Location, location, location. Just not my locations, please. Or anyone else's for that matter.

Years ago - a couple of decades, actually - I was on a panel at a tech conference, and one of the questions that us sages on the panel were asked was to name an issue that we saw emerging over the next few years. My answer, pulled either out of the sky or out of something I'd recently read, was PRIVACY.

This was during the early stages of the dot.com era. The Internet wasn't brand new. Not exactly. But it was just taking off as a platform for commerce and interpersonal communications. 

Little did I know...

Fast forward and privacy is a huge issue, in that most of us no longer have as much of it was we used to.

I was only on Facebook for a brief while, mostly to look at pictures of the kids, grandkids, and dogs of friends. So I didn't surrender much there.

But I've been blogging for nearly 15 years, and if someone wants to figure out where I'm coming from, they can look here.

Ditto for Twitter. I've only been at all active since the 2020 election, and 99.99% of my activity is commenting. But if the coming fascist government wants to Gestapo in on folks, Twitter is where they'll find me.

Plus I sign petitions. And donate to ActBlue.

I order plenty of things online. 

I search all the time. And while I say good luck to anyone trying to figure out who I am and what I'm about by all my rando searches, I'm sure there's an algo in the making which will be able to do just that.

I've spit in the vial for Ancestry, so my DNA is hanging out there.

I wear a Fitbit that records my every step.

And I never leave home without my smartphone. As it is for everyone else, my phone has become an almost seamless extension of my body. (Not really, but I've always wanted to use the words "seamless extension" in some context other than as weasel words talking about one tech product integrated - however tangentially - with another.) I don't leave home without my phone, and on the rare occasion I find that I have, I quickly backtrack. And, like most folks, I do leave location tracking on. 

So between Fitbit tracking my walking, and Verizon tracking my location, and Google tracking my online activity, and mouthing off on social media, if I think about it for a moment, I'm living - as most of us are - the creepy prediction that the creepily named group The Police made way back in 1983 when they released their stalker anthem, Every Breath You Take. 

Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I'll be watching you.

Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I'll be watching you

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you

Bad enough that all these every-things are being fed into the maw of big data machines that spit it out so that companies can get their marketing message to us. It'll get a lot worse when, say, insurance companies strike a bargain with Ancestry.com and figure out who's got DNA that's worth selling insurance to and who doesn't. And it'll get a lot worse if and when an authoritarian regime takes control of this country, a prospect that once seemed outlandish, but which is now within the realm of possibility.

The best movies I've seen about a total society where the regime keeps watch are The White Rose and The Lives of Others. 

The White Rose is an account of a anti-Nazi student movement in Germany in the 1940's, told largely from the perspective of Sophie Scholl. Control was so intense in Germany during the Nazi years that you couldn't even purchase a ream of paper at a stationery store without getting reported, and there were government agents monitoring how many stamps you bought at at time when you went to the post office. The better to figure out who was printing anti-government pamphlets and mailing them out. (Sophie Scholl, along with fellow members of her resistance group, including her brother, were beheaded.)

All that Gestapo-led total society training perfectly set the East Germans up for a life in their repressive post-war regime, and The Lives of Others centered on a member of the Stasi who was eavesdropping on citizens trying to catch them out. The Stasi also relied on family members, colleagues, and neighbors reporting on each other - a tactic which had been perfected by the Nazis.

Anyway, both of these films are chilling. And they were made about a time that was way, way, way before technology enabled the collection of an almost infinite and granular set of information about us - much of which we voluntarily surrender, day in and day out, without thinking twice.

The latest fear factor surrounds threats to privacy with respect to women's health:

A location data firm is selling information related to visits to clinics that provide abortions including Planned Parenthood facilities, showing where groups of people visiting the locations came from, how long they stayed there, and where they then went afterwards, according to sets of the data purchased by Motherboard. (Source: Vice)

While this is macro level data, it's apparently not all that difficult to unmask the data and find the names of (and dox) individuals. And going after those visiting Planned Parenthood is apparently nothing new:

Anti-abortion groups are already fairly adept at using novel technology for their goals. In 2016, an advertising CEO who worked with anti-abortion and Christian groups sent targeted advertisements to women sitting in Planned Parenthood clinics in an attempt to change their decision around getting an abortion.

This location data could do grave harm to those seeking reproductive care, as it could be used to follow women traveling from a state without the right to an abortion to a state where abortion is available. Some legislatures in anti-choice states are already making noises about homicide charges for those who have an abortion, about tracking women who travel out of state, etc. Could get very, very scary.

Even scarier when you consider that many women use period trackers. The thought of this data combining with location information. Shudder, shudder, shudder...

And for those wondering whether "they" will be coming after gay marriage once "they" overturn Roe v. Wade. Of course they will be.

Recently, a Christian-focused outlet The Pillar published a piece that used location data to track the movements of a specific priest and then outed him publicly as potentially gay without his consent.

I'm too old to have periods, to get pregnant. I'm not gay. But I regularly participate in protests.

So I need to start turning off location tracking on my phone. 

Not that this will necessarily work. With facial recognition technology and drones, with spies no doubt being everywhere filming protests (not to mention phone-made videos being posted on social media by the folks on the right side), and Alexa and Siri potentially spying on you in your home, there's probably no place to run, no place to hide.

Technology is such a mixed bag, isn't it?