Capitalism: Our Knight In Shining Armour?

Fashionable as it has become within the tech spheres of the developed world to think of the masses as subject to the totalitarian surveillance predicted by George Orwell, the exasperating tension between satirising the sinister activities of the world's biggest corporations and continuing to use the services they provide is leading to an increasingly tedious repetitive streak of discontent in the media.

When Facebook introduced it's Messenger app, requiring permission to make and charge for calls automatically and use a device's camera and microphone whether or not the app is in use at the time, news sources rushed to report the injustice we are being subjected too. There is no denying that anyone who has downloaded this app is putting themselves at risk of having their privacy breached but that hasn't stopped more than a billion people downloading the app, despite the uneasy feeling in the back of our minds that there had to be a catch. We can never truly have believed that social media would give us the luxuries we enjoy today at no cost but so far, we have overlooked this.


For now, we still have time to make an informed decision about whether we want to go down this road. If we did want to opt out now, we would have to change our day to day lives drastically. For a start, we'd have to delete everything - Facebook, Twitter, Google, Skype - they're all at it and even if the web didn't catch you, 95% of UK residents use loyalty cards which track our shopping habits. We really would have to thoroughly disconnect ourselves from almost anything that makes life convenient.

This is not a crusade. Whether or not we continue to allow these organisations to access our data is neither here nor there to me but given that I will be affected as much as anyone if we don't take the necessary steps to prevent the inevitable, I'd quite like to know that, rather than drifting towards 'Big Brother' like lambs to the slaughter, we decided our fate, weighing up the loss of our privacy against the convenience of these services.

The brilliance of getting rid of all the techy stuff we take for granted is that capitalism would kick in and within a matter of weeks, new gadgets would become available to meet the demand. Indeed, some alternatives are already out there, waiting to be discovered. For instance, I have taken to searching the web with DuckDuckGo, who make a point of not storing users' data. As consumers, we have more choice than we think.

But the time to make that choice is now. Today, GSMA have released figures which estimate that there are 7.22billion gadgets on the planet, 200million more than the world's population. Once we all start using devices like Microsoft's Surface Pro 3, which advertises itself as "The tablet that can replace your laptop", it will be all too easy to introduce default apps which can't be deleted and have all the permissions people claim to be worried about today.

In short, the media has said what it has to say on the matter. Now, journalism at large will simply repeat itself, reporting scandal after scandal until we either change our ways or let our phone watch and listen to everything we do while charging us for the privilege.