ALL EYES
(
& ears)
ON YOU
By WING SZE TANG
Is your smartphone spying on you?
Welcome to Big Brother 2. 0.
IN THE 1964 SPY FLICK GOLDFINGER, James Bond’s gadget arsenal included a “homer,” a
tracking device that was sci-fi then and seems quaint now. Today, 007 wouldn’t need it: There are lots
of companies selling our real-time location data based on where our cellphone is. They buy this data
from not only wireless carriers in the U.S. and Canada but also innocuous apps, like the ones we use
to check the weather, get sports scores or read the news. According to a 2018 New York Times exposé,
there are at least 75 such data-brokers trading in the whereabouts of millions of devices. “Location
information can reveal some of the most intimate details of a person’s life,” U.S. Senator Ron Wyden
told the newspaper, “[like] whether you’ve visited a psychiatrist, whether you went to an AA meeting,
who you might date.”
If the threat of losing your privacy makes you shrug—after all, why worry if you have nothing to
hide?—consider t hat t here’s more at sta ke t han just secrecy. “P r ivacy is about hav i ng persona l cont rol
over your personal data,” explains Dr. Ann Cavoukian, who leads the Privacy by Design Centre of
Excellence at Ryerson University. If you’re personally cool with disclosing exactly where you live,
where you go every day, what you write in every email, what you’ve Googled, what pics you’ve snapped
and more—well, having privacy means that’s your call. Privacy means control isn’t in the hands of
corporations and governments that may vacuum up your data and use it for purposes you can’t predict
now, don’t know or don’t want. h
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