The systemic deanonimisation of the Internet

I've been worrying these last few weeks due to something that I can't change. It's just something about the "system", as it's usually called. We're in the Information Age. Ever since we invented printing and then electricity, the wheel started to turn toward today unchangeably. Information is more valuable today than it ever was.

There's a famous phrase by Francis Bacon:

Knowledge is power and it can command obedience. A man of knowledge during his lifetime can make people obey and follow him and he is praised and venerated after his death. Remember that knowledge is a ruler and wealth is its subject.

Lots of spying, Wikileaks, Facebook's prying on private information, NSA and similar international agencies with the sole goal of aggregating information about everyone of interest (a category that keeps growing as storage and analysis capabilities keep increasing with time).

At first, I didn't even think about it. When the internet first came into my life, nobody spoke about the dangers of sharing personally identifying information online. I just thought that it was a nice place and I stayed. And then, Facebook and the NSA leaks came along and pushed this perspective out of my life. The internet, this very public place where we share our thoughts and our lives, is a basin from which corporations drink.

Information is worth a lot of money today. Information about you, about me, about everyone you know. And it's freely accessible. It's in the interest of corporations to have more information. Not because Francis Bacon once spoke about the power brought by knowledge but because it is just the industry standard. Marketing requires knowledge of the public. Ads, product design...

I sadly realised that our economy is based on the appropriation and aggregation of all publicly and privately available information. I emphasise "private" because Facebook doesn't doesn't seem to care whether our information is private or not. Wait, Google doesn't either! Besides every search we make being recorded and added to statistics in order to improve advertisement AIs, our e-mails on GMail are notoriously used for ad "personalisation".

Now, with the new European Union policies regarding the use of cookies and users' private information, many companies have started to be more discreet about their bulk inquiries on our data, and many others have changed their behaviour to a more healthy one for the general population. But this is just a minor setback for the info-miners.

The wheel is turning. There is nothing that can stop the trend. It's convenient and the ones who care about aggregating all of the information are also, coincidentally, those who hold the most power in the world.

I don't want to be a victim of this. In fact, I'm worried, almost sickly toward the idea that the prophesied Big Brother will come not in the form of one evil government but in the form of the global collective corporate and governmental prostitution of our information. I can feel our freedom oozing out of every pore in our bodies every time we spill our lives on this information basin we call the Internet.

And there's nothing we can do about it. It will happen. It's inevitable. People will keep sharing and info-miners will keep improving their technologies. And and once their AIs are very well fed, they will know you even if you haven't ever shared anything. The more you protect yourself, the more it will hurt when this happens.

And there's nothing we can do about it.

We can just only delay our slow demise.