Peeping Toms category archive
All the World’s a Stage 0
And all the men and women merely players (whether they want to be or not).
One more time, “social” media isn’t.
Facebook Frolics 0
The Zuckerborg takes a tip from the musical Hair and sings, “Assimilation can make you mine.”
When They’ve Got Your Number . . . 0
. . . it turns out that they really have got your number.
No Place To Hide 0
The snaring economy wants to shadow you like a cheap detective.
“We Know Where You Are” 0
The Bangor Daily News reprints a Bloomberg article on the explosive growth in the use of automobile license plate scanners, leaving you no place for privacy. Here’s a bit; follow the link for the rest:
But the use of license plate scanners and other car surveillance techniques may already be so embedded as to prevent any rollback. And with private companies leading the way in normalizing surveillance in the name of financial savings — as Progressive Insurance has done with its Snapshot program, which offers discounts in return for collecting data about driver activity and behavior — the public may already be so inured to it as to quell any public outrage to the recent revelations.
Picture This 2
Leonard Pitts, Jr., tackles the recent theft of pictures of well-known actresses and models. I have a few quibbles with some of what he say, but he speaks reasonably.
He starts by considering that men like pretty pictures–that’s biology. Then he moves on to the theft.
Which is precisely what’s wrong, creepy, slimy and profoundly distasteful about the hacking of those files and the posting of those pictures. Jennifer Lawrence didn’t make that choice. Nor did Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst or any of the other women whose unclothed images were stolen by unknown hackers and splashed across the Internet on Labor Day weekend by celebrity gossip Perez Hilton (he’s since apologized) and two popular message boards.
Let no one argue the women never should have taken the photos in the first place or entrusted them to digital lockboxes. To do so would come perilously close to blaming the victim for her own misfortune, something with which women who were raped were once (he should have “are,” not “were once”–ed.) all too familiar.