Sitting quietly under a parasol, beer in hand, observing a beach full of people enjoying the recent sunny weather, triggered fond memories of days at the same beach in the 1970s. How things have changed since then! Today, those on the beach are, let’s put it tactfully, ‘bigger’. (The average British man is around 7.62 cm taller, and 10.4 kgs heavier than 50 years ago). Adults with tattoos are commonplace, whereas in the 1970s tattoos featured primarily on seafarers and unruly motorcyclists. When soaking up the sun’s rays today, most beachgoers are using their smartphone or tablet for social media and surfing the internet, for taking copious photos and videos, and for streaming music or watching movies. Printed newspapers and magazines, portable transistor radios and cassette players, and cameras requiring photographic film – all commonplace at the beach in the 1970s – are a rare sight on the beach today.
As he quaffed his beer, the Badger reflected on how the digital world has changed our lives since the 1970s, a decade when pen and paper dominated, a computer was programmed with cards or paper tape, and an affordable electronic pocket calculator was a great leap forward! Way back then, what we take for granted today was science fiction. Progress, however, always comes at a price, and today’s frequent security breaches, data thefts, IT system problems causing widespread disruption and inconvenience, and misinformation, disinformation, and scurrilous content on social media, all expose the fact that part of this price has been an erosion of personal privacy.
When today’s world is typified by things like those reported here, here, here, here, and here, and AI- produced, deepfake video, photos, and audio are ever more commonplace, then people who value their privacy must be wary, clear-headed, and ruthlessly objective about protecting it, much more so than in the 1970s. The Badger, observing the beachgoers liberally using their personal devices, asked himself whether they were doing so with their privacy in the forefront of their mind? Were they conscious of how many online enterprises know their email address, contact details, their likes and dislikes, what they buy and when? Were they conscious that there is a reasonable probability that their personal data has been leaked in cyber-attacks? Were they aware that a deep fake of them can be produced by anyone with scurrilous intent in the digital world from a single image, ~40 seconds of speech audio, and a few cheap AI tools? The Badger’s doubtful.
The advent of the digital world since the 1970s has brought many benefits, but it’s been at the expense of eroded personal privacy. Who’s to blame? Well, blaming others misses the point because protecting our own privacy starts with our own actions and behaviours. So, if you value your privacy, then think very carefully whenever you upload content to the virtual world, because once privacy’s gone, it’s gone…
