No Peeking

It wasn’t that long ago that if you were curious about anything you would find info or a picture or an ad to answer your questions, and it would be your little secret. Research of the most rudimentary kind, it started when you were a kid. Your guide might have been World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica, or just as likely Playboy or National Geographic. It gave you a chance to look at things your parents couldn’t or wouldn’t tell you about. So you waited till they went out or hid under the covers, and you dug in. How else were you going to know what boy parts and girl parts actually looked like?

As you got older it was no different, but the objects of your curiosity were wider. For sure there were still questions about sex, but it went far beyond that. It might be about a band or a weapon or a drug, a lifestyle or a religion. Or it might be about some darker world that you had heard of and just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

The thing was that it was pretty easy to hide your exploration. You could take a book from the library shelves and sit in the back, or listen to a song late at night through headphones, or simply read the article or ad in the paper or magazine. When finished you put it all away or just turned the page, and no one was the wiser, except you.

No more. With 90% of our wanderings happening online, nothing is hidden. Sure there are ways of masking your activity, but most don’t bother. It’s not that we don’t know our every click is being tracked, it’s that most don’t care. If spite our protestations about being watched, we live our lives not just in the open, but in front of a bunch of accountants who are tallying our every action. We use Uber to call a car (where we are), Doordash to order food (what we eat) and Amazon to shop (what we buy). We think of all that data as being anonymous and innocent and useless, until, well, we really think about it. One acquaintance was on the phone troubleshooting a problem with his online provider and they asked if they could look at his search history. His response: “No! Look Away! Look away!” 

The bottom line is there is no more surreptitious looking. Everything is being recorded and noted in some spreadsheet somewhere. But it’s also true that 99% of that information is not being judged or considered or ogled by any living being. Bots, AI engines, algorithms? You bet. Actual people? Not so much. It’s like passwords. We select combinations we think no one can guess, while the “guessing” isn’t being done by anyone. As explained to me by a hacker, it’s not like someone is pouring over your profile and trying combinations of your birthday and kids’ names. Rather they set a computer program to rifle through every combination while they go out for pizza.

Still, it’s all being tallied. And so it can be disconcerting to click on something of a personal nature, and see the follow up. Surely no one is watching if you take a quick look at solutions for smelly feet or excessive sweating or hearing aids. No “one” is. But some “it” is. And that means the next time you go online to check the weather you’re presented with ads for “Odor BeGone” and “SweatBlock” and “Eargo HearClears.” And no matter how many times you refresh your screen, they will never, ever go away. Just when you least expect it, you will call someone over to watch a really cool video you found online, and before it starts there will be a 10 second ad that starts “If you still have that itch, go to stopthescratch.com.” Me? Nah, couldn’t be for me.

It’s all out there for the taking, but there’s no peeking. True, there’s also no judging, so that helps. But even if you don’t post it on your Facebook page, there is most definitely a record. Remember in elementary school how Mrs. Maransik used to threaten that if you weren’t careful your transgressions would be noted in your “master file.” Well, it really exists, except it's less about stealing Billy’s homework, and more about your curiosity over naked Justin Bieber pics. 

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Marc Wollin of Bedford sees endless ads for snoring remedies. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.