We have inflicted mass surveillance upon ourselves

I visited the UK 10 years ago. I was deeply perturbed by the amount of CCTV cameras everywhere. Everywhere. Even posted in rural areas. Little cameras just watching you as you walked the street. I thought to myself—in American we would never stand for such an infringement of freedom. Haha, ok.

Fast forward-obviously big businesses and busy streets have had video surveillance for decades…but now, our surveillance has been self inflicted—chosen by us, for us. I never realized the multitude of data that can be gleaned from Onstar until the Murdaugh case. Life360 & Snapchat maps. Ring doorbell surveillance pretty much blankets every neighborhood. Cheap outdoor security cameras. Wifi enabled pet and baby cams. Dashcams. A video recorder in your hand at all times. —not to mention geo/location tags on social media, cell pings, your photo library (every photo you take tags the location you took the photo—then it gets stored in a virtual cloud), all your searches, keystrokes, biometric data…..we hand over our health stats and dna to big corporate businesses…..and every day it seems, what do you know? oh—another data leak. Oh well….it happens sigh

There would be outrage if there was a blatantly obvious, blanketed surveillance system with cameras posted everywhere—instead these nefarious entities were like “hey, let’s give them the illusion of freedom, but market products that they believe will enhance their safety—AND while we spy on them and glean their data—they get to foot the bill for it, muhahahaha”

We are mass surveilling ourselves, and here’s the kicker…funding it. Of course, just like our health insurance, we would be the ones to choose and pay for our own surveillance. Yet we are so stockholmed by tech we continue to enslave ourselves.

Edited to add We have also been tracking our youngest generations with apps, airtags, all the things— their whole lives—for safety. I get it. In reality though, it’s just desensitized a whole generation completely to what real freedom feels like—& they will have much easier acceptance —and less resistance of surveillance. It is all they have ever known.