Is Big Brother Really Watching You?

by Max Harvey

In the modern day and age we are connected to the internet in so many different ways. From the phones we chat to friends on, to the iPad you read this on and even the sat-navs within our cars: it seems that there is no escape from being online.

Since the internet was first made widely accessible in 1990 in the form of the World Wide Web, it has connected many across the globe and has come on leaps and bounds in the last few decades. You can now search for a keyword and receive over 100,000,000 results in under a second, or even partake in online lessons via software such as google meets or Microsoft teams. This is undoubtedly amazing and arguably many of the great achievements of the 21st century would not have been possible without this technology. Despite its usefulness and success, however, very few ask whether the widespread use of the internet is leading us towards a new age - an age of no privacy - an age, to liken the situation to George Orwell’s 1984, where Big Brother really is watching you.

Now, I’m not suggesting that armed units of thought police are about to sweep onto the streets and arrest any teenager who has ever thought that their parents were being unreasonable (I’m not sure even they would be able to complete that mammoth task) but, everyone is a lot less protective about their online privacy than they are of their privacy in person.

We fuss over losing a driver's license or personal data such as our address yet we seem perfectly happy to routinely enter bank details online and accept terms and conditions, when we all know that nobody reads them, just so that we can start playing that latest game that is trending online. Despite this, only a fraction of us ever question what is happening to that data and how it is being used.

As an example, think of when you have probably had an app request to use your location. Now you probably believe that the app wants to do this in order to make better suggestions whilst you are searching for something, and you are right, it probably is. However what you don’t know once accepting that request, is how else your location is being used. Are the developers of the app also tracking your location in order to track their users habits? Or worse still, are they sharing this information with third parties?

The greatest threat that the internet poses in my opinion is to our privacy, and more specifically to our personal control over our privacy. We build walls around our gardens, put curtains over our windows and if we were to write our pin code on a piece of paper, we would still have control over where it goes. But, with the internet, once that data goes online, it does not simply just disappear, and online, it is even harder to know what exactly is the agenda of any company whose software you make use of.

So I return to the question in the title: Is big brother really watching you?

I’ll leave you to decide.