Generally, I’m not very paranoid. I’m usually a “go with the flow” kind of girl and things like surveillance don’t really bother me. However, after reading Parry’s Ubiquitous Surveillance, I feel the presence of paranoia looming in my mind. It is really hard to believe that in such a “free” country, we have to deal with surveillance on such an intense level. It is especially hard for me to believe that just because I have social networking connections, anyone anywhere anytime can figure out things about me. Let the paranoia begin.
“It might seem odd to include the concept of ‘surveillance’ within a book series about life, but one claim I would like to advance as part of this collection is the idea that one cannot consider life without also considering the data that life produces.” To me, this makes a ton of sense. EVERYTHING that I do can (and most likely will) be traced by someone. No matter what you do these days a paper (or data) trail follows. So, it wouldn’t be hard to tap into that data if one knew the right buttons to push. Scary.
What’s even scarier is that someone can find out anything about you via your social connections like Twitter. “In his study, Daniel Gayo-Avello shows how, relying on the principle of homophily and analyzing relationships, in this case on Twitter, one can determine sex, age, religious or political affiliation, race or ethnicity, and sexual orientation of a given individual with a relatively high degree of precision.” REALLY?! It blows my mind to think that someone I don’t even know could find out anything about me just by searching my connections with other people! How is a person supposed to protect themselves from people they don’t even know are looking at their connections? How is it even possible to protect yourself from something that you can’t know is going on? These are questions I’m sure a lot of people ask everyday and the only answer is “There is no way.” Sad, but true. You cannot protect yourself from things that you don’t even know about. You simply have to live your life, try not to be paranoid, and cross your fingers that your identity is not the one being targeted.

References: http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Surveillance/Introduction