Hello again lovely email friends, I hope you are well. Until recently, you were not being spied upon. Surveillance was the stuff of cop shows and spy movies; the greatest intrusion incurred by normal law-abiding folk was the spinning roof-rack of the TV detector van, introduced 68 years ago this week. But if you had nothing to hide, you had nothing to fear, right?

💌 Emails, like bananas, lasagna and, uhh, piranhas are better shared. Invite the nattiest people you know to join in. 🎣

Surveillance is becoming commonplace as both a business model and a means of social control. The technology that underpins it isn’t well-regulated or even well-scrutinised. A commonplace metaphor for mass surveillance is the CCTV camera, ubiquitous in many urban environments, but these do little more than provide footage. There are many back-room technologies trying to identify people or monitor behaviours, and we know little about them.

Facial recognition is one such technology already raising hackles. While accuracy is still quite low, it also depends upon the collection, storage and sharing of large quantities of images of peoples faces—including sharing between corporations and government agencies. In fact millions of photos of faces, perhaps yours, have been harvested from internet without consent for use in recognition software.

This lack of consent, both contributing to the software and being subjected to its use, is troubling. If you’re willing to put the work in, you could opt out, Or you could choose not to use any service using the technology. But with the growth of surveillance capitalism, this becomes less practical. Furthermore, most people won’t know or won’t care, and the ethical responsibility for any technology should extend to everyone, even non-users.

Governmental response is uneven. There are strong links between Bejing and WeChat, China’s omnipresent social and commerce platform, while Chinese border guards put surveillance app on tourists’ phones. And as facial recognition was being introduced by police in London, San Francisco became the first US city to ban the technology.

But perhaps banning facial recognition misses a broader point: the intention of these systems is to treat people differently based on certain characteristics. The introduction of facial recognition, and other more accurate anonymity-depriving technologies, is only a small part of this aim.

In his book Nothing to Hide, professor of law Daniel J. Solove points out the old ’nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ argument is based upon flawed views about the costs and benefits of protecting privacy. Solove argues reaching a better balance between privacy and security is essential for protecting freedom. 👀

• 🎹 Pet Shop Boys: ‘The acoustic guitar should be banned’: another excellent, headline-grabbing interview to coincide with their new album. I didn’t know Chris Lowe could climb any further in my estimation until “I’m quite looking forward to running out of ideas… because that’s when you go and work with Brian Eno.”

• 🌡 Google’s new wellness tools, ranked from ingenious to offensive: there are a few places you shouldn’t turn for wellness advice—mosquitos, confectioners, pimps, advertising agencies—and Big Tech has now firmly established itself on that list. But so keen is Google to distance itself from responsibility for our smartphone-induced unhappiness, it has a range of wellness tools intended to help find a balance with the technology.

• 👩‍💼 RBS boss sets aside £1bn for female entrepreneurs: a UK government-backed review found that women are less aware of funding options and launch businesses with on average 53% less capital than men. See also: Why Women Make Better Venture Capitalists.

• 📺 Why We Need MTV Now More Than Ever: everyone, and everything, is everywhere. The price of high availability is channel dissipation: we’re all now listening to an enormous breadth of stuff scattered across a great many sources. We’ve lost focus and direction; the kind MTV offered.

• 🌊 Why ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ has mystified art lovers for generations: Katsushika Hokusai’s famous woodblock print is one of the world’s most iconic pieces of Asian art, and a symbol of change as Japan emerged from two centuries of isolationism.

• 📖 Eunoia is a database of words that don’t translate: words that exist in languages from all over the world but that don’t have a simple, single-word English translation. Joyous.

Surveillance is the new oil: As a culture of surveillance is finding its way into all corners of modernity, its origins are with the technology giants. Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard, coined the term ‘surveillance capitalism’ to describe those businesses use data from and about their users as a resource to be mined.

In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff argues that all Big Tech now works like this, but it was Google that invented it. Amnesty International describes this pervasive surveillance as posing an unprecedented danger to human rights. Some Google employees say it’s spying on them, and you probably can’t trust their browser even in Incognito mode (here’s some better choices).

But if Google invented the science, Amazon pursued the artform. Alexa records mundane details of your life as part of a broader plan to run your entire life. But this poses questions about whether this sort of data-gathering is appropriate in more public spaces, whether in college dorms or neighbourhoods. There’s no doubt, though, that Amazon takes this stuff seriously: it has even received a US patent for ‘surveillance as a service’.

But whereas with government surveillance there is a question over consent, with Big Tech the chances are you’ve already consented. So odious is it to try and read and understand the many pages of terms, we mostly accept blindly. As Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne note in their book Tools and Weapons, we’re at an inflection point, where companies with evermore powerful technologies must take more ethical responsibility for their use. 🕵️

Finally: Terry Jones rose to stardom writing, directing and starring in Monty Python. I often think about that world’s funniest joke sketch from the first Python show and wonder if it was a statement of intent, for surely Jones’ falsetto scream of ‘he’s a very naughty boy’ must be up there. All this from a man who wanted to be remembered not for Python but for his children’s books and historical studies. 🏰