Old Folk Paranoia

I suspect that the ghosts of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley will not haunt you for the mixed references to 1984 and Brave New World. ????

Let's hope they will be pleased that they are not forgotten!

Big Brother wasn’t monitoring the residents of Oceana, only Party members. It was the constant broadcasting of fear that kept people in line and thinking that leaders like Putin (of Orwell’s Eurasia), and Xi (of Orwell’s Eastasia) would bother to notice prols like you and me. It seems that it is working.

From the text, it's not clear whether or not the proles were being monitored by the government apparatus. I suspect they were.

I suspect that the lackeys at Tesla have long ago become bored of my occasional utterances when I am in my car.

Their AI searches for the more salacious and illicit conversations and alert the lackeys to some good stuff to listen to.

My thermostat is connected to the internet. I am quite confident it hasn’t been listening to me. It certainly hasn’t engaged me in conversation. The same goes for the water leak sensors in my crawl space, my internet-connected cameras in Canada and Mexico, and my wifi enabled doorbell. My Sonos speakers and my internet-connected television talk to me, but like my wife, I am quite certain they don’t listen to me.

Those are not the reports that have made their way into the news media.

Ring Employees Illegally Surveyed Customers, Failed to Stop Hackers from Taking Control of Users' Cameras

And of course, I know that regardless of how I set location services on my phone, my location is always known as the cell phone towers triangulate my location, ensuring I have the best signal.

Personally, I don't know what I am more scared about. The fact that this technology is so widespread and unregulated or the fact that the vast majority of the population has resigned itself to having no privacy whatsoever.

I suggest there are more important things to be thinking about than how people open their glove box.

Not worried about the glove box? I agree. That's just dumb. However, given the rise of authoritarianism around the world, including the historical bastion of freedom, the United States, all the other spying technology scares me to death. I wonder if I could learn to love Big Brother without having to follow Winston's path of horror. (If you have no idea what that last sentence means, please, please, please read 1984. You young'uns can download it to your phone so you don't have to be seen reading a book.)