Big Brother: Are We All Actors as Well?

2010-03-28T05:56:00.000-07:00

Have you watched The Truman Show or read Orwell's 1984? I watched The Truman Show long time ago before Big Brother appeared on TV. I am not sure whether it is because of reality shows, the news about the terrorism or it is because the advancement of technologies that people became so prone to conspiracy theories and many suffer the "Truman syndrome" - I found something about this on msnbc page.

Well the fact is today's technology can reveal personal informations even the person herself doesn't know. This can help a person to reveal early symptoms of a desease, suggest the activity that improves the mood or reveal other things that can improve the quality of life in general. In the same time personal informations can be abused and there are a lot of groups and organisations that are eager to gain access to personal informations for different reasons.

What does the government know?

The government strives to keep order and power and manage the policy on the international level (wars, relationships with other countries). So if there is someone in the country who wants
to make a harm the government would definitely gain an advantage by discovering the intentions and prevent harmful actions.

In most democratic countries there are law restrictions which prevent the goverment organisations the access to personal informations without the prior judge warrant. So if you're an outlaw or you have been talking (even if joking) about some bad intentions the government agencies might try to collect some additional informations about your behavior and keep an eye on you.

What does Google Know?

By having a huge amount of personal informations, the access to your email and the log of the keywords it is possible to determine many things about the person. Somewhere it has been mentioned that Google tested a service which was able to estimate the risk of cancer upon analyzing the email text.

There is no doubt many concepts have been already discovered for future estimations by analyzing the data from the past and surely the advancement of technology hasn't stopped.

Who has the access to private informations?

As mentioned before in most countries the law is very strict regarding the access to personal informations. Internet providers and telecommunications companies have access to personal data but are not allowed to share it or even examine it.

The paradox: People themself disclose personal informations

The funny thing is that many people are obsessed with Big Brother and at the same time they are freely sharing their informations with everyone. Many people use social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter and regularly share their status. This kind of data could be used by commercial companies without extra effort to determine a customer profile and organize targeted advertising campaigns. There are also other individuals who can predict many things about the person by examining these status reports without any special artificial inteligence.

The morale of this writing is that everyone should be aware of personal behavior and know what is worth to share and what could be harmful. The informations collected by the communications companies and Google are kept in a safe place at least in a democratic countries and until some evil CEO doesn't take over the management of Google. So if you don't have bad intentions and live in a democratic country there is no reason to be afraid of Big Brother. Otherwise in case you live under dictatorship avoid exchanging the informations over the phone because there are no limits in today's technology.

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Big Brother: Are We All Actors as Well?