Smartphone Ledgers

By: Pavel Stovall

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Smartphones and devices that surround us throughout the day aren't spying on us in the traditional sense, but they are creating a digital ledger of all personal interactions, beliefs, whereabouts, and much more. This is true for those who use smart devices or don't as billions of devices connected to the Internet surround citizens around the world, so even if you have never used the Internet, data mining organizations can create a profile of you based on public records, information gathered by governments that becomes public, and through other people's devices. This may seem alarming, but in reality, smartphones, which are ubiquitous globally, are great devices for remote computing as well as being a window into the real world in which audio, visual, and other important information can be gathered by third parties from individual users and those who are in the vicinity of them that have agreed to the terms of services for applications and operating systems. There's no obligation to delete any information gathered during the time that an application is installed, and organizations have the right to keep this data as long as they see fit as it's not owned, regardless of a user's information being communicated publicly or privately through the software. Data mining is the new currency of the surface Net, and courts throughout the world have ruled that what they are doing is legal as well as allowing government agencies to purchase this information without permission in investigating individuals for crimes. Cryptography is still relevant on the surface Net, but governments have the ability to navigate through all software at will via backdoors or through the use of quantum computing, including Bitcoin. The Internet has created a ledger for the life of every single person's statements, movements, beliefs, behavior, desires, and much more globally, and it will continue to do so well into the future. Machine learning will allow people's statements to be authenticated in real time, and societies will increasingly become much safer. The cost will be personal freedom, but this is the reality of living in the modern world.