The world we live in today is advanced in technology, even if we don’t realize it we are slowly being tracked more each day, there are spyware in the tools we use every day such as but not limited to: web browsers, games, cars, social media, governments, phones, and computers.
The extremely known and popular web browser Google Chrome is always tracking your search history, mobile device’s location, youtube history, phone (if you own an android phone) and etc. If you wish to you can set up Google Chrome to stop tracking you. Google has already faced problems due to its intensive tracking of users, such as facing a $5B lawsuit for illegally invading the privacy of millions of users by pervasively tracking their internet use through browsers set in “private” mode.
In the past, Steam (a popular game distributor software) has distributed games with a spyware called “Red Shell” which tracks and logs: operating system, browser version number, IP address (anonymized through one-way hashing), screen resolution, in-game user ID, and font profiles. Even while there is evidence that it does track users, the company that made it calls it “a tool that enables developers to understand exactly where their paying customers are coming from on the Steam PC gaming portal.” which is just glorifying a spyware, unfortunately there are still games being distributed with this spyware.
In the U.S. president biden has recently signed a new law that forces all new cars to include a kill switch, which can be useful in a number of situations but such technology can be easily eploited by anyone with backdoor access to it, hackers could turn off your car while you are in the middle of the freeway.
Nowadays to participate in social media you must give up your privacy, freedom of speech, and other human rights, such an example of this can be seen in Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Oculus, Ghiphy, Instagram, whatsapp, etc. Meta sells it’s user’s information to create revenue, which can be easily compared to farming animals but using humans instead. Facebook also turns over similar private information to authorities with warrants, including messages, photos, videos, posts and location data, it said. Law enforcement authorities can also use warrants in other ways.
Social media also plagues the modern web, the modern web is filled with ads, clickbait, pop-ups, and fake information. In other words the modern web is terrible, because of this a new project called the "Gemini Protocol" aims to be lighter than the modern web, meaning that it’s intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible
Our government is tracking us to some extent. London besides being the capital of The United Kingdom, is also known as the "CCTV capital of the world" it’s name comes from the fact that the city is home to hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras, and the average Londoner is caught on CCTV 300 times a day. The London’s police department stated that it would begin using facial recognition to spot criminal suspects with video cameras as they walk the streets, adopting a level of surveillance that is rare outside China.
China’s Communist party has been constructing a moral ranking system for years that will monitor the behavior of its enormous population and rank them all based on their "social credit". Social credit determines the benefits people can recieve, such as taking a loan from the bank, travel outside china, or interact with certain people.
The USA has a similar system, the only difference is that private companies enforce it instead of the government, companies such as Uber and Airbnb can ban you for no reason.
Apple and Google keep track of your activity through their services such as Google Maps and Apple Apps, s study by Douglas J. Leith, School of Computer Science & Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, claims that “Google collects around 20 times more handset data than Apple.” When an iPhone and Google Pixel phone are idle, a Pixel sends about 1MB of data to Google every 12 hours versus the iPhone that sends 52KB to Apple, the study said.
Windows 10 (A popular Operating system created by Microsoft) heavily tracks your Hardware information, Microsoft Store logs, list of your connected devices, Browser activity logs, etc. This heavy tracking has lead to the creation of "Windows 10 Ameliorated" (Ameliorated means to make something bad better) the project’s description reads “…Windows 10 Ameliorated aims at delivering a stable, non-intrusive yet fully functional Windows 10 to anyone…”
These are just some corncerns that I have about what is going on at the time that I am writing this.