Creepy Technology - a review of the video documentary: The Creepy Line

I've worked in Information Technology forever, and have seen it transform from basic data processing to information processing to behavioral and political processing. Some aspects of today's technology abuses are downright creepy, and there's much more of it on the horizon.

Common sense dictates limiting the amount of personal information posted online. It makes sense to configure browsers for maximum privacy. Yet the feature-length documentary The Creepy Line points out that we voluntarily give out all kinds of personal information to Google and Facebook. Millions of people use Google for email, which is archived and processed in order to extract personal information and interests. Many corporations and nonprofits process their email and documents using Google services and servers, thus exposing them to the same information mining.

The Android phone was developed by Google as a competitor to the iPhone. Yet as the documentary points out, one of the prime reasons for doing so was to gain control of the platform for data mining purposes.

It's worthwhile noting that if something is free, you're the product.

The pervasive detail of personal information collected by the Masters of the Universe (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon) is leveraged by enormous computational and archival capability. This enables them to excel at targeted advertising, implicitly influence online behavior, and even influence elections.

The Creepy Line explains how this works, in terms that are easy to understand. When you search with Google, behavioral influence begins with the very first letter you type. Search suggestions entice you to search for suggested phrases. As a blatant example, the documentary shows that when someone searched for a phrase similar to "Republican election race," a search suggestion asked, "do you mean racist Republican?"

But it goes much deeper than that. The extensive research of Dr. Robert Epstein reveals how search engine companies can bias results in a manner that shifts opinions of undecided voters by up to 43.4 percent. Epstein states that election results could be undetectably shifted by 10 percent. There is no audit trail.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even Amazon have begun to engage in outright censorship of conservative and non-politically correct sites, blogs, and books. Shadowbanning and deplatforming are becoming all too common. The documentary explains how Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are exempt under the law from liability for what users post online because the companies aren't themselves content producers. Google, Facebook and Twitter are similarly exempt because they purportedly don't produce content. Yet when they engage in censorship and shadowbanning, they indeed have become content publishers and producers; they have crossed the Creepy Line.

This documentary is about what you don't know. It's highly recommended viewing, especially around election time.

The Creepy Line documentary is available on Amazon Prime and can be rented or purchased on iTunes.

Originally published on CAIRCO.org.

Permission granted to reproduce this article in full without alteration, with credit.

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