Living in a mobile age has encouraged plenty of folks to take on a certain level of paranoia. We all have that friend or acquaintance who thinks he's constantly ?being watched.? And most of us find that guy a little crazy, his extreme statements about our smartphones and how they know everything about us makes him relatively easy to brush off. But the fact of the matter is that he's right ? crazy still, yes, but scarily on point.
We are constantly being watched, in a way. Our smartphones retain an ever-growing list of information about us and our everyday mundane activities. Those little handsets we tote everywhere can quickly reveal our exact location at any given moment, what we search for in Google, who we chat with, how many weird self-portraits we snap and how often we access our social networks, among other personal tidbits.
That data can also very easily be stored by our phone companies for an indefinite amount of time. What exactly happens to it? Where does it go? How is it really being used? Nobody on the outside really has perfected an answer for it. And anything we're told on the matter should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
It's more than a little disturbing, yes, but here's the truly unnerving part of it all: It's tough gaining access to your own records. All of that information stashed away by your phone company, that data that should essentially belong to you; it's no picnic trying to attain a copy.
In the TED video below, Malte Spitz details his own account of getting his hands on his mobile data. After multiple unanswered requests to his phone operator in Germany, Spitz ended up filing a lawsuit. That apparently got the operator's attention, and prompted it to fork over 35,830 lines of code.
Let's just look at that number again: 35,830 lines. That's a little brain-melting, isn't it? That's enough code to feed starving children in Africa, or something. And here's the thing: That amount of data was just for six months. Six. Months. Every single minute of Spitz's mobile life for six months packed into nearly 36,000 lines of code.
How's that for ?being watched??
Of course, that's not to say that anybody really gives a crap about your own boring day-to-day activities. Again, as far as we know, this data is simply stored with phone companies. That doesn't mean some dude in a watchtower is peeping into your every move.
Should we be paranoid? No, because living a state of panic is stupid. But does that mean we should suck it up and go in the polar opposite direction of desensitization? Absolutely not -- that's equally as bad. There needs to be a middle ground; a healthy awareness, and a clear, simple way to access your own information.
Check out the video for yourself and let us know what you think. Should companies be allowed to retain our data?
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