The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) offers a great commentary by Eva Galperin that describes traitorware: “devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy.” Basically, she’s describing nearly every digital tool that we use and carry, from printers to cell phones and CDs. Somebody is collecting all kinds of information about you in non-volunteered ways. This information includes your location and movements, device identity codes, all of the very intimate details of your life and activities. This term acts as a wake up call: the technology is only going to evolve to detect and discover more details about our selves and our environment.
Coaching moment: The alarming thing about this post, and why I’m happy that EFF is watching developments in this area, is that surreptitious tracking is non-voluntary. We do not know when we purchase our devices what kind of information is being collected and sent back to various hidden interests. The collection of details includes information that we may not wish to share with unknown sources, for unknown purposes about our location, our social network, or personal health, or any other details about our existence. Do we have a choice? More now than we will if we do nothing until later. Write a letter to your congressperson. Talk with your friends. Turn off Fox. Hey, if you’d like to thank EFF for their work in this area, here’s one way.
Many of us have a common mis-perception that we know who we are and what we want. Our minds think this way as a systematic approach to controlling our world. The problem is that we don’t realize we have more choices than what we think we know every day.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article last weekend called David Foster Wallace on Life and Work that speaks to this situation. In this article, David wrote about
being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
He continues…
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.
Ironically, few of us believe in ourselves in this way. It’s out of our comfort zone. We are, in a sense, not free.
That is exactly why we should go there.
Coaching moment: Next time you’re stuck in traffic or in a long line, try to imagine that things are not what they seem to be. What if you were happy about things in your grocery cart? What if the traffic jam gave you time to try a breathing exercise to reduce stress? Can you remember to do this one time every day?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) offers a great commentary by Eva Galperin that describes traitorware: “devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy.” Basically, she’s describing nearly every digital tool that we use and carry, from printers to cell phones and CDs. Somebody is collecting all kinds of information about you in non-volunteered ways. This information includes your location and movements, device identity codes, all of the very intimate details of your life and activities. This term acts as a wake up call: the technology is only going to evolve to detect and discover more details about our selves and our environment.![[del.icio.us]](http://digitalidcoach.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
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