Technocreep (32 page)

Set traps in your email accounts.

Many email providers, including Google's Gmail and Microsoft's
Outlook.com
, support the “plus convention.” Anything you put after the plus sign in the name portion of your email address is ignored by the mailer, but carried along so you can track it. This will allow you to monitor the proliferation of spam, and figure out who the guilty parties are.

Have your own surveillance cameras.

Dash cameras have become widespread in many countries, and have become a “must have” on Russia's wild and woolly road system. They serve as a countermeasure against organized crime gangs that stage car accidents then try to extort money from innocent drivers on the spot.

Even in North America, people are grabbing footage of car crashes and other events and giving or selling it to media outlets. Police cars routinely have dash cameras. You should just assume that you're being photographed whenever you drive (or ride the bus, tram, subway, etc.) and behave accordingly.

Record your life (just in case).

Why not just record everything from a camera on your body? Cameras that do “lifelogging” have been around for years, but the problem is who really wants to relive their life moment by moment? Makers of the Narrative Clip are betting that people will want to “tell their life stories in photos” as their inexpensive and unobtrusive camera grabs a photo every 30 seconds.
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It also stores up to four thousand pictures and they can be transferred to a computer. Unless you are a rock star, a spy, or a politician, you are likely to find that most of those ­images don't need to be transferred because you'll never want to look at them again.

Of course, if your body camera is stolen, or smashed by police in a riot, you'll lose what may be the most important pictures of the day. Cameras and smartphones apps are now springing up that will upload your photos or videos continuously to a server, so your vicious beating video might live on after you. Just remember to leave the password in your will as part of your “digital legacy.”

The rise of “wearables” such as fitness wristbands, and even more advanced devices like glucose monitoring sensors in contact lenses, will make lifelogging the norm for most people.
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Make your computer or smartphones your personal spy.

“Phone home” anti-theft software can be remotely activated to track a lost or stolen device, make it take pictures at regular intervals, even howl an alarm. Some products to do this include LoJack, Find My Phone, Find My iPhone, and Prey (
www.preyproject.com
). Prey is open source and free for up to three devices. You might even pinpoint the precise Starbucks where your thief is slurping his latte while using your laptop. That program can also lock up your device tight as drum, and make it display a “This is a stolen computer” message.

One clever user in Brazil, who could not find any company that would insure her electric bicycle, placed an inexpensive Android phone inside its tailbox, and used Prey to create her own anti-theft system.
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Track your stolen computer through its attempt to access Gmail or Dropbox.

If you have neglected to install anti-theft software you still might luck out when your stolen device connects to the Internet. Through services such as Gmail or Dropbox you may be able to see the latest IP address of the AWOL device and do some sleuthing. This could require help from law enforcement, but there have been success stories.

Another trick that has worked is to have your phone automatically upload photos you take, say to Facebook. Yes, this is a potential privacy risk for you, but it's an even bigger one for people who steal your phone and use it to take “selfies.” In a delightful U.K. case, police are looking for a “brainless thief” who not only used a stolen phone to upload self photos but also ‘disclosed, via instant messaging, that he lives in south London.”
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News reports on this story carried a picture of the suspect, proving that guys who steal a phone from a twelve-year-old kid at a tube station have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

My favorite device recovery story is the tale of New York jazz trombonist Nadav Nirenberg, who left his iPhone in a livery cab. The new “owner” of the phone was using it to send messages to women using a dating app. Nirenberg sent him a message offering a date, and including a picture of a pretty girl. “When the culprit arrived at Nirenberg's Brooklyn apartment building with wine,” reported the Associated Press, “the musician greeted him with a $20 U.S. bill while holding a hammer—just in case.”
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Protest Loudly but Carefully.

What can you do when you catch a company selling your name without your permission, targeting you unfairly with ads, or treating you in some other creepy, shoddy fashion? First, you need to make sure you did not actually agree to whatever behavior is offending your sense of personal privacy. As shown in the terrific movie
Terms and Conditions May Apply,
in most cases you will find that you somehow consented to this use of your information, and that's the end of it. If you are sure you've been wronged, there are many options available:

Send a polite but firm email, probably to a bot-monitored mailbox.

You could start your complaint process by sending an email to the company's “customer service” (or whatever) department. If, as is often the case, you can't find that on their webpage, you could try sending the mail to abuse (at) whatever web domain is associated with the malefactor. Be warned that companies have often set up unmonitored mailboxes and auto responders and there's no guarantee you will actually reach a real person.

If they are using a free email service like Gmail or
Outlook.com
, and you provide enough evidence of nastiness, the provider might even yank their account, though of course real bad guys will simply move on to another one.

Escalate to emailing an executive.

Depending on how annoyed you are, you could find the contact information for executives at the company, and gripe to them. It may be a little early to call your lawyers, though, as the legal framework around business-to-business information selling is still evolving. The sticky part is proving that you have actually suffered harm from a company selling your information. In a 2013 decision in Delaware, U.S. District Judge Sue Robinson dismissed a class action lawsuit against Google even though they had sneakily bypassed cookie blocking software by exploiting a loophole in the Safari web browser.
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The plaintiffs could not prove that they had suffered actual harm from the tracking cookies. Google did not get off scot-free, however. The company paid $17 million in civil penalties to 30 U.S. states, and promised not to be so evil in the future.

