I like very much ;"THE STASI IN YOUR POCKET",in the Financial Times , 9 october 2109:
_The last time I stood inside the complex of drab communist-era buildings on Normannenstrasse, a riot erupted around me.That was mid-January 1990, when I was travelling through newly freed eastern Europe with the photographer Justin Leighton. We had heard that crowds were storming the Stasi headquarters in a cheerless suburb of East Berlin. By then, two months after the opening of the Wall, it was clear that the game was up. Communist dictatorships were collapsing one after another. Locals feared that East Germany’s ruling powers would try to destroy the files. As the crowd surged in we followed in their wake. The narrow corridors were strewn with documents and half-destroyed papers. The protesters were right — but the Stasi’s shredding machines had broken down.Run by Erich Mielke, a veteran communist, the Stasi was one of the most effective secret police forces in history. It recorded conversations, opinions, medical histories and, especially, any contact with foreigners, in millions of carefully numbered, classified files. It even archived the smells of dissidents. The Stasi left behind 160km of files, dossiers and tapes on about 6m people. Hannah Arendt, the writer and philosopher, coined the phrase the “banality of evil” to describe Nazi totalitarianism, but it could just as well be applied to the Stasi.Today, the Normannenstrasse complex is a fine, if thoroughly chilling, museum. So it was with relief that I stepped outside and walked towards the U-Bahn station in the bright late summer sunshine. How wonderful that the era of mass, intrusive surveillance is over, I thought as I took out my iPhone to check Google Maps.And then it hit me. That era wasn’t over at all. Rather, it had escalated to a new level of data volume, speed, efficiency and, most surprising of all, wilful mass compliance. Now I — and everyone with a smartphone — was carrying a digital Stasi in my pocket. Not only was I willingly feeding more personal data than Mielke could have dreamt of, and to who knows where, I had paid several hundred pounds for the privilege.For all its efficiency, the Stasi was an analogue organisation. The demonstrators who trashed the headquarters 30 years ago were not after computer software or even floppy disks. They wanted to preserve handwritten or typed files.My iPhone was sending hour by hour details of my location and journeys, my telephone calls, my internet browsing history, my contacts, friends, examining my files and who knows what else. The services provided by the apps were convenient and free. But as the saying goes, “If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product”.We have been commoditised, and happily. Hands up who has ever actually read a privacy policy on a telephone app? I thought so. You may feel comfortable enabling location services, for example, but that app may be bundling and selling that information on. Do you really want a data services company to know that you visited a certain kind of legal or medical specialist? Or that while you profess to be a vegan you sometimes sneak a McDonald’s? Probably not.So what can we do to avoid the Stasi in our pocket? Consider switching to a non-smart phone. Before you install a new app, read what permissions it is requesting. Does that fabulous new game with amazing graphics really need to access your private messages? Or is it really a front to hoover up your data and sell it without you realising? Ditch Google Maps, or at least minimise your use, especially on foot. Learn how to use the privacy settings on your phone to control which existing apps can use location services. The instructions are easy to find on the internet. But don’t use Google or Chrome, Google’s own browser, to find out how to avoid Google and Chrome. Instead, purchase a VPN service to encrypt your activity and cover your digital tracks. Use a free privacy browser app like DuckDuckGo that doesn’t track you.We cannot storm into Silicon Valley, Normannenstrasse-style, to demand our data back. But we can take some simple steps to take control of the Stasi in our pocket.
The writer, Adam Lebor, is the author of ‘Kossuth Square’, a crime thriller._
The article above is taken from an english newspaper; in Italy the situation linked with privacy violations is even worse, with , for example, recorded conversations and data collected by public officials without the permission of the italian magistrature.
