Member-only story
Are Privacy Wars Looming?
How Surveillance Anxiety Is Sparking New Forms of Collective Action and Technological Sovereignty.
Debbie was relieved to get on a flight as her father was dying. She’d needed to get home. Her friend suddenly plopped down beside her, they’d both booked a late flight. Debbie told her friend the cost. Her friends eyebrows perked up. Debbies flight had cost $850 more than hers. And Debbie had booked two hours earlier. Same route, same day.
What Debbie didn’t know is that when she was booking her flight, the airline had scoured her searches and social media. It registered a dying parent and urgency. They jacked the price because they also knew through her credit history what she could afford. It’s called surveillance pricing and Delta is already rolling out. The airline calls it “dynamic pricing”. No, there’s no appealing to customer service and it’s perfectly legal.
Perhaps the most well-known privacy protecting tool most people are familiar with are VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) that disguise the origin of the IP address of your device. They’re extremely popular in autocratic countries and becoming more so in democratic ones too. But some VPN companies aren’t what they seem either and are actually spying on you to either get passwords or resell your data to third parties. Not all…
