Draw The Curtains, Sapiens!
Since the day when the Sapiens defeated the Neanderthals and strived to become the only human species, there has been a continuous evolution and the result of which is us. Even though it is one of the striking differences between the ‘then’ Sapiens and the present Sapiens, the root cause of the Nakedness of the former and extravagance in covering of the latter, is more often than not, OVERLOOKED.
As the human species evolved, they made it clear: Very few things are to be disclosed about oneself. Which is why, clothes came on the stage. Humans didn’t want to bear bleakly cold days bareback , but more importantly, they obviously didn’t want fellow humans to stare at them in a way which only them who were given consent had the right to. This was the first ‘privacy policy’ of mankind:- restriction to disclose certain things about an individual. Then came scattered dwellings: humans started to dominate living spaces and did seldom share them. And after almost a thousand years, with minor other information restriction abilities, curtains were invented to keep the news of the salt of a house to its members, and members only. After that few more centuries passed while mankind attempted to increase privacy and emerged victorious. And that’s why it’s so destroying to hear and accept that, after all the efforts of mankind, privacy has started to shatter as a glass house today. We are back to square one.
Every tap on our cell phone, every press on our keyboard, every voice note to our smart speaker are being noted. These are raw data, which when processed becomes information. This information states our very personal choices and preferences. These bits of information are then sold to advertising companies. Then one fine morning, our day begins with the advertisement of a product we were searching on the web, or were talking about with our friend the previous evening. This may seem to be oversimplified, but the validity of this example is ruthlessly true and yes, it hits very hard.
However, just as an atom’s neutrality, there are people who oppose this game of data and neutralize the villains (who are playing this game) to some extent. Brian Acton, one such individual, happens to be the inventor of WhatsApp’s End-to-End Encryption, which transform the messages we send into codes which is hard to crack and convert these codes again to the messages once they reach the recipients. This prevents middlemen to read our messages thereby guaranteeing our privacy. Acton couldn’t continue for long when Facebook acquired WhatsApp and he did this just because he was against compromising with one’s privacy. He founded Signal which is in itself the Gold Standard of Privacy and anti-data theft and most importantly is non-profit.
It’s a common notion that it’s our data they are skimming and they don’t know us. Then what’s all this about? Explaining in broad terms, it’s like being kept in a brightly lit glass room without any curtain and outside in the dark there are eyes watching our every breath, whom we can’t see properly. We search for pants on the web to shop them online, and they get to know about our pant size and find out whether we are obese or anorexic. When we search for mutual funds, they get to know that we have some spare money and start to give advertisements about luxurious things which more often than not we end up buying. This means they know our money. We search for doctors and information about diseases on the web and they get to know about the diseases we have which we may not want to disclose. They know the most intimate details of our bodies. They know us more than any other person in the planet.
Although we can still minimize the embarrassment to an extent and people like Edward Snowden and Elon Musk are shouting out to us HOW. It’s high time we exercise our options very carefully. It might seem unconvincingly boring and tedious but reading the privacy policy of an app/website whatsoever before hurrying to press Agree and making a fool of ourselves is one of the first steps. Above all we have to be ever vigilante and subscribe to the services of such social media behemoth who have their own reputation to respect our privacy.
Draw the curtains Sapiens, they are watching us NAKED.
