For the past couple of years it’s been pretty clear that we’re all being watched all the time. My phone is constantly inquiring whether I would like this or that app to send me push notices based on my location. When I turn off my Wi-Fi, a message pops up warning me that the cloud may not know where I am if I do so. I got a ticket in the mail for going through a yellow light, and with it came a picture of me taken by a surveillance camera. I looked like a maniac hunched over the wheel. I guess I’ll need to shave every time I leave the house — if I can be photographed anywhere, I might as well look my best.
At the office, every word I write can be peered at by the Corporation anytime It wants. There is a rule that nobody obeys against using the company Outlook for personal communications. Every “Hey, sweetie” or “Boy, was I drunk last night” could be a violation. Beyond that, when you tell a colleague that his boss is a “self-aggrandizing doofus,” is there somebody in IT chuckling along? How about all the financial information you exchanged with the bank when you refinanced your mortgage last month? Do you trust your IT people? That’s good. Why?
This doesn’t even begin to consider the guys who may be hacking into our system. Somewhere in China or Romania or Syria, is somebody reading our fall marketing plan? Every day, some moron with a suspicious link gets through our firewall. Why shouldn’t I assume that every word I write is out there, being perused, parsed, passed along for amusement or exploitation?
“It’s been a long time since you tweeted!” Twitter tells me. “Here are some people you may know,” says Google Plus. I feel their digital eyes on me, their tiny electronic fingers skittering over my virtual body, feeling for soft spots, probing for opportunities to monetize me.
And then there’s Facebook. Not long ago I got about 50 emails from people accepting my friend invitation. There was only one thing: I didn’t invite anybody to be my friend that day. And yet there they were, in my email and on my timeline. “Stan!” one of them said. “I had no idea you even remembered me!” Guess what. I didn’t. In fact, there are a whole bunch of my ostensible friends I don’t recall … and whom I think I never really knew at all. How did they get there? Is there somebody at Facebook who determined that I require more friends and implemented the Stanley Bing Pump Up the Friends Plan? Paranoid? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe … not.
Did you know that the former head of security for Facebook is now at the NSA, the government organization that’s been combing over the digital footprints of millions of Americans for several years? His name is Max Kelly. He went there after he left Facebook in 2010, taking with him a wealth of skills acquired at the single greatest possessor of customer data on the planet. Go ahead. Google him. He just might have somebody Googling you right now too, you know.
Further interesting issues are generated by recent admissions by Facebook that for the past several years it has been extruding into the cosmic digisphere the personal information of more than 6 million of its trusting users. Could be you. Could be me. Whoops. Sorry. I wonder. Who would you rather trust with everything from your medical information to your taste in online entertainment to your political views as expressed by your behavior on the web? The feds, who now are in bed with Silicon Valley, the better to mine your big data? Facebook? Reddit? Your friendly venture capitalists behind the next big startup? How about nobody?
How does nobody work for you?
This story is from the July 22, 2013 issue of Fortune.
