Sunday March 12, 2023

“Hey, Siri,” I said to my cell phone.
“Yes?” my cell phone replied. So did my laptop and my desktop. I had assumed both of them were turned off. Or at least dormant. I was wrong.
Now I wonder how much else those microphones are picking up when I think I’m alone.
CBC’s Marketplace program hacked into a scammer’s computer in India. It was able to turn on the scammer’s camera, remotely, and show Canadian viewers the man actually making his phone calls.
I’m suddenly uncomfortably aware that my iPhone scans my face for recognition, without warning me, “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!”
And now I wonder what else my cameras may be revealing when I don’t realize they’re on. To whom? And why?

A futile ban
As I have written before, there’s no such thing as privacy on the internet. But now I’m worried that there may be far less privacy than I had thought.
The man who invented the cell phone 50 years ago, Martin Cooper, agrees: “We don’t have privacy anymore because everything around us is now recorded someplace and accessible to anybody else who has enough desire to get it.”
Canada has followed the lead of the U.S. and the European Union in banning TikTok from government-owned cell phones. But that doesn’t stop government employees, federal or provincial, from having it on their own phones. Which may be on their desks. Or in their pockets, while they’re in highly sensitive meetings.
I don’t have TikTok. Or Instagram. Just Facebook. And even that, I beginning to realize, not only reminds me of birthdays of people I haven’t seen in years, but also tells me where they’re travelling and who’s chatting with them.
TikTok is apparently far more intrusive than Facebook. Sean Kilpatrick of Canadian Press researched its capabilities: “TikTok can access personal data including contacts, calendars, which device you're using, keystroke patterns, battery state, audio settings, connected audio devices, and your location. Your exact location.”
\Robert Potter, co-founder of a cybersecurity firm, compared TikTok to other social media and found TikTok was “an outlier in the sheer amount of data it collects.”
It is able to identify “the objects and scenery that appear [in your videos], the existence and location within an image of face and body features … and the text of the words spoken,” Potter stated.

Selling your secrets
Beyond that kind of data, media experts suspect that TikTok can also transfer your “algorithm” – that unique collection of data that helps search engines feed you the information you want. Maybe you look for sports scores or store discounts. Or maybe you explore porn sites, child abuse networks, or bomb-making instructions, any of which could be used to blackmail you into changing your vote. Or pressuring you into illicit activities.
Government banned TikTok for its Chinese ownership. I think that’s (pun intended) a red herring. China is not the only agency involved in data mining. Remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018? The company collected data on 87 million Facebook users, and used it to meddle in at least 50 political elections.
Cambridge Analytica was, ahem, a reputable British firm with Canadian connections.
In all the froth and ferment about TikTok, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced not one, not two, but three investigations into Canada’s digital vulnerability. As a CBC report stated, “The prime minister said he's tasked the country's two intelligence review bodies -- the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians and the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency -- with investigating the issue.”
That’s on top of appointing a still un-named “special rapporteur” who will investigate the issue to decide whether it should be investigated.
I won’t second-guess Trudeau’s decisions.
But I already know what the rapporteur and the two agencies will conclude. There is no way that anyone – individuals, corporations, or governments – can retain control of information once it goes into cyberspace.
Whatever TikTok can do, any other platform can also do. Or can be trained to do.

Thoughtless censorship
Governments cannot easily legislate against data abuses. If Canada’s laws limit data mining, just move the server to a more lenient clime. If the server is in Singapore, say, it operates under Singapore’s laws, not Canada’s.
Granted, there is one alternative. The government could require the corporations that control wireless transmission in Canada – Bell, Rogers, Telus, and Shaw – to set up stringent controls on every message.
Which could curtail individual freedom of speech. I could have my columns censored by some mindless computer algorithm in Toronto.
Why, it could cut me off in mid-
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Copyright © 2023 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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Your turn

Last week I sounded off about the need to stand up to, and to reject, racial prejudice – evne when it comes from within “our” ranks. I started by telling about the actions of Matthew Harrison, president of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod to denounce white-nationalists within his church.

Marilyn Josefson responded, “I can't speak for all Lutheran churches, but as a member of the ELCIC (Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada), I would say that we are among those who are more progressive. While we recognize Martin Luther as a man who protested against certain beliefs/practices in the Roman Catholic church of his time (1517); he was eventually excommunicated. [This video shows] that in his later years, he became rather disillusioned... https://www.history.com/topics/religion/martin-luther-and-the-95-theses#section_6

There’s a significant difference between the U.S. and Canadian racism. Ruth Shaver wrote, “Racism in what is now the United States of America goes back to the importation of African natives as enslaved persons in 1526 by the Spanish in the Florida colony; Florida entered the Union as a slave state despite Spanish attempts from 1693 through the Revolutionary War to create a free colony for those who escaped their enslavement in Georgia and the Carolinas as a way to destabilize the economy of those colonies. The British importation of enslaved Africans and the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists embedded racism, White Supremacy, and Christian Nationalism as the unholy trinity in the DNA of the United States of America 150 years or more before such a country existed. What is today the far-right was once the happy middle of American political and economic thinking. I fear that unless more conservative Christian leaders do as Matthew Harrison has, what was once the middle may get far too close to that point again.”

In Canada, the prejudice is more likely against Indigenous peoples. Sandy Hayes’ book club has been reading “Five Little Indians,” He says, ”I am finding it well written and easy to follow, but very sad.
“I believe there needs to be more accountability from many of the chiefs and councils as to who the money from Ottawa goes to. Of course, it is the same with ‘our’ politicians -- some get a much larger portion of the pie! I think people are so afraid some group is going to get more money than they do -- this stokes racism. There are many injustices -especially on reserves, and if the government continues to assist them financially, there needs to be more accountability.
“I do not know much about the ‘Indian Act’, or if it is ‘good or bad’ for First Nations, I do know things change and even the name Indian Act is archaic. Some groups of people want NO interference, yet when they are not helped, or heard, they.
“To not even bother to let parents know of the deaths of these children is beyond sad -- even if it was from natural causes-like TB. To be so callous as to not inform the parents is beyond belief. They knew where to go to pick them up and take them away; surely they could have retraced their steps to tell the parents?
“So many questions, so few answers.”

Tom Watson offered additional reading: “Anyone wanting to know more about the harmful effects of the Indian Act should read ‘21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act’ by Bob Joseph.”

Dave Grundy: It seems to me that REAL Truth & Reconciliation can only happen after the real truth is understood. This will be a long process, perhaps a generation or two, but really needs to begin with a much better common understanding of the Indian Act of 1876.
My question to you is: How can we (all Canadians) effectively learn about the contents and consequences of the Indian Act? A tall order perhaps, but probably a necessity for effective change to commence.

Eduard Hiebert was a week late responding to my column on the Ukraine war. He offered a quote from Sun Tzu's The Art of War: "All war is based on deception… If you're in a shooting war, you've failed in your long strategy."
Eduard campaigns for numbered voting: “What we now have in some 240 federal districts, most of those who voted -- well over half -- NEVER VOTED for the one who was declared and designated their MP.”

James Russell objected on logical grounds to my suggestion that “If there had been a Marshall Plan after WWI, there would have been no WWII. By 1939, it was too late to seek ‘peace in our time’.”
“The link between things that didn’t happen and other things that didn’t happen is a pretty weak one on which to hang so much. (“If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs” comes to mind.)”
JT: James is quite right – there is no way to prove that IF something had happened, something else WOULD have happened. I can only argue that there is no way to prove that IF something had happened, something else WOULDN’T have happened.