It’s about how a young woman in Seoul loses her phone on a bus only to have it picked up by a tech-savvy sadistic serial killer. He befriends her after planting spyware on her device that enables him to read her texts and notifications, listen to her calls and observe her through the phone camera.
Her life descends into a nightmare when he begins the process of isolating her to make her his next murder victim.
While critics have panned the movie for various reasons, many viewers, like me, can see the validity of just how dependent and vulnerable our phones have made us, and that is deeply disturbing.
Back on Nov 21, 2012, I wrote a column called “Don’t hurt me, handphone!”, in which I raised the question: As we grow more dependent on our smartphones, how do we protect ourselves from them? This was because there were concerns over the way our smartphones were controlling us.
I quoted Eben Moglen, an American free software pioneer and digital privacy advocate, as he sounded the alarm on the smartphones we carry everywhere with us. These devices, he said, “see everything” are “aware of our position, our relationship to other human beings and other robots”, “mediate an information stream about us, which allows other people to predict and know our conduct and intentions and capabilities better than we can predict them ourselves”.
The smartphone has become so powerful, it is now our personal “spy satellite”, as Moglen calls it in a talk he gave in 2019. That’s why we are now living in the “age of surveillance capitalism” where human behaviour in all forms is being collected and mined for profit.
Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff explains what this is in her best-selling book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: “At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential.
It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labour, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labour, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.”
Businesses want to track us because, as one media website states upfront, with its partners, it “may store cookies and other similar technologies to access personal data, including page visits and your IP address.
We use this information about you, your devices and your online interactions with us to provide, analyse and improve our services. This may include personalising content or advertising for you.”
So, it’s all about how they can learn our behaviour and interests so that they know what they can “push” to us.
As for the tech giants that rule over us – Google and Facebook – I do not trust them. Google has been caught scanning private correspondence on Gmail for personal information, listening to user conversations on its AI Assistant and putting in a microphone in its Nest home security system without listing it in the tech specs.
To Moglen and Zuboff, Mark Zuckerberg is a villain running one of the world’s biggest data-mining operations called Facebook.
The 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal saw the personal data of 87 million Facebook users harvested from an independent app developer and sold to a political consulting firm. This led to Facebook being fined US$5bil for privacy violations by the US Federal Trade Commission.
Surveillance capitalism’s happy hunting ground is the ubiquitous smartphone. Every business now wants to entice us to download their app by offering incentives, discounts and promotion codes.
I truly hate it as I feel the more apps I have on my phone, the more likely I am to have my personal data being leaked, stolen or sold.
Sure, I can get better deals, but I figure it’s just not worth the risk, even with the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) 2010, which is supposed to safeguard our personal data in commercial transactions.
From what I could make of it, a key factor in the PDPA is the customer must give consent for their personal data to be disclosed for marketing or any other purpose beyond what service the person signed up for.
That’s mainly it. But if we don’t give our consent, how effective is the Personal Data Protection Department in checking for compliance?
After all, there must be hundreds of companies and organisations that collect data.
But, in 2019, the Personal Data Protection Commissioner inspected the personal data system of just 23 business and commercial entities for compliance.
What’s more, the onus is on the data collector/user to keep all the personal data safe and permanently delete all personal information after the retention period. But how do we know if that is done?
Almost every day, there seems to be a data leak or breach, and the number of people who have fallen prey to scammers is shocking and scary with almost all involving calls or pre-recorded dire messages on phones.
The recent case of a Sarawak businessman identified as Lee, who lost RM1mil after he answered a call, shows just how dangerous the handphone can be.
When the caller claimed he was from PosLaju and asked for the one-time password (OTP), Lee knew it was suspicious and hung up. It was just a 14 second- call, but two unauthorised withdrawal transactions of RM500,000 each were made from his account.
This scam truly sent shivers down my spine. OTPs and transaction authorisation codes (TACs) used to be safe and secure, but Bank Negara has ordered banks to find more secure authentication methods. If scammers and hackers could crack these once unassailable cybersecurity measures, who’s to say they won’t do the same with the new authentication methods in just a matter of time?
When online banking services came along, many of us happily gave up on issuing cheques for the wonderful convenience of doing our transactions and payments from the PC at home and later on, via the phone, wherever we were.
Well, we are now paying a high price for that convenience.
What are ordinary folk supposed to do in this terrifying cyber-wired world? How do we really ensure our personal data are not harvested and sold by telcos, Google and Facebook?
Regardless of whether my handphone is a friend or foe, I still need it. While banks and the government need to step up and do more and better to keep our money and data safe, I can only try to reduce the harm my phone can do to me by weaning myself off it, be diligent about changing my passwords, ignoring strange phone calls and uninstalling unnecessary apps.
And maybe I should dig out my old cheque book too!
> On March 7, 1876 Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, his greatest invention. The man refused to have a phone in his study, considering it an intrusion to his work. He must have known what it would be like 147 years later. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
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