Big Brother is
watching you
LIBBY
PURVES
B
etween hard news and paranoid
fantasy, we’ve all become aware this
year just how much of our data big
tech companies have on fi le. They
are gently, politely sucking out facts
about our travels, fi nances, personal
tastes and connections through our
phones, laptops, tablets and watches.
Some people even keep a cylindrical surveillance
machine in their house, supervising everything from
TV and internet shopping to lights-out time. Not
so much Big Brother as nosy little sister. Its creators
actually applied for a patent enabling said device
to eavesdrop uninvited on
conversations without being called
for (a bit like a nosy parlourmaid,
ear pressed to the keyhole).
This means that ‘she’ could pick
up hints on what to try and sell
you next. Or, in some dystopian
near future, diagnose you as an
undecided voter and send you persuasive political
messages from a creepy committee in Cambridge.
They say they won’t do these new bad things – perish
the thought. But the future rolls ever more rapidly
towards us, and some people’s devices have reportedly
started giving chuckling, sinister laughs. Well, they
might: several people I know admit to sleeping with
their iPhone under the pillow because it’s ‘in charge’
of monitoring whether they have a good night’s sleep
or not. That thing is probably listening to you breathing,
assessing your snores and drawing dark conclusions to
pass on to your health insurer...
But what has this to do with yachting, you cry? Aha.
It may have been a cheese-fuelled dream the other night,
but I woke up convinced that we, the proud free sons
of the waves, were defi nitely up next. Who is more ofa patsy for new technology than the modern yachtie?
Who is it who succumbs, despite costs rising year after
year, to little boxes containing everything technology
can invent, moving from basic echo sounder and RDF,
to Decca, then to GPS and AIS? Who was it who greeted
with excitement the refi nements which saw plotter and
sounder and compass and autohelm and engine and
batteries talking freely to one another, and to an app on
the skipper’s phone? Who squeaks around boat shows in
deck shoes with a credit card and a happy daze, throwing
their heart over the windmill for every new gizmo?
Us, that’s who. Proud boat owners, lovingly lavishing
new kit on the beloved craft. Already your plotter knows
where you’ve been, which may
have already led to a few fraught
marital conversations: ‘Darling,
this line here – in what sense was
Deauville “on the way home” from
the club rally to Port Solent? Are
you sure you were stuck for three
days on a mudbank in Beaulieu?’
There are now enough voice-activated nav apps for
cars to make it likely that it won’t be long before boats
get them, and Vice Commodore Pugwash of the Royal
Mud Lump YC is able to snap, ‘Waypoint East Bramble’
or ‘352° magnetic!’ without putting down his gin.
If an appliance can hear commands, it can also listen.
As AI becomes ever more sensitive, it might also draw
conclusions, and act upon them – bleep, fl icker, fl ash
and it’s diverted the boat smartly away from a destination
it knows to be a dangerously boozy weekend with the
lads. Which, moreover, also carries – bleep! *checks
the bank* – a risk of exceeding stated overdraft limit.
Expect a grating voice from the future to say, in the
tones of Nurse Ratched, ‘Illegal Operation. Does not
compute. Course adjusted, 360°, ETA Ramsgate 1800.’
Well, it was just a nightmare. Or was it?We throw our hearts
over the windmill
for new gizmos
COLUMN