It is a common
fact that you could position yourself better in a social setting if you know
the people you are dealing with, namely their interests and personalities. If
you have power, the knowledge of such things can help you manipulate people
into playing to your plan without coercion. This is the benefit of total
surveillance to the government and other corporations, and they can save money
from making surveys.
This is why
laws on fairness about privacy are put in place. We all want freedom to do
things on our own accord, and without these laws that allow us to protect our
rights to privacy, we just lose to the bigger corporations.
But then the
best player for the game comes. Technology.
Technology
carries an amour of convenience and wonder at the capabilities of a device to
perform superhuman tasks. Carrying this particular superhuman mentality associated
with technology, we inevitably enjoy things that some entity could use against
us. We willingly post information about our own selves through social media,
share our thoughts through blogs.
Technology is making it easy for us to enjoy
this particular freedom, a freedom that has a cost in the form of providing
oppressors confidential information about ourselves.
This is why
total surveillance, regardless of new laws coming about to protect the right ofindividuals, is highly inevitable. It will likely have similarities to the
total surveillance described in Brave New World. No, it will not be an
Orwellian police state, but, because the government and almost every
corporation in the world knows what we want, they are not breaking any laws
because we allow them to look into our lives with open arms.
