So much of what we do is recorded

What do we know about ourselves? Even before we are born, medical records are being created about our well-being. From scrapes, and fractures, to colds, sniffles, tonsils, everything goes into our files. As adults, pregnancies, weight, and other afflictions are added along with x-rays, CT scans and surgeries.
Paralleling those records, schools gather information about us from the first day of Junior Kindergarten through to high school graduation. If we play athletics, then our participation in hockey, swimming, figure skating, curling, bowling etc. is recorded.
All of our banking, stock trading and insurance functions are tracked.
We don’t think about all of those things too often. Everyone tells us that the privacy rules prevent disclosure of our personal information and security systems are present to prevent hacking.
With the creation of huge data base computer systems, every major retailer in the world tracks our purchases. We provide them with a telephone number or email, which are easily swapped between major corporations. Our shopping patterns are catalogued.
The retailers then sell that information to aggregators of personal shopping patterns. Those loyalty cards and credit cards track every purchase. Patterns are found, and then retailers contact us through email making offers that we find difficult to resist. One may wonders why books, or jewelry, or clothing are identified for you. We find those offers hard to resist.
With the advent of cell phones, retailers have the ability today to track your movements in their stores to see what displays cause you to pause. It is seldom used, but the GPS function makes it possible. Parents can even track the movements of their children with the GPS signal of smart phones.
Is it any wonder why international governments are not using these techniques to track individuals and world leaders? We hear that the leaders of Spain, Germany, France and other nations are appalled at being spied upon and private conversations are being recorded from leaders cell phones.
I suspect that it is more theatre than outrage. From earliest times spying has always been part of business and government strategy. Spying has been used against all nations, and in Canada we have CSIS, a government agency, which looks to defeat spies and protect Canadian interests. It is to protect Canadians from other governments spying on Canada and protect Canadians from terrorists whether home grown or international.
We know as a fact, that the United States monitors phone calls from all over the world. They are probably monitoring Canadian calls too. And it becomes easy for nations to intercept emails, when the movement of emails is scattered to reach the final destination. They can be picked up and traced back to the originating computer or phone.
Any nation has the ability to track us and discover our financial, health, education, and lifestyle information. Against all the security in the world, nations can spy on us. And our records make it valuable for hackers to also break through firewalls to grab our data.
For most of us, our information is not all that valuable. If we were to gather all the information that is stored about us, we would have a lot of reading to do. We might even enjoy remembering about buying that first car, or moving into a first home having qualified for a mortgage. We might not enjoy being reminded about a speeding ticket, or missing a credit card payment of having our children discover that we were not the best students. But our life histories have been recorded even if we can’t remember much of them.

–Jim Cumming,
Publisher