Technology overuse makes us prone to total surveillance and identity theft – expert
NSA is unpopular among Americans, but Disney seems to have taken a liking to its practices. The company is in the process of introducing electronic wristbands that allow Disney theme parks to track visitors and store information. The bands are replacing paper tickets, room keys and even credit cards, the Voice of Russia reports.
Americans are eager to try out Disney’s Magic Bands, despite their growing outrage over other data-collection processes, such as NSA’s spying. At least that’s what online reviews indicate. The bands can be decorated with Disney character charms, opening up possibilities for personalization and more fun. In an interview to Voice of Russia, Paul Wiffen, a filmmaker, performer and political activist, talked about possible repercussions of this recent development. Mr Wiffen claimed he wasn't sure if Disney's new activity can be in any way linked to data collection by the US intelligence agency:
“I would suspect that Disney’s main priority is to maximize as much revenue as possible from the people visiting the park. Whether the NSA might be able to think back into this technology, I suspect they would much rather wait until this sort of technology is much more widespread. So, when McDonalds are doing it and when everybody else is doing it, then I’m sure they’ll want to come in and use it as a way to track us all.”
Mr Wiffen pointed out that the majority of people going to Disney are “very unlikely to be subversive” and therefore, are of little-to-no interest to the NSA: “They are the kind of middle Americans living the great American dream.”
He said he is more worried about the politics the multinational corporations pursue, that is, the way “multinational corporations seem to be very keen to get in bed with the authorities in whatever country to get privileged rights to the market and, therefore, will just hand over any data they do collect on us without thinking twice about it."
“I think it is very worrying that things like payments can now be made with waves of hands. What it does is, it makes it very easy to make a payment. And yet, you’ve got no device in your hand that you can check what that payment was, whether it went through okay, whether it was the amount you wanted and so on. At least, if you are doing things on your mobile phone or on a credit card machine, you can see how much money is being taken,” Mr Wiffen added.
"All this kind of technologies have to know where you are to be able to send the messages to you, and they have to be able to do the authorization there on the spot. So, it does mean that everything is wide open and one could say that you might wish for a better encryption system and something that is less likely to be hacked. But, yes, I mean it is all a sign of the way everything is going and it all proves that we are laying ourselves more and more open all the time in the name of convenience to not just the NSA, but also to people who want to do identity theft or hack into our accounts to steal our money or whatever," Mr Wiffen stated.