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Privacy: “Everything you say or do can and will be used against you, at any point in the far future when the context and agreeableness of what you said or did has changed dramatically.” With the analog surveillance of our parents, everything was caught in the context of its time. The digital surveillance of our children saves everything for later use against them.

It’s a reality for our digital children so horrible, that not even Nineteen Eighty-Four managed to think of it. In the analog surveillance world, where people are put under surveillance only after they’ve been identified as suspects of a crime, everything we said and did was transient. If Winston’s telescreen missed him doing something bad, then it had missed the moment and Winston was safe.

The analog surveillance was transient for two reasons: one, it was assumed that all surveillance was people watching other people, and two, that nobody would have the capacity of instantly finding keywords in the past twenty years of somebody’s conversations. In the analog world of our parents, that would mean somebody would need to actually listen to twenty years’ worth of tape recordings, which would in turn take sixty years (as we only work 8 out of 24 hours). In the digital world of our children, surveillance agencies type a few words to get automatic transcripts of the saved-forever surveillance-of-everybody up on screen in realtime as they type the keywords – not just from one person’s conversation, but from everybody’s. (This isn’t even exaggerating; this was reality in or about 2010 with the GCHQ-NSA XKEYSCORE program.)

In the world of our analog parents, surveillance was only a thing at the specific time it was active, which was when you were under individual and concrete suspicion of a specific, already-committed, and serious crime.

In the world of our digital children, surveillance can be retroactively activated for any reason or no reason, with the net effect that everybody is under surveillance for everything they have ever done or said.

We should tell people as it has become instead; “anything you say or do can be used against you, for any reason or no reason, at any point in the future”.

The current generation has utterly failed to preserve the presumption of innocence, as it applies to surveillance, in the shift from our analog parents to our digital children.

This subtle addition – that everything is recorded for later use against you – amplifies the horrors of the previous aspects of surveillance by orders of magnitude.

Consider somebody asking you where you were on the evening of March 13, 1992. You would, at best, have a vague idea of what you did that year. (“Let’s see… I remember my military service started on March 3 of that year… and the first week was a tough boot camp in freezing winter forest… so I was probably… back at barracks after the first week, having the first military theory class of something? Or maybe that date was a Saturday or Sunday, in which case I’d be on weekend leave?” That’s about the maximum precision your memory can produce for twenty-five years past.)

However, when confronted with hard data on what you did, the people confronting you will have an utter and complete upper hand, because you simply can’t refute it. “You were in this room and said these words, according to our data transcript. These other people were also in the same room. We have to assume what you said was communicated with the intention for them to hear. What do you have to say for yourself?”

It doesn’t have to be 25 years ago. A few months back would be sufficient for most memories to be not very detailed anymore.

To illustrate further: consider that the NSA is known to store copies even of all encrypted correspondence today, on the assumption that even if it’s not breakable today, it will probably be so in the future. Consider what you’re communicating encrypted today — in text, voice, or video — can be used against you in twenty years. You probably don’t even know half of it, because the window of acceptable behavior will have shifted in ways we cannot predict, as it always does. In the 1950s, it was completely socially acceptable to drop disparaging remarks about some minorities in society, which would socially ostracize you today. Other minorities are still okay to disparage, but might not be in the future.

When you’re listening to somebody talking from fifty years ago, they were talking in the context of their time, maybe even with the best of intentions by today’s standards. Yet, we could judge them harshly for their words interpreted by today’s context — today’s completely different context.

Our digital children will face exactly this scenario, because everything they do and say can and will be used against them, at any point in the future. It should not be this way. They should have every right to enjoy Analog Equivalent Privacy Rights.

Privacy: In the last article, we focused on how people are tracked today when using credit cards instead of cash. But few pay attention to the fact that we’re tracked when using cash today, too.

Few people pay attention to the little sign on the revolving door on Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It says that wi-fi and bluetooth tracking of every single individual is taking place in the airport.

