Bramblings: Cyber warning

By BECKY NELSON
Millions of us are headed to the malls, the box stores and to the internet to do some shopping this week. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over, but the shopping frenzy goes on. The shelves at the stores and in the warehouses are stacked with all sorts of technology devices to attract and beguile us into thinking we need them all. Smart everything. Smart TVs, refrigerators, microwaves, doorbells, car cameras, etc. I even saw some smart glasses on an internet surf as I started writing this column.

Technology and the internet are so inextricably entangled in our lives that it has changed our lives forever. Just as automobiles and electricity changed forever the lives of those not so long before us, the generations now inhabiting Earth’s soil don’t know life any other way. Most of us cannot imagine life without our smart phones, smart speakers and smart televisions as we “unplug” from cable and satellites and start streaming all of our television entertainment and music over the internet. Not even a century ago, folks were finding electricity the same newest and best thing. Electric lights. Electric stoves. Electric refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, radios, washing machines, dryers, clocks, hairdryers, razors, etc. You name it. And the manual items were on their way out of our lives. Life as they knew it was over and a new era was upon them.

My brother now owns the old wind-up Victrola that was one of my Dad’s prized possessions. This, too, was a revolutionary invention that made music available to anyone who could afford the machine and the tubes or records that held the notes. Electricity made this even easier, with the record player changing people’s world. My vinyl records stored in a closet are beckoning. For as long as I can remember, when the Thanksgiving dinner dishes were cleared and cleaned, one of us in the family would make our way to the record collection, haul out the Christmas albums, and Christmas season would begin with music. Not so this year. I was so wrapped up in thinking about business that I never pulled out an album. I plan to do so as soon as I finish this article. I do not own a smart speaker, and I have no desire to have a robot that searches for answers or songs or entertainment for me. I draw the line on being monitored at every moment with my “data” and habits collected so that the internet and every advertiser on the planet can “target” me with songs I might like or items I might think are essential for my everyday enjoyment.

The internet is an amazing tool. I use it every day. I use my smart phone to get maps and look up information. I use my laptop to order items for the store and pay bills. Technology in the past quarter century has become the new refrigerator. Except for some remote locations, the internet has spread like a gigantic spiderweb across the globe. It is wonderful, and it can be terrible. We willingly give away tons of information to the “web” in seemingly harmless ways. The web knows where I live because of Google earth and Google maps. The web knows what I am interested in because of my web searches. But who is “the web”? To whom have we given all our information and secrets? Advertisers, for sure. Pop-up ads certainly target us. But more nefarious users can be cyber stalking us and gathering information and using that information to harm our bank accounts or our very lives in some cyber-stalk cases. I am not a fan.

Life as we knew it is over as we who used phones plugged into the wall and records on a record player and the new era is well under way. One that I am not all that thrilled about. The FBI issued a warning this week that your “smart” tv just might be spying on you. These devices are connected to the internet, and as my daughter jokingly said recently, “the internet is the devil.” In some way, she is right. There are suggestions to cover the camera of your smart device with black tape, cover the microphone with some sort of muffler, and if you are really disturbed by some unknown entity spying on you without your consent, not use it as a smart device at all and unplug from the internet.

I wonder if the folks who developed the internet and associated hyperlinks, protocols and all the necessary doo-dads to hook us up to one another for better or worse ever thought this might be the case. It’s pretty sad that our merry Christmas season and our daily life has to be issued with a warning label.

Becky is co-owner of Beaver Pond Farm in Newport, New Hampshire. [email protected].