Dracula Doesn't Need a Warrant
The sanctity of the home is enshrined and recognized not only in law via the Constitution (the Bill of Rights) but in mythology as well. Based on centuries old folklore, a vampire may not enter a home unless an invitation is extended by the occupant. Perhaps this folklore developed as a way of punting responsibility to the naïve resident who swings the door wide open and willingly allows a pallid nefarious fanged creature into their home. By these rubes giving consent, neighbors can shake their head and chuckle at the dim witted resident saying, “well, they got what was coming to them!” This punting of responsibility actually embodies a very (misguided) American notion of self-responsibility and consequences. Caveat emptor.
Outside of folklore, the Third Amendment allows you to runoff wayward Soldiers before they can bunk up in your home and the Fourth Amendment protects you from a vampire in the guise of the government (vampires can turn into bats and mist—so why not a cop). In such an instance the vampire must have a warrant to enter the home, however consent works just as well. The overall principal is that in order to transgress the boundary of something so sacred as the home, something more substantive is required.
In modern times the vampire is no longer knocking on doors and stalking alleyways under the cover of darkness for basic blood. Instead, today’s sophisticated vampire is seeking a much larger prize. The lifeblood of the economy itself—consumer information. This vampire has evolved. He realizes consumerism is everything. These 2.0 vampires, many equipped with MBAs and a stint on Wall Street under their cloak, have brilliantly figured out a way to not only have households invite them in, but pay for them to enter! In the words of Charlie Sheen a “bi-winning” situation. In the guise of all sorts of gadgets and gizmos our homes have been consensually invaded by monitoring technology that would cause Mossad to salivate.
Take inventory of a typical American household and dollars to donuts it will contain multiple laptops, cellphones, dots, nests, rings, homepods, smart TVs, Roombas, smart bulbs, smart appliances etc. The home of the future we have been told. We pay for these products and eagerly bring them into our homes. These products contain all sorts of technology ideal for monitoring a household and its occupants 24/7; all for our benefit of course. Monitoring occurs not only through audio and visual tools, but data compilation as well. For example home mapping via a smart vacuum cleaner (one of the reasons Amazon recently scooped up the maker of the Roomba, iRobot, for $1.7 billion). This acquisition can now help Amazon determine the size of a home, the type of furniture in the home, the number of stories and any changes in floor plans and rooms.
These devices operating within the home provide unfettered access to an endless array of data, whether the device is being interfaced with directly or not by people. Simply by their presence they are positioned to collect information. Yet there is more. Additional data, arguably even more intimate, is gleaned by the layering of apps within the products. This involves the user directly interfacing with the device, for example apps on a phone. A Fabergé egg of unlimited digital surveillance. All “consensually” given. I use quotations marks because the consent is not transparent and instead typically buried in dense verbose legal language. Even the vampires of yore made sure to knock on the door after hitting the gym, tanning bed and doing laundry to look more like Rudolph Valentino than Nosferatu in hopes of an invitation inside. All in order to mask their true intent and what they really are—a blood sucker.
The products are marketed as shiny wonders all intended to simply make your life easier. But no, your data is what they are after and why typically they are relatively priced low. All your data can be bundled up and consumed inhouse and/or sold to all the other vampires out there. Everyone eats. Off you. And not in the naked sushi sorta way. Our privacy interests are being decimated wholesale by big tech. And we are being told any of our lamentations are unreasonable. Mark Zuckerberg claims that “privacy is no longer a social norm.” Eric Schmidt (of Google fame), channeling Joe McCarthy, opines, “[i]f you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place?” Stop whining. How dare we ask for privacy in this new digital world. Next up on the chopping block is autonomous thought. As these technologies are harvested in order to “nudge” us in the direction corporate opportunists desire (hint—its usually monetarily driven). For an excellent analysis on this issue, check out Shoshana Zuboff’s, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. A light read you can finish in-between digesting the latest Keeping Up with the Kardashians episode. Alternatively, or conjunctively, check out The Social Dilemma on Netflix.
Elimination of these devices is not very realistic given their ubiquity, usefulness, and integration into our lives. A practical solution would be regulation regarding privacy rights with limitations placed on the collection, retention, merging, and sale of personal data. So where is the government in all this? Even putting aside the amount of money thrown around by tech companies to politicians and the reliance of politicians on the data provided by tech companies for their own campaigning, there is an Orwellian factor at play for the government’s inaction. After all, a vampire isn’t bad if they can be reduced to being your supplicant. This is exactly what we are witnessing now with the dangerous symbiotic relationship between private tech companies and government. Manipulation of public thought. Across the board. On a behemoth and very efficient level. Whether it is WMDs (legacy media), the war in Ukraine (isn’t it crazy how often we have to kill people who hate democracy) or the lap-top of a certain First Son. Frankly the vampire doesn’t ascribe to any political agenda, he simply wants to eat. Red blood. Or blue blood. Either will do.