What sets Schiphol Airport apart isn’t that they track individual people’s movements to the sub-footstep level in a commercial area. (It’s for commercial purposes, not security purposes.) No, what sets Schiphol apart is that they bother to tell people about it. (The Netherlands tend to take privacy seriously, as does Germany, and for the same reason.)

Locator beacons are practically a standard in bigger commercial areas now. They ping your phone using wi-fi and bluetooth, and using signal strength triangulation, a grid of locator beacons is able to show how every single individual is moving in realtime at the sub-footstep level. This is used to “optimize marketing” — in other words, find ways to trick people’s brains to spend resources they otherwise wouldn’t have. Our own loss of privacy is being turned against us, as it always is.

Where do people stop for a while, what catches their attention, what doesn’t catch their attention, what’s a roadblock for more sales?

These are legitimate questions. However, taking away people’s privacy in order to answer those questions is not a legitimate method to answer them.

This kind of mass individual tracking has even been deployed at city levels, which happened in complete silence until the Privacy Oversight Board of a remote government sounded the alarms. The city of Västerås got the green light to continue tracking once some formal criteria were met.

Yes, this kind of people tracking is documented to have been already rolled out citywide in at least one small city in a remote part of the world (Västerås, Sweden). With the government’s Privacy Oversight Board having shrugged and said “fine, whatever”, don’t expect this to stay in the small town of Västerås. Correction, wrong tense: don’t expect it to have stayed in just Västerås, where it was greenlit three years ago.

Our analog parents had the ability to walk around untracked in the city and street of their choice, without it being used or held against them. It’s not unreasonable that our digital children should have the same ability.

There’s one other way to buy things with cash which avoids this kind of tracking, and that’s paying cash-on-delivery when ordering something online or over the phone to your door — in which case your purchase is also logged and recorded, just in another type of system.

This isn’t only used against the ordinary citizen for marketing purposes, of course. It’s used against the ordinary citizen for every conceivable purpose. But we’ll be returning to that in a later article in the series.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: We’ve seen how our digital children’s privacy is violated in everything they buy with cash or credit, in a way our analog parents would have balked at. But even worse: our digital children’s privacy is also violated by tracking what they don’t buy — either actively decline or just plain walk away from.

Amazon just opened its first “Amazon Go” store, where you just pick things into a bag and leave, without ever going through a checkout process. As part of the introduction of this concept, Amazon points out that you can pick something off the shelves, at which point it’ll register in your purchase — and change your mind and put it back, at which point you’ll be registered and logged as having not purchased the item.

Sure, you’re not paying for something you changed your mind about, which is the point of the video presentation. But it’s not just about the deduction from your total amount to pay: Amazon also knows you considered buying it and eventually didn’t, and will be using that data.

Our digital children are tracked this way on a daily basis, if not an hourly basis. Our analog parents never were.

When we’re shopping for anything online, there are even simple plugins for the most common merchant solutions with the business terms “funnel analysis” — where in the so-called “purchase funnel” our digital children choose to leave the process of purchasing something — or “cart abandonment analysis”.

We can’t even simply walk away from something anymore without it being recorded, logged, and cataloged for later use against us.

But so-called “cart abandonment” is only one part of the bigger issue of tracking what we’re interested in in the age of our digital children, but didn’t buy. There is no shortage of people today who would swear they were just discussing a very specific type of product with their phone present (say, “black leather skirts”) and all of a sudden, advertising for that very specific type of product would pop up all over Facebook and/or Amazon ads. Is this really due to some company listening for keywords through the phone? Maybe, maybe not. All we know since Snowden is that if it’s technically possible to invade privacy, it is already happening.

(We have to assume here these people still need to learn how to install a simple adblocker. But still.)

At the worst ad-dense places, like (but not limited to) airports, there are eyeball trackers to find out which ads you look at. They don’t yet change to match your interests, as per Minority Report, but that’s already present on your phone and on your desktop, and so wouldn’t be foreign to see in public soon, either.

