit class, clearly she was the type to be asking for it, begging for it, so my client is innocent"
I'm NOT saying thats right or wrong WRT, well, anything, I'm just stating the fact this WILL be a problem in court.
Any civil case involving death -n- destruction will be extremely interested in the program authors stats vs class averages for any bug related topics. Not to mention the legal liability of the school for passing a student who spent less than the median amount of time studying garbage collection algo scalability WRT RTOS interrupt latency or whatever. J Random Programmer may be judgment proof, but a uni with an enormous endowment certainly isn't, and they knowingly granted degree credentials to a programmer who later when on to cause grevious bodily harm...
If you're afraid of looking silly to the company, just remember that everyone will be having that fear if their digital profile is requested. Relatively, your value doesn't change. If everyone has stupid stuff on their digital profile, well, the company still needs to hire people, they're not going to reject everyone because that guy posted pics with booze and that guy posted some incriminating status and that guy got in a fight with his LIT 101 teacher over the legitimacy of the class and nearly got suspended! So I doubt anyone rational enough is gonna care.
Also, the most successful companies hire the most capable programmers, so the most successful companies have to be aware of the fact that whatever stupid status you posted about getting arrested for a night in your freshman year at college is not at all correlated to your skill as a programmer. So they wouldn't even bother wasting the legal effort and time to get their hands on your digital profile from Google or Facebook.
Most of this tracking stuff is just going to be used for targeted advertising. All this social and personal stuff is pretty much useless for the workplace unless you're like, a murderer or rapist or something (in which case you're already in records far different than Facebook's or Google's and it really doesn't matter what they do). 70K NSA employees aren't going to randomly stalk the intricate life of some random Average Joe to figure out what color underwear he's wearing. Another irrational fear is that you're unwittingly breaking some stupid bullshit tiny law and all this tracking will allow you to get in trouble with that. howevermanyK Google employees aren't going to hunt you down and get you in trouble because you did something technically illegal because that costs resources to develop the technology to automatically detect those crimes and then legal resources to accuse you of them, and Google really doesn't get anything out of spending those resources (I doubt the government would pay off Google for that information, either, because if it's some insignificant, mundane, bullshit traffic violation caught by a Google Car, the government wouldn't care because they're too busy spending their resources towards more important stuff, like murders or kidnappings. Big companies already cooperate with government on large scale crimes like that, if that qualifies the trend.) No one is going to fucking make the US into some 1984 clone because that's in no one's incentive.
All of this data is just going to be sold to advertisers because all of these companies don't have any other source of revenue because we all decided we'd rather get ads than directly pay money for Google products. In very rare cases, the government is cooperating with regards to stuff like murders or kidnappings or such.
I mean, if you don't like that, fine. Go ahead and petition to get the ability to pay $30 a year to use Google products (which is the revenue per user per year that they're making off advertisement).
Just recognize that this data isn't going for some James Bond-villian-esque desire rooted in pure evil. It's advertisement.
No one is going to fucking make the US into some 1984 clone because that's in no one's incentive.
Many countries---China, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, North Korea---were increasingly influenced by fervent advocates of utopian Big Government social engineering programs and ended up with "1984 clone" governments as a result. The evil government of "1984" was modeled after real life. Those who brought these governments to power lived by the theory that further social progress required a significant expansion of central government control. Their preferred form of government was Big Government domination of people's lives as long as the domination favored them and their preferred political identity groups.
The US has plenty of such people in positions of influence, and the notion that it is so ridiculous to be concerned about ending up where others have gone before is unsupported by history.
Our online behaviour is already tracked and recorded to a large degree. Analytics software is everywhere and growing. The tracking is often not anonymous either; it's far more valuable to companies and organisations when tracking can be tied to an account or email address.
More and more companies are encouraging schools and students to use their digital products and online services. This trend is likely to grow (Google's presence looms particularly large). Tracking data anonymously and aggregating it can have benefits. But to evaluate a service properly, we need to know what is being tracked, how it is aggregated, who has access to that data and how long that data is kept. These are things that companies simply do not reveal. And something that a lot of individuals never ask about in the first place.