“Wear clean underwear folks, because governments on all levels, businesses and internet trolls are poking around where they shouldn’t be poking.
A few examples;
For $500 the TSA will gladly maul, manhandle and otherwise probe portions of your body that should only be available or visible to you. The nice part about it is no dinner, conversation, or any of the other common ‘first-date-jitters’ are involved. It’s my guess that this person would likely get winded making her way to the restroom yet I could see where she would possibly whip out a tube of hemorrhoid medicine and threaten to lube the pilot if she wasn’t immediately flown to Maui.
Fire up your cell phone and take a good, hard look at the apps on the device. Most of them were not put there by you. Most of them were put there by the cell phone service provider because they would really like to get to know you better…, a lot better…, better than your mother knows you. (Remember your mother telling you to always ‘wear clean underwear’ in case anything happened?) Many of the apps on your cell phone follow your every move through GPS, cookies, transactions and just plain asking you what you would like to do. Ask Siri how well she knows you and you may have to think about filing stalking charges.
A couple of days ago I saw a commercial on TV that utterly fascinated me. A cable company had gleeful, glossy-eyed, robotic, frontal lobotomy patients, er, I mean customers, all happily espousing the wonderful benefits of allowing the cable company and their devices to have access to all their television, cell phone and internet activities. This, they proclaimed happily, allowed the cable company to ‘suggest’ programs to watch, apps to download, things to sign up for or buy and how to properly pick the guy/girl of your dreams. (Well, maybe not that last one.) The end result is that your TV screen now looks like this.
I don’t know about you, but as a writer, I don’t have time or the inclination to watch 589 channels of junk. Nor do I wish the cable company to know more about me than I know about me. (Do they know if I have clean underwear on? Do they then suggest buying Hanes over Jockey? What do they do with someone who doesn’t wear underwear? If I wear Fruit of the Loom does that mean I am more likely to buy jalapeno flavored barbecue potato chips or watch Duck Dynasty in my clean underwear?)
If you ever wish to experience a need to change into some clean underwear, literally, try plugging Ghostery into your web browser and watching how many entities are tracking your every move on the internet. It will, quite literally, amaze the crap out of you. But don’t worry, if you listen to your Mom, you’ll have clean underwear to change into.
There’s such a thing called privacy. Privacy’s definition necessarily dictates that you don’t know whether I have clean underwear on or not. Privacy dictates you shouldn’t need to know. Thus I choose not to allow the TSA a complimentary grope of my personal parts. (Thank you kindly, I’ll drive in my clean underwear or semi-naked.) I choose to have control of my own phone and the apps on it. I choose to not have access to thousands of channels at a cost of thousands of dollars per year. (But as the cable company will tell you, “you’re saving thousands on bundling”.) I choose not to have my TV, cell phone or DVD player tell me what I feel like watching tonight.
What do you choose? What value do you place on privacy and your personal rights?
Ethan Holmes is the author of Live Your Life In A Crap Free Zone, a humorous and witty look at the choices people make in life and the paths these choices set them on.
Ethan Holmes welcomes comments and followers.
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