Your car, ratting you out to Big Brother.

I post this little article in relief that I am not merely crying in the wilderness about this mass surveillance by our electronic devices.

While on the subject of apps, coincident with this year's CES, Subaru announced that it has added eight cloud-based apps to the STARLINK multimedia system in the 2017 Impreza. Some are familiar, like Yelp. Some are a bit narrow in focus, like eBird, which was developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for birdwatchers. And one ought to give a bit of pause: RightTrack. According to Subaru,
"RightTrack Test Drive from Liberty Mutual Insurance monitors driving habits and provides customers with tips on driving safer to help lower their insurance rates and improve their safe driving skills."

Or said more simply: You drive. It watches. And let's the folks at Liberty Mutual know how well, and how fast, you've been driving.

But this is old news. Big Brother already knows where you are every minute, because cell phones. Big Brother already warehouses that data forever. Private companies like Target already can tell if your teenage daughter is pregnant by analyzing credit card purchases.

Let me add something now that may bring this all home to you nice and hard.

Imagine if you will, you are some schlubb in an office at Big Brother Data Inc. You have access to Donald Trump's and Milo Yiannopoulos' driving data, their Vizio TV data, their radio listening habits, their credit card data, their second-by-second location data for the last twenty years, every phone call, email and web site visit since there was an internet...

You are going to be one rich office schlubb, if all it takes to destroy a public figure is a re-cut video of him telling a joke.

Now imagine you are Milo. All your shit is spying on you, 24/7/365. Car, TV, phone, radio, fridge, toaster, if it plugs in its collecting data. If you have a non-standard way of picking your nose, there's probably video of it somewhere. More to the point, if you have ever lost your temper in a car or told an off-colour joke, there's video of that too.

There is not a human being on the planet who can survive that proctology exam.

The Phantom