In the world of our analog parents, we weren’t registered and tracked when we bought something.

In the world of our digital children, we’re registered and tracked even when we don’t buy something.

Alex Bono finished with seven saves for D.C. United, Roman Celentano stopped four shots for FC Cincinnati and the two clubs played to a scoreless draw on Sunday.

Free college tuition. New cars. Complimentary passes to government gyms. And cold, hard cash. Militaries all over the world are at war right now. And they're getting creative with pay and benefits to lure in potential recruits and to keep battle-hardened veterans in their uniforms for another round.

As you pack up your things, Joe and Kamala, I just wanted to take the time to thank you for taking such good care of middle- and lower-middle-class Americans these past four years.

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From his early years taking classical piano lessons, to playing in a rock band during the 1990s, composer Jeff Cardoni has built up a diverse ... Read more

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Being a primary caregiver while working full time is a challenge in itself and even more so during the pandemic. Elaine Varelas guides on how to best keep your family members safe while maintaining your work responsibilities.

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We speak with Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, who is advocating on behalf of Syrian refugees as other American politicians try to turn them away. Then, we sit in on a cooking class that teaches people in Boston how to eat healthier with traditional African dishes. And, the US wants to give peanuts to malnourished kids in Haiti — we find out why that idea is so controversial.

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Image: A refugee mother and son from the Syrian town of Kobani walk beside their tent in a camp in Sanliurfa, Turkey. October 19, 2014. (Credit: Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images)

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Anyone who has been serving in the local church long enough knows that ministry is a 24/7 - 365 gig. There is no off-season. There are no slow months. And there definitely is no such thing as part-time. In fact, those times of the year when everyone else is enjoying extra time with family and friends, church leadership is usually pulling overtime like it’s a lifeline.

As I type these words, we are waist deep in the Christmas season. Trees are up and decorated. Garland is strung on anything that will sit still. Sales are in full bloom. On the church front children’s Christmas programs are wrapping up, Christmas Eve service times are being blasted all over social media, and worship leaders all over the world are trying to figure out the perfect set lists. 

That all sounds so simple, doesn’t it? 

If only that were the case. But for most people in church leadership, the Christmas season is anything but simple. I don’t know about you, but this year in particular seems uncharacteristically heavy. It feels like every time I turn around, I learn about someone else in my little corner of the world who is walking through something tragic . . . a death, job loss, divorce, a diagnosis, and the list goes on. Sure, there are plenty of wonderful things happening in the midst, but the fight every single day is to not let those wonderful things get overshadowed by the not-so-wonderful. And I have a feeling that until Jesus comes, that fight is going to get tougher every year. 

So as worship leaders, what role do we play in helping both our worship team members and the people we serve navigate a season that at times can feel more joyless than joyful? Unfortunately there is no secret formula, but I do have a few tips that might resonate with some of you who are entering into Christmas surrounded by people who are suffering, or even walking a tough road yourself.

1. Acknowledge the hurt.

A precious friend of mine lost her 2 1/2 year old little boy unexpectedly right before Thanksgiving this year. Not terribly long after his death, she posted a quote that basically said not to avoid mentioning him out of fear of somehow reminding her that he was gone. She hasn’t forgotten, and never will. Instead what you’re reminding her of is that he lived. The people around us who are hurting don’t wake up some days having forgotten what is going on. They don’t walk through the doors of our churches and suddenly feel all better. So what good does it do for us to tip toe and pretend like nothing is going on, whether face to face or from the stage? When the Bible tells us to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep, it doesn’t say anything about holidays being exceptions or saving it for certain settings. The church operates at her best when she comes around those hurting especially at times like these. So call it for what it is - painful - and you might be amazed at the new level of freedom that is felt in the room.

