On the passing of my friend, Peter Smith (1966-2023)

I was saddened to hear of my friend Peter Smith's sudden passing this week. (his obituary)

Peter was 56.

I moved with my wife and 14-year-old daughter to New Brunswick, Canada in October 2005.  One month later, Peter Smith shared these photos with me.  He was one of the first friends I made in Canada

Peter was a man I knew to love beauty, to love life, to love adventure, and to love his wife, Molly.

I had the utmost respect for him.

Peter took these photos on Sunday, 11 September, 2005, in Sussex, NB

Google knows what you did last summer

 Here's something you may find interesting, even "cute" in a way:

Back in the winter, I returned some equipment to a Bell/Aliant store.  When I approached the building the door wouldn't open.  A guy ran over to the door from inside the store and opened it manually.  "It's because you're wearing a mask," he explained.

"Oh, you have a facial recognition system," I said.

"No, not really," he said, "it just keeps people out whose faces match a profile of bad guys.  We don't collect information on our customers."

"I see, it's a facial recognition system that only detects bad people."  

I would bet money there's an image in a database somewhere of me entering that store, with the exact time and date.  Just like recorded surveillance video footage.  No harm done ... except I bet that image can be used to link me to countless other pieces of data, including every location I've taken my cellphone.

We all have the right to engage in perfectly legal activities that harm neither ourselves or anybody else without continuous scrutiny of our activities and without fear that we'll be mistakenly identified as a "person of interest" or whatever. As I've pointed out before, I'm doing nothing wrong when I use the toilet; yet I still believe I have a right to do that in complete privacy. (trust me, you don't want to watch)

Privacy is a basic human need, and a respect for privacy is basic human decency.  What I say, to whom, and where I say it, simply is not anyone else's business but my own.  I resent being told I'm the one who's doing something ​wrong when I express a desire to protect my privacy.  And I think privacy is worth defending.

I would also like to stress this point: it is not the actions of those who intrude on our privacy that appalls me, it's the passivity of the people who accept one of these two claims:  

1) Heck, who cares?  I've already shared half my life on FB ... nothing's really private anymore, anyway.  

Worse, because it's a passive acceptance of authoritarianism: 

2) I am doing nothing wrong; why should I care if my actions are being recorded?  If you're not doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide.

Yeh, if you are an honest law-abiding citizen, then you should not harbor a desire for privacy.  Not in what you do, or where you go, or whom you love; not in your finances, your personal or your business relationships, your communications, or your personal beliefs and practices.  These things don't belong to you.  They belong to society, to the State.  And if you seek to conceal them; quite obviously you are trying to conceal something you've done wrong.  Bad person.  Bad citizen.  

People are really twisted mentally today ... not just those who control the instruments of ubiquitous surveillance, but those who think they're "cute".