On Friday, I wrote a post about Electronic Immortality and shared a video about how everything we do online is subject to other people seeing it.
I just got a new HTC phone and I hooked it up the other day, but I just had time to sit down this evening and start to get apps running and actually do something with it.
What I am noticing is that it is ALL Google for one. I cannot do anything at all on the phone without logging into my ‘Google account’.  I cannot set up my phone apps unless I backup ALL THE DATA ON MY PHONE to Google ~ on their Cloud ~ whether I want to or not. I get a warning telling me I can’t go any farther if I don’t upload all my information to Google. I also must “allow” my phone to access my Google+ account ~ not too bad, but I don’t like the fact I MUST put this option to the ‘on’ position.
So I go into Facebook and to install and update the Facebook app I must turn on location services, I must give FB access to my calendar, my identity, my contacts (on my phone), my Device I.D. AND my phone call information. It also says it can access my “Phone Call Log” and that “charges may apply”. This is precisely why I did not install FB messenger on my other IPhone. It also needs access to SMS, MMS (again ‘charges may apply’). Oh yeah, it wants access to my browsing history too.
Am I the only one who thinks it is totally creepy that my device and or apps have access to so much of my personal information? That they can do whatever the heck they want with my phone; including making calls and sending texts.
Are we that lazy and dependent that we can’t just say NO to this collection of our data? I need to do some more looking around my phone, I have just started, but I might just go back to my old phone where I can actually decide myself what I want to share, or not share.
Your personal privacy doesn’t exist and YOU are giving it away
I am sharing a Ted Talks Video here featuring Edward Snowden where he talks about some of the information he disclosed that got him exiled. Yes, the information he shared was from the United States, but I assure you, this is exactly what Stephen Harper is trying to push through right now here in Canada.
The talk is from the TED event in Vancouver last year.
Stephen Harper is doing this because of the supposed ‘terror’ attacks in Canada last year. First off, in both those cases the perpetrators were bonkers and surveillance or lack of privacy would NOT have stopped either event. Second of all, they, by DEFINITION were not ‘terror attacks’. Terror attacks are unprovoked against CIVILIANS. Neither of the victims were civilians, both were in uniform.
I am not saying that they were not upsetting events, but, once again I stress, BY DEFINITION they were not ‘terror attacks’ they were ‘acts of war’. The government surveilling us won’t stop people who are crazy from doing crazy things.
Us giving away all of our private information to corporations (and government if they want to go after the corporations for it), will bite us in the behind.
All because we are too lazy to take the time to back up our own data and we want it to auto backup into some other place (anyone remember all the nude actor/actress photo’s hacked scandal from last year). And no, I don’t have nude photos on my phone (lol), but really I would prefer to choose what information I want to put on a cloud.
I also see no good reason why any 3rd party needs to know who I call (or text), when I call them, or the numbers I call or what websites I am going to. It might be more convenient for Facebook to ‘feed’ me ads or information on my newsfeed, but really?
I think I can decide what I want to see and live with it if Facebook shows me something I’m a little less interested in. So I loan someone my phone and they browse something and all of a sudden I’m being ‘spoon feed’ that subject through the Facebook newsfeed?
Or, worse yet, something happens in our world (9-11 example), and all of a sudden the government and anyone else who wants to know, has access to all YOUR information. Oops, you clicked a link that brought you to a ‘sketchy’ site ~ now you are on the ‘bad person’ (terrorist) list ~ look out!
I’m not ‘doing anything wrong’, and you probably aren’t either. But if we allow it, we could wind up losing a large part of our freedoms and privacy.
You need to realize that we have a choice. YOU have a choice. There may be a lot of places where you cannot keep your information to yourself, but there are many places you can.
If you are Canadian, and you get any chance at all to vote on this new ‘policy’ S. Harper wants to put in place, take the chance and vote against it. It won’t protect us from crazy people but it will take away your privacy and your rights.
So, this can be the end of my rant for today. I was just so disappointed that my new phone wants access to all my information so that it can share it with outside corporations (so far just Google and FB, but it appears like its probably more). If I take my own advice and ‘speak up’ or ‘vote with my dollars’, I guess I will need to stand alone and scrap the new phone.
This subject could be an entire book. Oh wait, didn’t George Orwell write a book like that? Wasn’t it called 1984 or something?
Anyway, if you are the least bit concerned about this you can research some more on your own.
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Interesting rant…similar to ones I hear in the U.S.
Thanks for sharing, Tamara!
Thanks Sharyn, yes, its getting interesting,
Stephen Harper, Canada’s PM, is trying really hard to turn Canada into the US.
You are 100% Correct! Funny thing, My Mom was so excited to be able to use FB call feature on her phone.. So Simple to Convince some people to Give Up their RIGHTS to Privacy because they get thrown a Bone. Sad shit indeed! Great Post Tamara!
My husband got an HTC last year. If he misses a call he will call the number back and the person who answers will say “I called you because you called me” (happens the other way around also). This happens too much. Sometimes if you answer calls from these numbers you get a recording that says “you won airmiles” or something like that.
People wonder why this happens. I suspect its because people have given apps permission to use their phone calling features. They don’t even need to call someone you know, it can be some friend of a friend who has their phone number in FB. I do notice though that the calls often come from numbers that are similar to the one being called.
Thanks for your comment Tara 🙂