Privacy invasion: It's worse than you think

The Guardian "liberated" a video demonstration put together by the defense firm Raytheon in which a cheerful fellow explains how the new Riot software can track where you've been and what you've doing, thanks to the GPS in your mobile device. I suppose similar capabilities have been around for a while, but Riot makes hyper-accurate spying as easy as using Google. In fact, the interface looks exactly like Google's.

The Guardian's story is here.

The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.

The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a "Google for spies" and tapped as a means of monitoring and control.

Using Riot it is possible to gain an entire snapshot of a person's life – their friends, the places they visit charted on a map – in little more than a few clicks of a button.

In the video obtained by the Guardian, it is explained by Raytheon's "principal investigator" Brian Urch that photographs users post on social networks sometimes contain latitude and longitude details – automatically embedded by smartphones within so-called "exif header data."

Riot pulls out this information, showing not only the photographs posted onto social networks by individuals, but also the location at which the photographs were taken.

The responses to this video, so far, have been predictable. Many people are unnerved, as well they ought to be. Others have retreated to those standard defeatist cliches: "Nothing you do on the internet will ever be private, so just suck it up." "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."

That last phrase (and yes, I'm going to repeat this line each and every time) was commonly heard in the days of Nazi Germany.

Here's a better response: Fight.

We don't have to live with these intrusions. We have a right to demand regulations and laws which will protect our privacy. For example, why should our camera phones record location when we take a photo? The EXIF information should record only that data which we wish to have recorded.

Those devices are ours. We pay for them. They should work the way we want them to work.

Similarly, the law should make it impossible for Facebook to transmit any personal data without a warrant.

Why isn't there a larger movement favoring internet privacy legislation? Why isn't there a lobbying group for a comprehensive Internet Privacy Act? Your forebears would never have allowed anyone to track their movements or to read their private letters. Why does the current generation passively accept spying?