How Big Tech Built the Iron Cage
Big Tech / Iron Cage
A decade ago, the residents of the English village of Broughton, in Buckinghamshire, formed a human chain to block an intruder. A car with a camera mounted on its roof was about to immortalize Broughton’s country lanes for Google Street View, which has photographed more than ten million miles of streets around the world. The car, having halted in front of the protesters, beat a retreat when one of them called the police. The story made the rounds of the international media, often treated as an instance of English eccentricity, snootiness, or small-town paranoia. It surfaced again the following year, when the German Federal Commission for Data Protection revealed that Street View vehicles were not only photographing people’s homes but also collecting vast amounts of data from unencrypted Wi-Fi routers—including e-mails, chat sessions, browser histories, and passwords. Peter Schaar, Germany’s data-protection commissioner, said, “I am shocked at the way these routes were used without third parties being aware of them.”
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