We Are Information

  Information has become the new currency of the 21st century. It seems like everyone is champing at the proverbial bit to gather intel on people. I just read an article about a company that uses sensors to track the movements of GPS enabled smartphones in order to gather information about the habits of the smartphones' owners. The collectors of said data process it and sell it to their clients so they can better sell their products and services. As this technology becomes more ubiquitous, the amount of data gathered about our movements and habits will grow exponentially. The question is how much privacy will we lose as a result of this technology? Big Brother already exists to some degree in our society. However, unlike in Orwell's fictional Oceania, this Big Brother hides in plain sight. Instead of Thought Police, we have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the like. And we voluntarily supply information about ourselves to these sights. Couple that with the information surreptitiously gathered via our smartphones, computers and tablets and the amount of information about us that exists on the Web is probably staggering. Data mining has become very lucrative for some companies and unlike precious metals, it won't run dry. This is a double edged sword we're wielding. In the wrong hands, we could end up prisoners in an information driven techno-dictatorship where our movements and information are constantly tracked and collated in order to keep us in line.