Monitoring the monitors – is internet privacy now a thing of the past?

Sometimes I feel like I’ve had it with technology. As a kid, I found myself getting get stressed out with its fallible nature  – when a project at school called for a piece of work designed in Quark Xpress, of which my tech-loving mother always had the latest version in her home office, there was inevitably some problem that meant a ten minute exercise became a two-hour nightmare. My technology phobia started early, and as I get older, it’s getting worse not better. Last week I wrote about feeling obsolete, and with the growing pace of tech development and change, it can be hard to keep on top of it all, especially if, like me, you’re faced with real-world practicalities rather than being chained to a screen based job day after day. I prefer it that way, but it does leave me rather feeling like a duck out of water whenever I have to prove my credentials in a digital world.

In other ways, my iPhone has increasingly filled the spaces that used to be occupied with other prevaricating activities, like boredom, sex or conversation, and while I’ve never got involved with apps like Tinder or Snapchat, my online Guardian article devouring it can occasionally reach epic proportions. I find my attention span is limited. I am twitchy around my phone. A new post can fuel anxious stat reading obsessions, and like many in a freelance capacity, I constantly refer back to my online email for confirmation of work or job updates. I do it almost without thinking – the last sentence had been frantically scrolling my emails in case I had, momentarily – missed something. In all, I don’t believe it’s healthy. That I find it hard to control my kids’ screen time is, according to most other parent’s, par for the course. Whether or not we should even try to is also up for debate.

This aside, I am increasingly paranoid about what I search for online – and even  – worryingly – the conversations I have around my phone. With my Twitter and Facebook feeds seeming to cross-pollinate with my Google searches, another trend has emerged – for things I have talked about around my phone – let’s face it, it’s rarely a foot away from me at all times –  to pop up in my newsfeed. Is my phone now listening to me, as well as keeping track of my interests through searches and likes? The BBC says no, but I’m not so sure.

A case in point, I was talking to my mother-in-law about friends of mine who have set up an adoption agency specifically for gay people, and an article (Guardian, natch) about gay adoption showed up in my Facebook feed the very next day.  Not for the first time have I noticed such a coincidence that I’m increasingly convinced it’s not one. With privacy policies increasingly obtrusive, and scandals such as Smart TVs that are set to transmit what’s going on in your living room as well as into it, it wouldn’t surprise me what tactics are being used by corporations to get hold of the detail of the minutiae of our lives. After all, there’s big money for advertisers and other interested parties in what goes on behind closed doors.

Perhaps I am paranoid – after all, I love a conspiracy theory, and some of the stuff you can read online about the Establishment in the wake of the Jimmy Saville expose could make your hair curl. But is it treason to look at it? Who knows, but I’m sure that most people’s search history can be used against them by someone with an agenda. Take, for example, the recent case where a workplace was deemed in the right to track an employee’s private messages on their work computer, and you get the idea about how terrifying it can become. And I say this as someone who has put a lot of information into the public realm. I don’t doubt ex-employers have viewed it with interest – and used it to justify ending my employment one way or another, though this has never been the official line. It has made me nervous of what I say, and where. As a writer, as a journalist, I find this all terrifying.

For my children, it is a brave new world and feels as though we are edging ever closer to Orwell’s 1984’s dystopian nightmare. A friend helpfully posted this link to the apps kids are now using, and how they can threaten their own personal information with what they make public. Even as a relatively young parent, I am shocked by my own ignorance. Neither of my kids has social media profiles yet (that’s not strictly true – Jonah has one for Minecraft purposes which he doesn’t use to post on) But he does have his own YouTube Channel for making Minecraft videos. As far as I know, he’s just merrily yacking away to himself about his games, but how this might be used by someone in the future, who knows? Microphones are, according to my-my tech geek buddy, proliferating like Hackney rats, in the same way that cameras are installed everywhere, except when you need them when your bike gets nicked, and we all face a future of having our every movement tracked and recorded now that the idea of god’s controlling omniscience has largely died a death.

I’d like to switch off but I can’t. These days, I certainly hesitate to use my computer for anything more salacious than Ocado after a  “late night browse” resulted in suspiciously related new items appearing in my Facebook newsfeed, which left my rather, let’s face it, red-cheeked. Who’s keeping track of this stuff and how is it used? Who knows, but I don’t like it one little bit. If anything, my new-found digital paranoia may have a positive result. I’ll stay out of the addictive conspiracy wormhole and keep my wilder fantasy’s strictly  to my imagination, but I do wonder how I can broach that topic with my soon to be the teenage boy. I’ve written before about internet porn, and what we should do about it, but it doesn’t take rocket science to get around parental controls. I recently set up Kiddle as the kids’ default homepage on my computer, and Jonah could get around it in seconds. And, humiliatingly, my effort to test it by typing “boobs” into the search window resulted in Buzzfeed articles on boobs in my Twitter feed. It’s all too depressing for words.

In the meantime, I rue the day “Father Christmas” bought the kids cheap Kindle Fires for Christmas (we’re actually doing one over on Amazon, said Tom, when I objected, coz these things are clearly a loss leader if you don’t use them to buy stuff on apps. I remain unconvinced that Amazon is the loser in this equation). They may have substituted mindless telly for mindless YouTube videos by Stampy Longnose, but they are exposed to a raft of advertising in the process, over which I have no control. What impressions are being left on my children’s eyeballs and their consciousness, I have no idea. We can’t protect them from the modern world, but I do wish to stem the tide of creepy corporate mind washing that infiltrates their bedrooms. The demands to buy non-existent items for their Minecraft armoury may help stave off the need to spend money on resource wasting products in real life, but I can’t help but feel, why waste money at all, if machines are going to be taking over all of their jobs in the future?

My one vain hope, in all this creeping tech-centrism is my kids will learn to code (The BBC has just launched a programme to give all Year Sevens the back-end to a computer in order to stave off the skills gap set to hit the nation in a few years). At least then, they might be able to wrest back some control from the covert power of the machines, because, which I believe are having more control over  our lives. Like the Apple logo (the word, apple, I note, now auto-corrects as capped up, which shows quite how far the corporate dictatorships have infiltrated our freedom of speech) that takes its inspiration from the biblical apple of knowledge, we have all taken a bite and we don’t quite how much hell has broken loose on Earth.