"We already live in '1984": the privacy alert breaks into the Web Summit

The use of the internet is not innocuous and neither is the trace of personal data that it leaves, so revealing about the user that it allows a level of "vigilance" very similar to that imagined by George Orwell in "1984", warns in an interview with Efe the founder of the Norwegian software company Opera, Jon Tetzchner.

Lisbon, Nov. 7 (EFE) .- The use of the Internet is not innocuous, nor is the trace of personal data it leaves, so revealing about the user that it allows a level of "vigilance" very similar to that of imagined George Orwell in "1984", warns in an interview with Efe the founder of the Norwegian software company Opera, Jon Tetzchner.

Tetzchner, who was responsible for Opera for 15 years, is now embarked on Vivaldi, a company he created in 2013 and has recently launched a browser that, he assures, allows the user to "be more effective when connected" thanks to a personalization that does not abuse the exposure of personal data.

He will talk about it tomorrow at the Web Summit in Lisbon, where he will give a talk in which he will influence the need for regulation to try to control traffic that massive data that, he says, has turned users into products.

"When you collect information from almost everything the world and advanced tools are used to identify groups and individuals, that's when things become more problematic, "says Tetzchner.

" Many of us have read '1984' and other similar science fiction stories, in which we live in a state of total vigilance. movement that we do is tracked through our mobile phones and other devices, every page we visit, every movie we see and we have recently added the ability to easily recognize faces and translate voices ".

These are some examples of those" highly problematic "technologies that allow the user to know in depth and" influence our process of make decisions ", to" make us buy products, manifest in the street or vote for a certain politician ".

" Sadly that is what we are already seeing, but it is not too late to fix this, "says this expert, who regrets that the delivery of information by the user, often unconsciously, is seen as a kind of price to pay to use internet.

In Tetzchner's opinion, citizens should be aware of this delivery and demand that the authorities cease, since in order to resolve this situation, the issue of global form, although in the meantime they can "use several tools to hide the activity" in the network.

Their main message in the Web Summit to "fix" this situation is based on the need to regulate to restrict to the strictly necessary the traffic of data of users and to prohibit the announcements directed to a certain person thanks to the information that of this has been achieved in a network.

Also, he points out, it would be opportune to establish a system to know if an advertiser is using large-scale data collection techniques to send "differentiated messages to different people".

"We have to make sure that the technology we build is being used to do good things. The tendency to direct things to a target audience is not good and is not improving the world. precisely in a philosophy of "no tracking" and that, however, promises great customization in its tools to improve functionality and that the user takes more advantage of its time.

"We believe that we are all unique, different users find different useful functionalities and also use functions in a different way," he explains. they must open all private data to the world.