My Garmin has made driving in London easy, as if I had a cabbie in my car and what with air conditioning on a hot day one could almost say it makes the experience pleasurable. But I have heard people say that if you use one then you can be tracked and ‘they’ know where you are going and where you have been.
‘They’ of course being government officials of unspecified kinds, but these days may also include the odd rogue hacker who gets into the satellite transmissions not (as I understand) as difficult as it sounds. The idea that ‘they’ should know where one is driving offends some people but then, there is a human tendency to want to know because by knowing one can be reassured not just where one’s loved ones are but where potential threats may come from.
‘They’ knowing is not a problem about other people knowing your business, it’s a problem of what they do with the knowledge. Faceless people all over this world know my name, where I live and random facts about me that’s a consequence not so much of their interest in me as my being alive. I have a series of numbers in government from birth and anyone can find out all the public facts about my life with relative ease. It isn’t their knowing that worries me. What worries me if England were to become a regime and that data fell into the hands of enemies.
We want to anticipate the worst.