Hiding In Plain Sight

Every day, we willingly share the minutiae of our lives – where we are, who we’re with and what we want – with global tech corporations. Is it too late to reclaim our data? MH investigates just how we signed up for this, and the small changes that can help us wrest back control

- Amos Barshad

Early last year, the day after the US presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke announced his campaign, the news organisation Reuters uncovered a juicy slice of the politician’s past. When O’Rourke was a teenager, he was a member of a hacktivist group known as “the Cult of the Dead Cow”. Posting on the group’s secretive boards under the name Psychedelic Warlord, he mostly shared his experimental poetry. “Thrust your hooves,” the teenage Beto wrote, “up my analytic passage.”

For years, this is how we understood the dangers of the internet: the lurking threat that everything we’d ever done online – each embarrassing overshare, or misjudged tweet – would come back to haunt us in time. Which, in hindsight, seems charmingly naive: the notion that all we had to worry about was our search histories being hacked and stuff like our anonymous, youthful, anarchist poetry ending up on handheld screens everywhere.

Over the past decade, however, millions of us decided it would be a good idea to sign over our personal information and intimate secrets – loosely known as our privacy – to some of the biggest companies in the world in exchange for their services. And why wouldn’t we? They were all free! But as these tech giants have grown increasingly advanced, they have come to know more about us than we know about ourselves. And though we are collectively not OK with it – a survey by the Pew Research Center found just 9 per cent of us were “very confident” that social media companies were protecting our data – we keep giving them our information anyway.