Social Control

I think what the last few people who posted about Wednesday's class are getting at is the idea of Social Control, or how much information should be made available to anyone from the government to the general public, especially through new technology that can be linked to location. While this scenario is not likely in the immediate future, the idea that something like cell phone data and credit card information will become open and the fact that it is possible/ has already been given out before, has some scary implications. One of the things that Jackie skirted around is it's impact on abusive relationships, which depend upon control, isolation, and manipulation. If there is technology out there that can be connected to specific people then it will become harder and harder (as is arguably has with cell phones in general) to be able to leave those relationships and stop an abuse cycle. The abuser should not be able to exactly monitor where the person's phone is at all times. I understand where compiling data like this could be useful for criminal investigations, however, the same Right Wing side of politics that is in favor of higher prosecution and criminal crack-down is also for a smaller government, and using all of this information in a "big brother" type of way seems to be exactly the opposite. Additionally, family information would become more public and potentially impact everything from social encounters to job offers. If jobs can do background checks or require that the employees are constantly on a system that tracks their phones, then that would be a breach of privacy, and in order to have jobs people would be controlled so that there were activities they felt they could or could not do. Class would also play an important part, since people with more money would not have to monetarily buy into the system. Thereby they would not have to live by these "safe" standards that could impact job and insurance. Hopefully, our constitution will prevent such data and control from becoming technologically available.