Of gadgets and needs

Recently, saw a movie called “Missing” on Netflix. It came as a recommendation from the app basis my preferences and watching behaviour and was also on my eyeline across several reviews. First few minutes, it felt like better version of “Blairwitch project” with a video being played. While I was about to lose interest and switch, the movie began to pick pace. It went on a decent pace and quite soon you get caught up in the kidnapping mystery that dawns on you suddenly. What follows next makes you wonder at the concept of privacy and how much our life is being monitored, knowingly and unknowingly. The girl on camera chases behind her mother’s whereabouts with the help of Google and several other tools that helps you to track the timeline of visits and journeys made by the person. All you need is a phone with a decent data plan!! The ease with which the girl hacks into her mother’s boyfriend’s profiles across several apps where he happens to have either the same email ID/PWD or same security questions to reset!! 

Possibly the biggest lesson from the movie – either to make things simple for our family, incase we go missing by having same password or make things difficult for those who chase us by having different security questions!!! The biggest surprise for me was there is an app where people donate their time for x dollars an hour for doing specific work and that app is global!!! You can pick someone in a different country to visit someone or someplace to do your chore!! And all this while our Bollywood/Kolywooders wreck their creative minds to figure out ways to engage koolipadais or to give supari for a hit job!! The girl manages to track down every personal chat/conversation that happened over apps, from and to her mom and eventually manages to track her down. The surprise twist of a villain is revealed about half hour from the end which makes the finish a bit of a drag, having known how this is going to end! 

The interesting thing about the whole movie being, almost the entire duration of the film happens in front of a computer screen, but for the climax and the portions involving the foreign guy. There are so many apps, some made up while most of them real, which are used to track anything from payment to purchase. And services offered is shown in a whole new light with anything that can be rendered by a person coming under the gamut of a service that can be tracked!!! While it offers immense help to the needy, the amount of mischief that can happen via these apps is terrifying and what is scarier being the forever watchful eye under which we subject ourselves or already have enslaved ourselves to!! What was shown as a funny spy gadget in a Roger Moore or Sean Connery movie is now commonplace stuff!! The fancier the app, the riskier the scenarios associated with it along with the niche benefits offered! The concept of privacy is broken down to the minutest of pieces and in an internet era even if you are fully clothed, that is not sufficient to cover yourself!! The fun fact being, while it is implemented by the government, people fight tooth and nail over it, whereas they find it least disturbing to volunteer their most private information if it’s requested by an app!!!

I guess it was a Sujatha short story, in which people from future would be arrested by the then government for conspiring against the regime and they would be charged with communicating in a cryptic language. They will bring in a linguistic expert who will identify the language as “Tamil” having been spoken by people as a common tongue several decades before!! The rate at which the apps are taking over our lives, if you are having a mobile with no data connection, people may suspect you for harboring sinister or shady intentions at the least!! In the valley of the blind, one eyed man is an outcast!!!