Is This Thing "Off"?

Going for a Run - Saturday proved to be a great day for a run through the neighborhood or even at the local high school track. There are plenty of people there and there is no Internet! You find yourself sweating it out and you finish your run. You check your Fitbit to see that you have met all the daily requirements for your daily exercise. You come home, shower and change. Just then, your cell phone, which you intentionally left at home (about 10 feet away) buzzes. You pick it up and the Fitbit app has posted your results to your Facebook page for all your exercise partners to see. End of experiment. Status: Failed

Brain Freeze - Thoroughly frustrated now, you blow all your exercise progress by going to the local ice cream shop and leave all your electronic devices at home. You have just your wallet with you. You get to the counter and order your favorite treat. As a member of the Frequent Freezer Club (FFC), you whip out your FFC card and have it scanned so you can get an instant upgrade on your treat. The ice cream shop system has now recorded your presence in the store, updated your purchase history and emailed a trial FFC membership for you to give to a friend. Status: Failed

Driving Away - Let's go for a ride. We can easily avoid the Internet that way, right? You jump into the car and in no time, you are out on the open road with the wind blowing across your bald spot (where hair used to grow). Anyway, you decide to listen to some of your favorite tunes and you turn on your car's radio and drive through your old neighborhood. What's the harm in doing that? You run into an old friend and before you know it, she flips out her cell phone and you end up in a selfie on Instagram. Status: Failed

Okay, we can go on forever with these silly scenarios, but the point is that every passing day delivers technologies that make disappearing from the grid increasingly challenging. Today, for instance, clothing and accessories are Bluetooth enabled. That's right. You can buy Bluetooth enabled cuff links and earrings. Why would anyone want such items? Because they are for sale!

The point is that keeping your life private is becoming less practical with each passing day. It makes no difference if you are planning the launch of something big for the community or if you are a bad person with malicious intent. Connected technologies; working singularly or as a collective, finds a way to poke its preverbal nose into your business and tells the world about what you are doing.

As the poorly contrived scenarios point out, it is not necessary for you to carry the technology on your person to be detected. There are Internet connected cameras and well-meaning friends and family members that routinely help to identify you and what you are doing. In addition, the technologies we do carry on our person do not have to be active (e.g. cell phones or exercise monitors). They can be passive cards that associate us with an activity. Grocery store cards, ATM cards and frequent coffee drinker club cards often record our activities in a specific place and time. Lastly, every application on our personal cell phones may contribute to telling the world about our location and activities. So, before you download a new application from the App Market, look at the access requirements before you enable it. For instance, why is it necessary for a flashlight application to access your address book and Internet connection, when other similar applications only require access to the white LED (that performs the flashlight function)? In short, we often assist in our own exploitation when we lose focus of the privacy details to gain access to a trivial capability.

Having grown up in the generation where most people had trouble programming their video recorders for their televisions, it is not difficult to conceive of scenarios where people, today, would not know how to configure their various electronic devices to prevent unwanted and unauthorized access to their personal information. On my street, for instance, I enabled my cell phone to connect to the Wi-Fi connection in my home. To do so, the phone performs a scan of wireless networks to which it can connect. Roughly ten networks are displayed (including my home network). Roughly a third of the displayed networks are not secured. If the signal strength was good, I could simply ignore my own network and connect to theirs. This is problematic because, once on the unsecured network, I can gain access to the Internet and to local information on my neighbor's networks. Why are the networks unsecured? It is because, believe it or not, the same people who could not program their respective video recorders, cannot configure a network router. In stark contrast to a popular saying, ignorance is not bliss, it's just ignorance.

Today, unless you are in a third world country with poorly constructed and managed technology infrastructure, you will find it very difficult to “get lost”. Whether you actively participate in the Internet by using connected devices, or participate in activities that provide information or insights about you and your activities, living life undetected is becoming a modern-day pipe dream. If you can't beat them, then join them!

Alexa! {Acknowledgement BEEP}, What is resistance? {Resistance is futile. You have been assimilated}