February 24, 2023

“I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said ‘I want to be let alone!’ There is all the difference.” ― Greta Garbo

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On February 2, Americans were treated to the spectacle of a giant balloon floating over Montana wilderness that would go on to traverse the entire length of the United States.  Of Chinese origin, this giant balloon was loaded with what appeared to be potential reconnaissance or communications equipment.  Depending on what side of the political aisle observers were on, there was one of two responses from the public: First, shoot it down.  We don’t appreciate foreign adversaries using espionage tools or potential weapons overhead.  Second, Biden did the right thing by ensuring it was over open waters before dispatching it.  It’s normal, they flew over during the Trump administration as well.

For myself, I fall squarely into the shoot-it-down camp.  There is something intrusive about a foreign object the width of several school buses entering my personal space that demands a decisive response.  Given the sparse population of Montana, it seemed the appropriate time to dispatch it while above remote territory with the least risk to bystanders below.  The concern wasn’t so much that China was gathering intelligence from above as some other potential for a weaponized payload like explosives, bioweapons, or an electromagnetic pulse device.  The Chinese have no shortage of satellites or technology required to spy on Americans.  Most Americans have willingly adopted Chinese manufactured and even branded surveillance technology into their homes, myself included.

I consider myself an early technology adopter.  I was an alpha tester of Amazon’s first Echo home speaker device.  An entire global library of music on-demand?  Yes, please!  What would follow is a connected home of lights, switches, thermostats, sprinkler controllers, alarm systems, cameras, etc. The convenient control over one’s home that technology allows is fantastic. But it has come at a cost. 

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During my foray into writing, one of the first articles I penned concerned the Faustian bargain we enter into when we trade privacy for convenience.  The crux of this dilemma is that the parties we enter into these agreements with have ulterior motives. 

Take social media, for example. We traded free personal connections online for a seat at the table in our daily lives.  Technology corporations performed massive data mining campaigns to paint a picture of your entire life.  They know who you are, your family and friends, your interests and hobbies, your jobs and colleagues, and your daily habits from sun up to sun up.  They’re even listening while you sleep. 

Once these corporations were firmly entrenched in our lives, they began to apply social pressure to engineer society in their twisted mold.  From campaigns regarding topics such as diversity, equity, and inclusion, to election interference like that of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, to silencing political dissent by censorship or steering press coverage in manners favorable to themselves, big tech utilized the monetized data that they controlled against those they’d taken it from. 

But I’m different. I have nothing to hide. Right?  This is a common retort when debating the merits of privacy with the average American.  It’s a good thing they have nothing to hide because they’ve given up any possible place to hide.  I started my blog, WithdrawConsent.org, to explore withdrawing consent from a system and society that had abused it.  A part of that process was taking back control over my personal information, including what parts of my life I allow the rest of the world into.

A few years ago, I installed a Firewalla on my home network.  A Firewalla is an inexpensive home firewall device that is easy to set up and has a minimal footprint on my home network performance without ongoing subscription costs.  It allowed me to secure my home network from outside threats and gave me a picture of what was happening with devices inside my home network.   What I learned raised some serious red flags. 

At some point, my wife found a Shark Robotic vacuum on clearance at the store.  Excitedly, she set it up on our home network, and it went to work mapping out its cleaning path.  Unfortunately, the Firewalla began to set off alarms at odd times, suggesting that the Shark Vacuum was uploading a data feed to Shenzen, China.  Regardless of how innocuous this could be, I find no reason why any home appliance needs to send data it collects in my home to servers in China.  I took the Shark vacuum off our network, and we got rid of it.  We exchanged it for a different model with no data connection that works only on light detection and ranging, or lidar, to determine its path.