In 2008, David Bond, a man from the UK received a letter from the government informing him that some data had been lost. That lost data had held information about Bond. Upon receiving this letter, Bond began to wonder what sort of data the government was keeping about him. Soon after this, he formed a plan to see whether it would be possible for a person to disappear while living a non-secluded life in society.
Bond hired two private investigators to attempt to track him down beginning with very basic information about him. The investigators were given a month to track down their target. Bond packed a backpack with the items he might need for a month, grabbed his camera in order to film his experiment, and left home to attempt his disappearance. Later this footage became part of the documentary called, Erasing David.
During the first few days of the Erasing David experiment, Bond contacted numerous companies and requested that they send him all the information they have concerning him. When the data started coming in, I was surprised by what had been sent. The most shocking to me was the stack of paperwork that was sent by Amazon that recorded every piece of information they had on David Bond. This made me wonder what Amazon knows about me. We don't know all the details of this situation such as how often David uses the services provided by Amazon. Perhaps he uses it quite often. I personally don't use Amazon often so I question how much information they have concerning me; however, I might be surprised.
While watching this documentary, we are shown a piece of data that is sent to David Bond in which it's stated that Bond seemed angry on November 21st, 2006. Viewers were not told where this data came from and this caused some speculation as to where this data could have been collected. A common answer was that it likely came from a customer service phone call. While this is plausible, I began to wonder what other situations might collect data that specific.
The first thing that came to mind was security and customs at airports. I've been through customs several times while entering different countries and at the time, I didn't think anything of it. After watching this documentary and looking back at those times it's overwhelming to realize how much data is collected in those moments. Going through customs I've had pictures taken of me and answered numerous questions. I've also experienced very crabby travelers who weren't happy about being "randomly selected."
Realizing that there is at least one place out there collecting detailed observations about the emotions that people are displaying make me wonder how many other places are also collecting similar detailed data. An airport seems like a prime locations for collecting data on a variety of people.
I don't believe it is possible to live in today's society without submitting to data collectors. Can you imagine what would happen if you where going through customs to get back into the United States and you refused to cooperate? You can't get past the first part of customs without having your picture taken and also having a face-to-face encounter with security. We are forced to hand over data in order to live a "normal" life.
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