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Privacy Watch: An Orwellian Bargain

By Russ Baker on Oct 11, 2012

How would George Orwell have imagined the world in 2012? In 1948, he imagined a 1984 where the government could and did monitor our every utterance and thought—with horrible consequences. That didn’t quite come to pass. Not in 1984, anyway.

But flash forward a few decades, and you find us creeping toward a total surveillance state. This time, though, it’s not just the government playing Big Brother, but the private sector as well, with the rest of us going along willingly.

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Consider a new app from a firm which, in tandem with Facebook, would allow people to be monitored—and identified instantly—by cameras wherever they went.

The lure to this privacy-rights slaughter? A meal or a deal.

Redpepper, a small Southern advertising & tech outfit with pictures of a lot of friendly employees on its website, proposes to make it easier to get good deals by automatically revealing your identity when you walk into a wide array of establishments.  It has created an online “app” (or program) that takes “tagged” photos of you found on Facebook and then matches it with your image taken by specially-designed cameras installed in stores and restaurants. Your smartphone then offers you a customized deal based on a history of things you have indicated appeal to you.

They call it “check in with your face.”

Watch their video showing how it works:

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You need to “grant [the system] permission” to track you, though who wouldn’t mind saving a buck on a burrito or a mojito?

But think about what we’re giving up in return for a little immediate gratification. The consequences of the steady slide into complete consumer commodification are staggering. Not only are we tagged and labeled like cattle. The long-range implications aren’t hard to see: Anyone with ill intentions (and the means of accessing the data, legally or otherwise) would be able to track our movements and locate us in a second. They would know where we go, what we do, what we eat, and perhaps who we are with.

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