Is Big Brother Watching?

The concept of Big Brother, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, written in 1949, has come to represent the spectre of government control of and intrusion into individual lives. How real is this perception and what, if anything, can you do about it?

By Peter Aggus

Peter is a technology management consultant who specializes in security and radio systems. He has developed innovative & cost-effective solutions for clients in many industries.

Fiction or Fact?

The concept is more real and pervasive than many realize – so some degree of paranoia may be justified. Orwell’s novel initially portrays the concept of Big Brother as benevolent – something to help individuals and society and nothing to be afraid of. By the end of the novel, it has become clear that there is a darker side – more about surveillance and control. The similarities to many aspects of present-day life are stark – and, to some, frightening.

The Risks

In general terms, simply reading information is not trackable. If you buy a newspaper and read its content, nobody will be any wiser about what you have done (unless you are observed on CCTV, but that is a different story). However, that act of buying the newspaper might be trackable if you pay electronically – which is why the more paranoid often favour using anonymous cash.

If you read the same news article on a web site, your retrieval of the web page might be trackable to you, though it is possible to retrieve web pages anonymously. The same tracking ability exists, but it no longer points at you as an individual.

There are reasons why use of electronic services is tracked, including convenience. If you go to a web site that you use frequently, the web site can usefully fill in data about you into forms or shopping carts. Unfortunately, your data can be later used for purposes you might not have approved had you known.

A stark example of this is actually nothing to do with electronic technology. In the 1930s many European countries included ethnicity questions on their census forms. People voluntarily declared that they were, for example, Jewish – after all, the census data is ‘protected’ by privacy rules and will only be used for ‘good’ purposes. Except that, when countries were invaded by the Nazis, the census data was repurposed to find all the ‘ethnically undesirable’ people – and history tells us what happened next.

More recently, some people have found that their private medical data might be accessible to non-medical users. Someone ‘hacked’ the files and leaked the data – possibly even published it. Exposure of some types of medical information can affect your chances of promotion or even of being hired.

There are countless examples, but the common thread is that, once you have given up some data, you cannot reverse that action.

What Can You Do?

Giving up data is part of life these days. What is important to understand is that you should limit the data you give up to only what is needed for the purpose of the transaction. Take steps to reduce your risks of your private data being accessed. Here are some ideas.

Keep work and pleasure separate. Do not play games and visit risky web sites using your work computer. Do not do work on your personal cellphone. You might not be able to justify doubling up everything but you can consciously decide to compartmentalize activities such that personal and work cannot inter-mingle by accident.

Using different browsers is a good and very simple step. Do all your work on Firefox and all your personal stuff on Chrome for example. That way, cookies and web site data cannot leak from one to the other.

Keep work and private e-mail separate, and don’t send cute looking links to the work address. That is, follow basic quarantine rules.

If you must use a network that is not secure (think hotels, coffee shops etc.), then connect to a reliable VPN service and do all your transactions via it. That way, nobody on the network, or connected to it, can see your data. When travelling, remember that Border agents (Customs etc.) are allowed to search your baggage and that includes data on your computers. If you don’t need it, don’t take it. You can always access it via the cloud from your destination if needed.

If you’d like to discuss information security, or to comment on this article, please email me at peter.