By Ron Steinman

For some time I have been thinking about apps and what they do for us and to us. Apps may be great, but they are also a huge problem. To back me up, comes a story called “Selling You on Facebook” in The Wall Street Journal, yes, the Wall Street Journal, the one newspaper that I am sure is an object of loathing to anyone who regularly peruses this site for a left wing and progressive take on the world.

Non-political, the article’s premise is simple, one that I have been writing about recently. It says, “Many popular Facebook apps are obtaining sensitive information about users — and users’ friends – so don’t be surprised if details about your religious, political and even sexual preferences start popping up in unexpected places.” What the authors write is not a plot against freedom or social networks. They speak the truth. More importantly, the premise of the article extends to other apps as well and that is where the trouble begins.

We have a new player in the world of previously hidden information. The app. Apps are about giving – information of every kind, directions, instructions, name your poison. With all that and more, apps are fast becoming the single most important means of data collecting that people who do not believe in privacy, nor allow themselves to think that privacy is important, engage in at almost light speed. These amiable creatures called apps are taking over our lives.

In the recent not too distant past, advertisers used human focus groups to judge and help define new products and services. There were no algorithms to get in the way of the human equation. Mostly, these real people did a pretty good job. Hollywood movies and TV shows still use focus groups often to the dismay of the producers who believe their instincts work better in the art of storytelling.

If we do not know we should, that cookies on the Web provide anyone who gains access to them information about every move one makes as he or she surfs the Internet, often innocently and sometimes for other reasons.  As I write, apps are taking over for cookies by further devouring our online lives. Apps in a very short time have replaced cookies as the most important sales tool merchants of every type depend on.

At the rate we are going, apps will take over for both cookies and focus groups, dominating every choice we make. Our lives with all the different cyber platforms – meaning every mobile device including smart phones and tablets and every social network imaginable — control who we are and what we do and how we do everything beneath each clever, smooth, come-on interface. This will surely continue into the future. Face it, our online lives, however we perceive them, because of apps are now more than ever open for prying eyes to use the information they collect to sell us what we might not want and control us in ways that we never anticipated.

Yes, I know, apps have become very important in our lives and in how we live. They help when you are lost. They guide you to a good restaurant. They locate the nearest hospital. They find the closest gas station. They keep track of where your neighbors are, if you are so inclined to know where they are at all times. They can improve one’s life. They really do everything and more for a person in a complicated world that is more difficult to navigate every day. But addiction rules. As all addicts know, kicking a habit is nearly impossible.

I am willing to bet someone is working on an app as I write to cover the most unusual aspects of our lives. There are apps for everything and just about everything has an app. Pacman, once thought dead, is flourishing. This means that soon there will be an app for even more than we have apps for now. It does not mean apps are benign. If we succumb to these new apps, what little privacy we have will be lost forever. Privacy used to be, well, private. I care about privacy but many other people seem to revel in public exposure.

There are now probably more than a million apps available for the choosing. The making of an app has become a major tech industry. And if an app catches on, riches follow. One common theme impossible to ignore when exploring the effect of social media on how people live is the belief that social networks are about sharing. Sometimes people on social networks give away too much. That is because much of what is on all social networks is sophomoric. It is dorm room cool, which means that it is silly and self–gratifying. It depends on how needy one is.

You may wonder if anyone cares what you post, and because you may think no one does care, what you place for all to see has little interest beyond the words or photos on your page. This is all the better for the collectors of your data who mostly believe what they receive is too little. The maw they must fill is infinite. The craving for more data increases by the millisecond. It is voracious. Ignoring the need for privacy is now beyond help. It is a dead concept.

Using an app relieves a person from making direct eye-to-eye contact with another person. Technology today replaces the social experience of dealing with your fellow man and woman as if they were live and not microdots on a small screen. Using apps for everything obviates the need for real people in one’s life. Sorry, but Angry Birds are not real.

However, as long as I have free will, I am safe from this new invasion of my prime space. My hermit-like desire may be my last refuge, my final bastion of freedom. I have no apps.

Editor’s Note: Ron Steinman is executive editor and a columnist for online magazines, The Digital Journalist and The Digital Filmmaker. An award-winning producer for NBC News and NBC’s Today Show, he served as bureau chief in Saigon during the Vietnam War, and later as bureau chief in Hong Kong and London. At ABC News Productions, he produced documentaries for A&E, TLC, The History Channel, and Discovery. He is currently an independent documentary producer, director and writer through his company, Douglas/Steinman Productions. He is the author of seven books, including “Inside Television’s First War: A Saigon Journal,” that details how NBC News covered the war in Vietnam.

In case you did not know it, SOPA in everyday English is Stop Online Piracy Act. Its main supporters are in Hollywood, TV, big music, and other major entertainment. Its opponents are the largest Web companies and the legions of naïve people who believe the passage of such an act would impede their right to freedom on the Internet.

