Digital Tools are Now Essential

In a few short months since the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 has degraded the health and economic welfare of thousands, brought countries to a standstill and ushered the global economy into the worst recession since World War II. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to reconsider how essential digital tools are to achieving some semblance of normal, everyday living. Seemingly overnight, we found ourselves adapting to social distancing, nationwide lockdowns, working from home, online shopping, digital banking, virtual classrooms, telemedicine and video conferencing. Unfortunately, along with this digital transformation came facial recognition, drones, license plate scanners, immunity passports, biometric identification, pervasive surveillance, social media data harvesting and countless other technologies which threaten both our personal privacy and the future of the American republic.

We are the Product

Most of the time, some computer somewhere is recording something about us, our patterns of behavior, our lifestyles or our spending habits. Every transaction may be recorded. All of our movements and actions may be traceable. It might seem that digital tools are made available on the Internet just to make our lives easier but each additional “free” tool has furnished yet another way to gather more information. According to Senior Research Psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, “Companies that use the surveillance business model — and this includes Google and Facebook — don’t sell you anything. They sell you. We are the product.”

Social media platforms amass as much information as they can about their users, their users’ online friends and about their users’ offline friends and it is all legal. Anyone who has ever interacted with someone whose data is stored on a social media website may have had their own information harvested to that website, even though they may not be a registered user. This is known as “shadow profiling” and it is a very profitable product.

Behavioral Products

According to author Professor Shoshana Zuboff, this data about us is sold to business customers as “behavioral products” for targeted advertising. Zuboff writes this “surveillance capitalism” is “a direct assault on human autonomy.” He states surveillance capitalist enterprises, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and others, oversee “configurations of knowledge about individuals, groups and society that are unprecedented in human history.” 

Watching an Invisible Enemy

Also unprecedented is big-government expansion brought on by the collective panic associated with the perceived health crisis. Fear has launched a pervasive proliferation of the latest surveillance technologies. “It’s the most frightening disease I’ve ever encountered in my career,” said Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “And that includes Ebola,” Hatchet continued, “…it includes MERS, it includes SARS. And it’s frightening because of the combination of infectiousness and a lethality that appears to be manifold higher than flu.”  Citizens and government leaders are operating in fear mode; only this time we are afraid of an unseen enemy. President Trump has said, “I want to assure the American people that we’re doing everything we can each day to confront and ultimately defeat this horrible, invisible enemy. We’re at war. In a true sense, we’re at war and we’re fighting an invisible enemy. Think of that.” 

Schools Fight COVID-19 With Surveillance

The Markup newsroom posted a series of articles in September which demonstrated how as some school districts prepare for the new semester of in-person attendance, they are fighting back by not scrimping on the latest surveillance gadgets. Fayette County Public Schools in Georgia bought five cameras equipped with thermal imaging which cost $7,000 each. The school district will not be using the automated mask detection and facial identification but they are available. A New York State school district had started to experiment with facial recognition until state legislators put the program on pause and Bluetooth location tracking is already operating in dozens of schools. An Artificial Intelligence-powered Motorola service detects mask compliance on video. Also, the schools may opt to outfit students with wearables for contact tracing with COVID contact-screening apps. The cameras are potential threats to privacy because it is likely they will stay in schools after the health crisis is over and may end up being used for something beyond the scope of their initial purposes. 

Pandemic Simulation Close to Reality

“Event 201”,  a pandemic simulation, was hosted by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in New York City on October 18, 2019 just six weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak. Fifteen business, government and public health leaders acted out realistic policy problems that would have to be addressed under pressure during a pandemic. It portrayed the outbreak of a “novel zoonotic coronavirus,” like SARS, but more “transmissible”. According to the Center for Health Security Event 201 Scenario, “There is no possibility of a vaccine being available in the first year. There is a fictional antiviral drug that can help the sick but not significantly limit spread of the disease.” In the fictional scenario outlined, the infection rate was not slowed until 80-90% of the global population had been exposed. Harsh policy decisions controlling the lives of masses of regular citizens, as explored in this hypothetical simulation, are a dreadful everyday reality in China. 

read more: https://www.endtime.com/articles-endtime-magazine/the-digital-transformation/