Are any actions still private?

A vibrator company in Canada was fined last week for using temperature and motion monitors to track, via a smart phone app, how people used their products.

As if Big Data wasn’t polarising enough – now it jumps into bed with Big Dildo for a palpable invasion of your privates, ahem, cough, privacy.

This came just days after the man who invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote a letter to the world saying we’d lost our way online, and the web has become a surveillance tool for advertising and harvesting our personal information.

Unlike the vibrator – the user didn’t know what was inside the shaft – we are voluntarily handing over our data. Then we act surprised when we get spam calls from overseas sales agents.

The choice is often loaded. So many basic online services make us log in to use them – from SBS On Demand, to Wollongong City Council’s pollution reporting system … even a new computer makes you log in with a Windows account.

WCC also wants to use phone wi-fi to track people’s movements in the CBD. 

Some people don’t care too much. I’m not interesting enough to snoop on, they say. Many of them already share pics of their most intimate angles – from sleeping toddlers to racy bikini pics and way beyond that. But how far is too far?

Not so long ago I lived in the Northern Territory – wide open spaces, the land of the free, but also the cowboys.

In 2010 the CCTV cameras were turned off in Darwin’s CBD after a police staff member used them – pan, tilt, zoom – to perve on schoolgirls in the Smith St mall.

Now I’m not saying anyone is about to do that here. But it pays to think about who we are letting watch us, and if we have a choice.

And when it comes to using devices in public or in private, I like to know whose hand is on the other end of it.