Sequestration - The right to privacy

Hello Reader

Hope you are doing well.

I will ask you to respect my privacy, respect my decision and just respect my right to be myself.

-Eddie Compass

The last blog I wrote about our lost old culture and the marvellous intellect of our ancient people needs to be studied and understood in detail surely will write more blogs like those shortly. Coming back to modern times let us discuss a more recent and “in the media” subject which is data mining.

We all have heard about the above term in one or the other channels of social media, the internet the sources are almost many.

There are concerns about this term called data mining, the word was first quoted by CIA in the mid-60s where the cold war was at its peak with the Soviet Union. Data mining was carried out to know if the Russians possessed some secret advanced technology that would be a threat to the USA. Imagine they quoted the term even before the internet came into existence?

Well, that was one phase of data mining, but later after the cold war was over, the CIA continued their data mining activities not any foreign spies or intelligence officers but on its citizens.

 The first whistleblower who exposed that Government agencies data mine was Mr Edward Snowden who was exiled from the USA on the grounds of conflicts of interest and not abiding by the NDAs of his workplace. He is presently living in Russia.

Question: Are we all confident on the statements released by large institutions like NASA, FBI, CIA and KGB are right to the end or is this answer a little shaky?

The truth is that there is a significant PR (public relations) department in each of these institutions which are trained and told to what to disclose to the public and what not to, the ex-employees who worked there confirmed this.

I had to go out a little bit out of the topic of data mining because it is also part of discourse and secrecy which I tried to discuss in the previous paragraph.

Data mining can be defined as the examination of an extensive database to extract new information.

An example will help you understand, imagine you have the database of 1000 employees and you are the and your company deals in the big data business which is a method business analytics which is used by Google and Facebook to understand customer behaviour and manipulate the market and make their subscribers more profitable.= by introducing only the ads relating to the most sold phones for instance.

So everyone should be aware that we are almost data mined either through our phones or our computers including our location details.

Recently I saw video which was being circulated in WhatsApp, where a person spends a day with two android phones with one of them in which he had switched off his location and another in which he had switched on the location at the end of the day when he compared the results by loading it to a software, it reported very accurate results like location, the time and date when the person visited those places.

 The kicker is that the results were almost same on both the phones the on with the location off and the second one in which the location services were on.

To conclude, modernization and technology is no doubt convenient and has taken our communication to the next level, but don’t you feel it has taken control of our privacy from us?

Why should always be glued to social media applications and websites, why can't we get stuck to books? And try to get some real knowledge; I am sure we have a lot of secrets to unearth.

Thanks for your time.

Helios.