Weird Stuff Read That I am Trying To Get My Head Around Right Now

 Home from church, trying to get through my open tabs. (I am supposed to be making submissions).

What I thought would be quick, quirky reads turned out a lot more.

Especially, Location tracking: ‘I can easily see where 80% of the people I know currently are’ (The Irish Times). I see parents tracking their kids; particularly since I have been dipping into missing person cases on YouTube. When I had stepkids, we gave them a cell phone when they were out trekking by themselves. On the other hand, the idea of tracking one's significant other leans heavily towards the creepy. It might also be the remnants of a bad conscience when, unlike Fats Waller, I was misbehaving.

When Orla Leahy, who is in her 70s, collects her husband from his appointments at the Beacon Hospital in Dublin she puts their dog’s collar, which has a location tracker, on to her wing mirror. “It’s a terrible place to park, so rather than have him waiting in the rain, he can see where I am [on his phone]. It’s a bit stalkerish but it’s a good use of the technology.”

A teenager I know was recently snared having a surreptitious party thanks to the family home’s doorbell camera. Sitting with his parents at the time, we watched all the youngsters coming to their door on his father’s phone before the event was shut down. I couldn’t help feeling it was a bit of a shame.

Someone else describes a friend whose girlfriend kept track of his every movement via location sharing – constantly ringing to ask questions about why he was where he was and who he was with.

We live in a world of surveillance. Our phones track us. Our apps track us. Security cameras on houses and businesses track us. Our data is circulated and shared and sold and hacked and leaked. Increasingly, assisting this process for the corporations who profit from it, we also voluntarily track each other.

Overprotection or rational lifeline? A surveillance state incubated by ourselves or a lack of self-consciousness about privacy? Not sure, but it sounds like an idea for a speculative fiction story.

But then my brain keeps thumping up against real safety concerns:

 

How I Became a Lock Picker is from The New Yorker and behind a paywall. Having watched too many crime shows, lockpicking always looked cool. That it is also a hobby surprised me.

 One day, I tried to open an old mailbox on the first floor. There were six slots, but I had only five keys, each of them as small and toylike as the key to a child’s diary. In an effort to open the last slot, I watched a video about lock picking on YouTube and ordered a set of picks from Amazon. Then I spent an hour unsuccessfully poking my new tools into the keyhole. In the end, I called a locksmith, defeated. A shifty young man turned up and, without even giving me his name, broke the lock with a drill. Before he left, though, he told me that there were groups of people who got together to study locks. I looked into it and found the Open Organization of Lockpickers (TOOOL), which originated in Amsterdam. Its members practice something called locksport.

***

TOOOL has a rigorous code of ethics. To form an official chapter, members must pledge that they will pick only those locks whose owners have given permission. Locksporters should not pick locks that are actively in use, because of the risk of breaking them. They should also be careful about whom they teach. Weyers turns people away when they seem suspiciously eager. Barry Wels, a co-founder of the Dutch chapter, has a security company that opens safes for clients, but he leaves the room when his work is done. “We are never interested in what is inside your safe,” he says on his website. “It is just not our business.”

Hobbyist lock pickers are not burglars, Weyers said, but people who want to master a practical and tactile skill. Once, a local television station profiled TOOOL and asked its members to dress in black turtlenecks and gloves. “That was not going to happen,” Weyers told me. If you truly wanted to get into a locked space, he pointed out, you would probably break a window or destroy the lock with a drill or a crowbar—unless, that is, you are dealing with certain American doorknobs, which Weyers considers inferior. “You will be able to open them after tonight,” he told me.

 

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