The fact of the matter is that our smart phones are so robust nowadays that they have the capability through apps to open up our house door, to start our automobile, and to save our credit and debit cards, for pretty much this device contains and thereby represents who and what we are, for all of our text communications, pictures, videos, as well as our location as we moved about our day is duly noted, stored, and recorded. This signifies that while there are massive conveniences to having a device that we can call upon to surf the web, to call a friend, to conduct business, to take pictures, to make social media posts, and so on – we also have a device that remembers everything that we do and in the hands of some other entity with access to our passcode, would provide them therefore with a very detailed biography of who and what we are, for our phones surveil our own self, exceedingly well.
It isn’t too much of a stretch to believe, that governments the world over, are absolutely delighted that cellphones know so much about us, for therefore everything that we have essentially done either on our phone, or in our movements in the community that we are a part of, has been recorded, and whenever the government or some other entity has access to that information, this can be utilized to manipulate us, to control us, and to compromise us, for there is always going to be some information meant exclusively for just one party or one person, that in the hands of a different party or a different person would serve to alienate us or to hurt us.
We thus live in a day and age in which, if we do not have ironclad guardrails put into place as to who and what controls our information dissemination on our cellphone, then we have essentially ceded our private information to private enterprise and to the governance that regulates the same. This is not, therefore the brave new world that we believe that we have entered, but rather this is a world in which “Big Brother” in any of its myriad forms is watching us and in that watching, putting itself in pole position to “groom” us in whatever direction serves its purposes.
It is somewhat ironic, that all of the domestic spy agencies that spy on its own, are presently salivating that never has there been a time such as this, in which social surveillance is done voluntarily by the user which is not only incredibly accurate but also incredibly detailed, of which, many of those that are being surveilled, are blithely unconcerned, unaware, or clueless, as if they believe that living a life as an open book, in which everything is known about them, will somehow never be used to influence or to harm them. As it is been said, information is power, and the type of information on our cellphones is so detailed and so complete that in the absence of an individual having personal sovereignty over that information contained on their cellphone, they are at the mercy of those who do.