Complain to government agencies and consumer watchdog groups such as The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

As discussed earlier in
Technocreep
, a string of U.S. Federal Trade Commission rulings, decisions by Privacy Commissioners in Canada, and similar actions in other countries show that valid complaints can be pursued through this channel. The caveat is that it may take a long time, there may be costs in some cases, and there are no guarantees of success because the laws around privacy-related issues are still being written and interpreted.

Go to the media, or make your own media.

Most TV stations, and even some other media outlets, have a reporter assigned full or part time to the “consumer beat.” They love David and Goliath stories of wronged consumers fighting back against bad treatment from impersonal corporations. Often, just having the reporter call a company is enough to sort things out.

Or you can take a more direct approach. Musician Dave Carroll put his 2009 luggage handling complaint against United Airlines to music as “United Breaks Guitars.” The video has garnered over thirteen million views on YouTube.
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He even turned it into a book,
United Breaks Guitars: The Power of One Voice in the Age of Social Media
. If you lack Carroll's musical talent, or the $150 he says the video cost to produce, you can just try holding up your story on cards in front of you while wearing a woeful look. That approach seemed pretty effective for the Occupy Wall Street protestors.

Watch your back when you protest.

The fact that companies are taking online consumer protests seriously is, by and large, a good thing. United Airlines, for example, reportedly uses Dave Carroll's video in its employee training. But sometimes you can hit so close to the nerve that a company bites back, which in America tends to mean “goes after your money.”

In 2009, a woman from Utah bought some merchandise from a company in Michigan. She was unhappy with the company and wrote a critical review on
RipoffReport.com
. Because of the way the company subsequently acted, that's probably enough details, though there are ample news reports about the case.
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The amazing thing is that the customer was then caught in a bizarre situation where the merchant was threatening her with a $3,500 “fine” for violating an obscure non-defamation term on its ­website. The money would be due, and potentially damage the customer's credit rating if not paid, unless the offending review was removed within 72 hours.

However,
RipoffReport.com
says they “never remove reports.” The only option they offer is their “VIP Arbitration Service” in which the complaint is reviewed by a private arbitrator, who might even be a retired judge. The catch? There's a $2,000 “filing fee” for this service.

This case turned into wonderful demonstration of what has been called the “Streisand Effect,” the result of that singer's 2003 attempt to suppress photos of her Malibu home, which generated even more publicity around them. The company that threatened to fine its customer is now the subject of negative reviews posted all over the Internet. News stories have been done on the plight of this harassed consumer. There are even outraged reports on
RipoffReport.com
from people who have never done business with the offending firm, hence never accepted their bizarre “terms of service,” and who therefore cannot be “fined.” All promise that they would never buy a thing from the company.

Future-proof yourself, your technology, and your knowledge.

If the remarkable revelations of Edward Snowden and the astonishing private sector forays into creepy technology discussed in this book teach us anything, it's that Technocreepiness will continue to change and expand on a daily basis. As I said at the start of the book
,
most technology is not what it seems. It is more than that, with wheels turning within wheels and systems interlocking in ways that most people don't even know exist.

This is both blessing and curse. We will never “fix” our security problems or “deal with” creepy technology. Even if we move to a cabin in Patagonia, there will be drones and satellites overhead. The best we can hope for is to have the right knowledge and mindset to understand the latest antics of the NSA, the GCHQ, and that big shopping mall down the street.

Since you probably have something else that's your full-time job, here are some ways to keep informed about technocreepiness, and benefit from the knowledge of others:

Use a search engine to stay up to date.

Yes, the major search engines do capture your information, sell it to advertisers, and even try to track you. Still, nothing beats a quick online search to figure out, for example, if you should download one of the programs mentioned in this book, in an article, or elsewhere. Thanks to search engine ranking, the first few hits (though not always the first one—there have been cases of search engine spoofing) will usually give you a good idea of whether something has a good or bad reputation.

Check for scams.

A simple but powerful trick is to put the word “scam” or “ripoff” into a search engine along with whatever you're interested in. As an illustration, a search on a major travel site, coupled with the word “scam,” produced the warning that if you buy an airline ticket from a certain travel bidding site, “I can assure you that you will be the last one the airline rebooks. That's the price you can pay for buying a deeply discounted ticket.”
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It makes sense that an airline will take care of its best-paying customers first, but that information probably isn't displayed on any official policy page.

Anticipate the next “DNA fingerprinting” type of breakthrough and ­prepare for it.

A few decades ago, criminals were oblivious to leaving their DNA at crime scenes because there was no feasible way of identifying them. Even semen samples left by rapists were only identifiable to the blood group (A, B, AB, O) level. All that changed in the 1980s, when a technological advance (DNA sequencing) combined with legal changes to bring about the world we know today through television shows like
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
. It behooves us to think now about what the next revolutionary technologies will be, and to understand that they won't just be used to hunt down criminals. We may all be targets.

If I had to put money on one thing that will be haunting people in even creepier ways in the very near future, it's their voluntarily shared photographs and videos. Teenagers who are posting X-rated shots of themselves today will be looking for jobs in a few years, and those images will be eminently findable. Facial recognition technology is moving so fast that the
Minority Report
scenario of being identified on the street the street, even in a crowd, will become reality. There is zero doubt in my mind that many computers, both governmental and private, are sucking up every digital image we share, just waiting for the day when it can be indexed and cross-referenced the way the LAPD did with tattoos back in 1959.