Perhaps it is my age, or the changing of the seasons—I always get a bit melancholy at the first signs of fall—but I have been thinking a lot about my youth, specifically the few years leading up the year 2000.

I was in my mid-twenties and living on my own. I had an answering machine at home, yet was still a couple of years away from getting my beloved Motorola pager.

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I had an email account, somethingsomething@netscape.net, and would walk six blocks (possibly in the snow, and very probably uphill both ways) to a dodgy Internet café on Cambie Street and check my email every week. A few hours spent reading lengthy messages from far away friends, maybe checking out options for furthering my education, or far off travel destinations. All things online seems so far off. So far away.

Pagers, answering machines, and email… my privacy was never in question, never a question.

Today, there seems to be as many ways to collect data on individuals as there are eyes stars in the sky. We oblige the use of traffic and security cameras, because they ‘keep us safe’ and help us ‘catch the bad guy’. We bemoan the privacy updates on social media sites, but rarely read the fine print and ‘just click accept’—half heartedly pointing our fingers at Mark Zuckerburg for selling our info to big data, or possibly a Nairobian Prince. Siri/Cortana are always listening (though apparently not always transferring data), our Fitbits are always tracking… the list goes on and on.

Although most aggregators take pains to not store information that directly identifies a person, researchers have shown that this is not much protection. It only takes a few data points, especially when location is included, to track a set of web events back to a real person—which offers the possibility of following that real person both back and forward in time.

We can pull-up hundreds of millions of pages of information at the click of a button. Our world today is literally at our fingertips. But what is the price of admission to access this info? Our privacy? Our identity?

“We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

I am a part of the last generation that will remember what it was like to be disentangled from “the man”. Yet, with every new update, every new feature I also ‘click through’, and pay my ticket to ride.

“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
― Philip K. Dick