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. - Romans 12:15

1. Give a reason to celebrate.

When everything is on the table and there is a rich sense of acceptance for everyone regardless of their mental, emotional, or spiritual state, the door to authentic celebration tends to open a little easier. It may not look the same as the person sitting next to them, but reminding them of the truths of who God is, what He’s done, and what He’s still doing will always prove fruitful - even if it’s just one more layer of doubt being broken off. At their lowest points, those who are hurting need to be reminded that there are still things in their lives to find joy in. Then once they are tapping into that joy that only comes from the Lord, they begin to experience a renewed strength they might not have thought was possible.

Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength. - Nehemiah 8:10

1. Root it all in HOPE.

The most important piece to the puzzle of loving well those who are hurting is to keep everything established and fixed on HOPE. Nothing you say or do is going to make things all better for them or take their pain away, but the HOPE of Christ can and will move the needle. If a hurting person leaves your presence or your church service knowing and believing that things will not always feel this way and that Jesus is able to replace their suffering with victory, their pain with joy, and their grief with peace, then you’ve done your job well. So keep HOPE as your North Star. Center it all around the fact that a baby was born to change everything, that our current sufferings are not in vain, that He wastes nothing. 

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. Romans 8:18

Whether it’s someone on your team walking through the most painful time of his or her life or a family in your congregation experiencing a tragedy, you have been given the opportunity to breathe life back into a place where death has begun settling in. Pray for open eyes to see the hurt around you. Ask the Lord to open doors for you to speak into those lives. Make the most of those chances and watch the Holy Spirit do what He does best. 

I heard a sermon the other day that was challenging. You know the ones that speak right to you? Ugh, I hate when they do that. The pastor started saying (paraphrased), “Trying to change the big things in your life ultimately fails. It’s very hard to do and it doesn’t work as well as changing the small or insignificant things. You see, small things/ideas/habits that you can effectively change will build up overtime to become one big massive change. We don’t usually see it until we look back throughout our lives and see how much has altered. So today, based on that, I decided to give some practical small things we can alter today that hopefully over time will become life changing.

1. Prayer.

Ooooh... this is a goody. Naturally, every pastor/leader/teacher/parent/theologian wants you to pray more. But when talking with friends and peers, it actually seems everyone does! So why don’t we? Well, to some, prayer can be daunting. What do I say? Is God really listening? All this takes is a small change. For example, commit to praying for 5 mins alone everyday. Doesn’t matter when, just that you can commit to the 5 minutes. Then after a while, go for 10 minutes. Then go from there. If you want to cultivate that prayer life, start small.

2. Reading

The Bible, John Grisham, or Marie Kondo, I don’t care (well the Bible is something you should read, just sayin’). Start small. Maybe a few verses a day, or a chapter. Build that up over time and don’t allow the excuse of “I have no time” to rule you! I did this many years ago. I committed to read my bible daily, which at that point was a miracle. After one month I was hooked. God began speaking clearly through his word and honestly, life got better. Try it. But start small.

3. Food.

Well, here I go hitting a nerve. Mainly in my right heart valve. Losing weight is hard to do. Working out? Hard to do. Unless.... you start…. small. You’re getting it. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. Find a buddy to walk with, or when you go out, only order from the kids meal. Having a community that has your best interests at heart makes this easier, so take the small step and get people together to be active, and stay accountable. Start small and grow from there. I mean, not grow as in waistline... you know what I mean.

4. HAVE SOME STINKING FUN

I recently started posting random out of context bible verses on my Instagram (@njgalbraith) just as a way to have fun and let others enjoy the process. I’ve received many messages saying this is the highlight of their day! It didn’t take much for me to put it out there (or for you to go watch them) but the small step I took to try and give people some laughs is paying off. Who knows where it will end up, but I started small and am letting God grow it with me. You may have something just like that. That thing that makes people laugh or have fun. Do something small (like send a mass meme text to friends?) and see where the fun takes you!

So start putting these into practice today. Like, right now. NOW. And apply this to anything you have in your life that you want to succeed in. Businesses, relationships, church, anything! Start small, and see where God leads you.

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