Demetri Martin has a joke that goes ” A lot of people don’t like bumper stickers. I don’t mind bumper stickers. To me a bumper sticker is a shortcut. It’s like a little sign that says ‘Hey, let’s never hang out.'”
For me, putting tape over your laptop is that shortcut.
I can’t comprehend the logic behind this move. It actually seems like people started doing this without any thought behind it. What’s the point? My best guess is that you think this will stop the government from spying on you.
Now I’m not going to deny that the government is spying on you. In fact, I can say with one hundred percent certainty that they are. They know absolutely everything we do. Every text, every video, every conversation. To be honest, I have a working theory that they can predict our thoughts too.
And the reason they have all of this information is because we give it to them! With every Instagram we provide our location and what we’re wearing. With every Tweet we tell them what’s exactly on our mind. We sign away every piece of our private information AND permission to access our phone’s microphone JUST so we can access Facebook on our phones. Yep that’s right! We gave our consent to the government to listen in on private conversations just so we could find out that Julia and Ryan had their fourth engagement photo shoot.
They didn’t have to extract this information from us. We gave it to them for free.
So going back to my first point, I can’t find one ounce of rationale for putting a piece of tape over your laptop camera. You are not preventing anything. You’re walking around mic’d up like an undercover cop wearing a wire at all times.
We all keep pretending that we care about privacy but in reality we don’t. There is currently a popular app that takes a picture of you and shows you what you would look like as an old person. It’s fricken hilarious. It’s also run by a Russian company that is one hundred percent compiling your pictures into a facial recognition database for who knows what purpose. Again, I don’t care about privacy. I’m just scratching my head at people who put tape over their laptop camera but also upload their selfies to a Russian app because it makes them giggle for a second.
And also, excluding everything stated above, there’s not a single person in the government who wants to sit and watch you through your laptop camera all day. You’re not Emily Ratajkowski or something. Point blank, it’s pretty cocky to cover up your laptop camera as if someone specifically wants to look at you.
