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120 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS
largely eroded, if not entirely negated, by the widespread use of
cell phones, credit cards, social media, and the search engines of the
Internet. When we use smart phones, our location is relayed to our
telephone service provider every three seconds. The phone compa-
nies collect and archive our phone usage “metadata,” which includes
whom we called and how long we spoke. When we use Google
to search for anyone or anything on the Internet, that activity is
captured by Google, a company whose profits mainly come from
making available to advertisers the results of its surveillance and
collection of its users’ searches, When we use Gmail, Google’s e-mail
service, used by nearly one billion senders and recipients, we agree
to allow Google to read the actual contents of our correspondence to
find keywords of interest to advertisers.
When we use a credit card, the credit card company also retains
data about what we buy and where we go. When we travel in auto-
mobiles equipped with GPS, every turn and stop is tracked and
recorded. And when we are in public places with CCTV (closed-
circuit television) cameras, our image is recorded and archived.
© When we use Facebook, Twitter, and other so-called social media, as ©
over two billion people do today, we allow these companies to collect,
retain, and exploit their surveillance of our movements, associations
with other people, and stated preferences. When we use Amazon and
other online stores, we allow them to track and archive a great deal
of our commercial activity. For Internet companies such as Facebook,
Twitter, and Yahoo!, like Google, collecting private data on hundreds
of millions of their members provides them with vast searchable
databases that are easily marketable. The exploitation of these data-
bases is a fundamental aspect of their business plans. Without such
surveillance of their users, social media companies would not be able
to turn a profit. Indeed, they may be more aptly called surveillance
media than social media. For those of us who use them to post pic-
tures and communicate, any notion of personal privacy is largely
illusory.
To be sure, there is a distinction to be made between the surveil-
lance of our activities to which we voluntarily agree in exchange
for the benefits and conveniences that we gain from social media,
search engines, and other Internet companies and the surveillance
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