• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, January 23, 2020

After noting that “Consumers are also more anxious than ever about technology’s ability to compromise their personal privacy,” a story by eMarketer said nothing more about that growing anxiety, but rather explored ways that exhibitors at CES found “to help people comfortably use technology in simpler, more intuitively ‘human’ ways and understand how it can ultimately benefit them.” 

This mostly meant disguising tech products as part of the home décor background or making machines look more like humans or dogs or artwork — anything other than keyboards and voice-activated speakers.

There was no mention of the fact that, regardless of what these future tech products look like, they are still collecting massive amounts of data (although everyone claims to strip out the PII. Yeah, right). This seems to imply that if something is cool enough and helpful enough, consumers will readily trade their secrets for convenience. 

And why not?  So far, this has been just the case. 

While ad tags and cookies have been nibbling around the edges of privacy for a very long time, consumers have been volunteering their personal information in tomes in exchange for convenience (or, in many cases, ego gratification). Look no farther than what folks post to various social media platforms and it is hard to make a case that these same exhibitionists are concerned about their privacy.

Only when they read stories about pedophiles using AI-like software to collect photos of kids in bathing suits or revealing pajamas do social media posters stop to consider their role in compromising their own privacy.  And then they keep doing it anyway.

There is really nothing new about businesses learning as much as they can about their customers, then using that data to improve their products/service and/or marketing. They have also been selling that data to others for decades. You can go back as far as the ‘50s and ‘60s and find information about you and your family being sold by “list brokers” or banks or credit card companies. BTW, they too promised they had stripped out the PII.

Clearly, the dawn of the digital age has changed the game. Hardly a day does by without a story breaking somewhere about how data was breached, used nefariously or recorded something important to law enforcement or national security. Not a week goes by without a poll or survey that confirms how “concerned” people are by all of this. 

Finally, governments here and there are starting to pass legislation that tries to put some guide rails on the use of the mountains of data produced by the IoT.

But what jumps out in all of this “concern over privacy” is how very few people decide to stop using the tech collecting the data.  Sure, one hears of friends who swear off Facebook or install browser-based programs to anonymize their navigation, or unplug Alexa, but not in significant numbers. 

Even when they find out that Chinese or Russian spies are using apps to record their faces, most folks just keep using them because they like the features. Besides, all that “bad stuff” is happening in the background — and if you can’t see it, it can’t hurt you, right?

Meanwhile, the current mission is to make data-collecting tech fade even further into your consciousness by making it “more human.”

The real cost to humans has yet to be calculated.