For the moment, SOPA is in the official wastebasket where Washington bills go to die when so much of the public rises up to shout it down. Now our esteemed lawmakers believe SOPA, though necessary, needs clarity and better direction. It is hard to argue with the failure of the original bill. It is not worth the effort to try to pass that bill and to have big entertainment, big Internet and everyone else against it for different reasons important to each.

Do not be deceived by the millions who signed online petitions to scrap SOPA. The so-called little guy, Mr. and Mrs. grassroots, is simply a pawn in the hands of the big Internet boys who control the WEB. Do not be deceived by the black banner atop Google in protest of the bill. Just because you signed an online petition, keep in mind that the battle is still between the bigs: Hollywood and TV versus the Internet giants. It is not so much that one is against the other as much as it is how does each side best get what it wants, absolute freedom on the Internet versus controlled use for big entertainment and how it presents online what it believes it owns.

I am against piracy of intellectual property, even if the property is weak or poorly conceived. You may ask, who is not. I am against the theft of who I am when cookies ingest everything about me when I spend time on the Web. Everyone else should also feel this way, but people do not. Thus, companies such as Amazon and others are hypocrites because all they are doing is protecting their own turf. I am against hypocrisy but who is not, you say. Many who are on both sides of the argument are hypocrites because they try to hide the reality of Web commerce under the guise of freedom.

I do not believe what anyone on either side of the debate says. Both sides are using the average person, however good or bad his or her creation is, to advance its concept of freedom and ownership. They are working hard to hide one’s history on the Web and how it affects sales of products and sales of ideas.

We should all be for creativity. Many people I know agree that creativity is a gift and one of life’s joys. The Internet is the greatest platform for creativity ever. It opens enormous possibilities for anyone to post what he or she believes is their contribution to humankind. I am not arrogant when I say that most of what is on YouTube, other file sharing sites and found in millions of blogs is not very good. It is usually drivel and laughable in that we laugh at the effort, not at its humor or sense of fun. Most of what is in cyberspace is not worth my time. Attack me if you want. Please. But realize first, that just as not everyone can be a professional athlete, not everyone is capable of creating something that has lasting value. Just because you can post anything you want on the Internet for which you usually receive no pay, the act of posting does not give the work value.

We live in a society where sharing is free, especially in the world of social media. On social network sites free is the operating value system. It is the new normal, what people expect because the Internet is there for all to use as they wish, they think. Only one’s time is at stake. It strikes me that for the current generation, sharing and ignoring personal ownership is often more important than personal achievement. Many pundits believe that owning the copyright to a personally created work is a sin. If they could, they would eliminate copyright. They want to limit its length based on the idea that everyone should benefit from a copyrighted work even if they do not compensate its owner. Everyone, that is except the person who created the work.

Creating anything – art of any kind, a widget, an app, you name it — is hard work. If I create something on my own using my own time and money, or, better yet, with someone else’s money why should I not profit from or share in the profits from my enterprise without fear that someone will steal what I created. I do not subscribe to the idea that better creation will result based on earlier work. Why do the users and distributors of everything on the Web believe they should have a free ride of the back of my creative endeavor? Using another person’s work is fraudulent.

I come from a culture, or a time not too distant from the one we are living in, that believes you should own all or most of what you make with your mind or your hands. That is not the norm today. A certain amount of pleasurable, yet evil anarchy exists on the Web. There is a shoot first and ask questions later attitude toward what people own. If someone sees something they like, they post it for all to see, to possibly enjoy it without regard to its copyright. Then, if there is a complaint, they apologize, they take down the video, the photo, the written work, and everyone seems satisfied except the person or group who created the entity in the first place. The damage done, the violator gets an insignificant punishment or none at all, and goes out for another latte. Such is life.

Let me be clear. I am against piracy of intellectual property, even if and when – most of the time, by the way – it has almost no value to most people. Whether it is well conceived or poorly done, I have to admit it has value to its creator. I am against the unbridled, underhanded use of my personal information and creativity without my permission by either big entertainment or big Internet.

The voice of the creative community must make itself heard. Despite being unorganized, the creative community cannot allow those who use the Internet for gain of any kind to dominate ownership. Whatever replaces SOPA must be worth the journey or else anyone who thinks the Internet is free, however anyone uses it, had better think again.

By Ron Steinman

In November, the Supreme Court will hear arguments that some legal experts are calling the most important Fourth Amendment case in years. It involves the use by police who placed an unauthorized GPS device on a suspect’s car to track said suspect’s movements. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizure of our  “persons, houses, papers and effects.” The clear question before the Supreme Court is “ do citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy as they move along public streets and highways.” Do not be too sure that the law will be on the side of the innocent. Interpretation is everything. For some judges, because of the ubiquity of new GPS technology, that fundamental constitutional idea in the Fourth Amendment, so direct and appealingly simple, at least on the surface, and well before the onslaught of recent technology may cut deeply into what remains of our privacy.

