Out of the many things going wrong in this world, there are some that bother me to a special degree: Terrible things only happen the way they do, because many people accept and/or support it. Without the complicity of the many, some systems of power could not sustain themselves. There are cultural and political examples for this, but I want to mention how this applies to surveillance:

If you have an Android phone, Google can track your location even if you have GPS disabled. How does that work? Google can see which wifi networks are in range of your device and their respective signal strengths. They can see that for other Android users as well and because those other users might not have GPS disabled, they can not only triangulate the precise locations of wifi hotspots from signal strengths, but infer your location based on the information that other users’ devices leak!

This only works, because most people do not disable location tracking and instead feeding Google this valuable information without second (or maybe even first) thought.

Similarly, Facebook knows the social network of people who do not have and never had a Facebook account. But because these people’s idiot unsuspecting friends give Facebook access to their contact list, everyone’s “location” on the social graph can be determined with some amount of precision.

These privacy violations are so infuriating because it is basically impossible to defend against that. Even some valid privacy best-practices do not protect you from getting doxxed by others, over whose behavior you have limited or no control.

As a consequence the privacy-minded have to resort to even tougher defenses which are inevitiably annoying to implement and seriously reduce the value to be gained from all this amazing technology. To protect against the leakage of your social graph you would probably have to stop giving others any contact information at all or at least different information to different people, to introduce noise into the data source. To combat location tracking you would at least have to disable wifi, but realistically speaking not even that might help, so better not to have an Android phone at all.

The understandable but reckless privacy practices of most people put their peers’ privacy at risk. I can only partly blame the oblivious or indifferent casual user, because privacy is never the default. It is never the easy solution, the convenient one, the one which lets you enjoy the latest technologies without restrictions. Obviously corporations are to blame as they are the ones who engineer the surveillance systems.

But I do desperately wish, people would at least take issue with the fact that they are somewhat complicit in perpetuating a system of continuous surveillance.

We can use technology for good or we can use it for evil. But it requires all of us to stand up against oppression, exploitation, surveillance, domestication and domination.