Thursday, November 14, 2013

Big Brother is finally watching us.

Like a lot of people I recently decided to upgrade my cell phone and get a data-phone as I like to call them but most will know them by the irritating name "smartphone" This has become the catch-all word to describe any iphone-like phone that will deliver and send email, run applications, or display web pages etc... Its a surprisingly addictive little gizmo and its using the Android operating system so it integrates seamlessly with my gmail account and now with all its connected "services" like YouTube and Plus and all that hazzmajazz. What this means as far as I can tell us that the Google corporation have succeeded in gathering even more information about me. If they choose (and most probably they do) they can read my mail, track my whereabouts, see my social life and pictures etc. So what happened recently is that when I purchased the phone Google had pre-loaded it with an ebook in order to promote their ebook store and encourage people to buy books and read them on their cellphones. The book they loaded it with? 1984 by Orwell. So what struck me as ironic about this is that periodically updates to the book application including parts of the books were automatically applied without me knowing or approving them which I guess is pretty much standard and accepted these days. Sound familiar? Mind you the text if the book hadn't been altered but the cover picture had. It makes me wonder where we're headed with all this auto-updating technology. Information is becoming less and less a finite thing that you buy and use it and enjoy and more of a service that you subscribe to. Its constantly being updated and modified. But it makes me wonder where were heading with this. Online news computer programs are already being constantly modified and rewritten. Will the same thing start to happen with books and movies?