Once again, our right to be anonymous is under attack. Other judges may not care how some use the GPS, as long as law enforcement has another tool that will help put criminals in jail. For years, some conservatives have been trying to upend the Fourth Amendment. It is one of the few areas where the strict constitutionalists are willing and ready to make changes. Now technology may finally do it.

Everyone knows what GPS means. If not, you should. It is that remarkable device implanted in cars, boats, trains, what have you, that tracks your every move when you are on the move. If you are lost, GPS finds you and points you in the direction where you want to go. Called Global Positioning System, its best definition calls it “an accurate worldwide navigational and surveying facility based ion the reception of signals from an array of orbiting satellites in space.” It provides location and time information in all weather conditions. That is a mouthful. Law enforcement and who knows who else, especially with brilliant hackers everywhere, is using GPS to track the movements of what we have to believe are criminals and their associates. Are lawn mowers, snow blowers and baby strollers future candidates for GPS? You may think that is beside the point. It is not. It is exactly on point. A smart, determined operative can place a GPS anywhere. Now attaching a GPS to a vehicle of any kind, however, is legally questionable, especially as a warrant is rarely used. If GPS surveillance is to become the norm as it is in some states, at the very least we as citizens deserve to have the law observed. Another question is how long will the surveillance last? Is it for a few hours, a few days, weeks, months? Privacy is again under attack. George Orwell’s 1984 is a few years late, but it is already here.

Recently I wrote about how cookies – what a wonderfully benign word – on the Internet capture more about our lives than we know or than we should want to give away. The world of commerce loves cookies. The possible abuse of the information they gather is beyond question. I wrote about algorithms whose creators bestow on them what appears to be minds of their own. Their originators use the neat excuse of an algorithm’s complexity to absolve them of any responsibility once these instruments are let loose in the innards of the Web, where no one can see what they are doing to an unsuspecting public. Now we are about to experience another move into the world of future technology that is changing our lives and could affect who we are, and how we go about our business. The world of the GPS is creeping quietly, but effectively, into our daily life. It is dangerous to privacy when using such a device is secretive and done in ways to protect the originator, not the citizen.

There are already too many people and institutions that know more about me than I want anyone to know. Attaching a GPS device to my car or person, my bike or my child’s stroller, means that whoever manipulated the device to track me instead of giving me directions to my destination is on their way to cracking my personal DNA. One might say it is generational, that millennials, already the users and abusers of social media, care less about privacy than I do. That might be right. We inhabit different spheres of life. We will never meet and agree that an individual’s privacy is sacrosanct. I only ask that those of another generation respect who I am and allow me to protect my secrets as harmless to others and me as I know they are. At least to me. But I think that is a wish denied.

Take the GPS battle one step further. There are chips implanted in pets to help find them if they are lost. There are chips implanted in wild animals for scientific research. Parents and educators are discussing placing chips in children to track them if the child gets lost or worse, is kidnapped. So far, mass implants are not in the offing. Who is to say they will not be in the future. Attaching an unwanted GPS device to a car, a boat, bikes, trains or planes is potentially a harbinger of things to come.

I am not an expert on the Constitution. I try instead to deal in common sense. How much of ourselves are we willing to give away for the sake of commerce and law enforcement? Though the Supreme Court will decide if applying a GPS device to the personal property of a person, or to the person him or herself is a violation of the Constitution as originally written. I believe it violates my rights and if asked, I am sure most people would agree. But I cannot be sure of even that.

Every day there is one more attack on what some consider the right to be left alone. As we move deeper and more swiftly into a world dominated by expertise that is beyond normal understanding, our right to be left alone is eroding while we watch helplessly, unable to do anything about it. I feel mugged by technology that I cannot control. By all odds, the assault on who we are will never end as long as the idea of creating something new dominates how a technical innovator without moral scruples thinks. Be assured, there will always be a new piece of software that will enable those who want to know everything about us to discover out inner lives by flicking a switch. My hope is that we will not go down without a fight. That fight is only beginning. Once the door is open, it may be impossible to close it. That is the reason that the protectors of our rights are pushing to deny the police, and thus anyone, the right to track all our movements with GPS or any other technology.

Editor’s Note: Ron Steinman is executive editor and a columnist for The Digital Journalist and The Digital Filmmaker. An award-winning producer for NBC news and NBC’s Today Show. He served as bureau chief in Saigon during the Vietnam war, and later as bureau chief in Hong Kong and London. At ABC News Productions, he produced documentaries for A&E, TLC, the History Chanel and Discovery. He is currently an independent documentary producer, director and writer through his company Douglas/Steinman Productions. He is the author of eight books, including “Inside Television’s First War: A Saigon Journal”, that details how NBC news covered the war in Vietnam. He is also a frequent contributor to News Junkie Post.