Interview on Papercut Magazine

Talking about Surveillance on Papercut Magazine.
Full digital copy of Papercut Magazine, Surveillance.
Full interview on Medium.

Papercut: What are your thoughts about surveillance and privacy? Sharing on social media, tracking, etc.?

Gasta: I’ve always been an internet enthusiast and an early adopter of social networks. Coming from my experience in newsgroups, bbs, forums, I truly believed in the power of sharing, of coming together, to do something better. And to be fair, we did it. I met incredible people, I learned [how to use] software online, found a job.

But, then, something happened. The whole idea of sharing, now, seems to be deeply poisoned. Everything we do online is tracked and sold to unknown third parties that, we have seen in recent present, are going to use it against us.

The idea itself of privacy is now radically different from what it was just 10 years ago. Going offline is not just hard. With the internet of things, especially if you live in a city like London, going offline is impossible. There will always be a camera shooting us, someone taking a picture where we are the background. And with more and more face recognition software, we really are tracked every minute.

But it doesn’t really matter, since we let Facebook long ago look into our secrets and sell them. Our freedom exchanged for a bunch of likes. And that’s completely fine for us.