[AxisOfEasy] The Internet Will Split In Two By 2028

• Ex-Google CEO: The internet will split in two by 2028
• A day in the life under Sesame Credit
• Life insurance company to sell only interactive policies driven by wearable tech
• UK initiative uses big data on citizens to predict child abuse
• Scan4You author sentenced to 14 years in prison
• EU court rules UK surveillance programs violate human rights
• Ticketmaster caught actively colluding with scalpers
• Watch out for Hurricane Florence charity scams

Ex-Google CEO: The internet will split in two by 2028

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, at a private venture capital event in San Francisco, predicted that by 2028 the Internet will split in two, with one half being controlled by China, and the other by the U.S. (For anybody paying attention I’ve been warning about this in one form or another since around 2011, see here and here)

Schmidt, who still serves as a director and owns 1.3% of the shares of Google is almost certainly jockeying to be neck-deep in both. If he’s right, then on current trajectories they will each be uniquely Orwellian gulags. We’ll think ours is better because we’ll have infotainment and government mandated safe spaces punctuated by heavily curated “free speech zones”.

A day in the life under Sesame Credit

China has already made it clear what their Internet will look like, and we’ve covered it here before: Sesame Credit – a social network system that gamifies obedience to the State and becomes compulsory for all citizens in 2020. “Leave No Dark Corner”, a truly chilling examination by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about a day in the life of a Chinese citizen, who is rated and scored on every single transaction and event of her daily life (“She selects a bottle of alcohol off the shelf, which may signal dependency, so she’s penalized a few points. Then she selects napkins, signalling cleanliness, and earns some points back”). Good luck with all that.

(In the meantime, Chinese state authorities recently concluded a three-month “web clean up” effort which removed over 4,000 websites from the internet which contained “harmful online information”. See https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/china-shuts-thousands-of-websites-in-clean-up-campaign-xinhua-10747570 )

Life insurance company to sell only interactive policies driven by wearable tech

Like I said, the forthcoming “Western Internet” probably won’t resemble Sesame Credit on the surface. It’ll be more along the lines of Black Mirror’s ’Nosedive’ episode Case in point: “John Hancock, one of the oldest and largest North American life insurers, will stop underwriting traditional life insurance and instead sell only interactive policies that track fitness and health data through wearable devices and smartphones”. The program is called “Vitality” and all existing policy holders will be converted to it by 2019. Participation at the individual monitoring level won’t be mandatory, but those declining may face higher premiums.

UK initiative uses big data on citizens to predict child abuse

Data point #2: Budget constrained government social agencies in the U.K are turning to big data and “predictive analytics” to “algorithmically identify” families who might warrant additional scrutiny from local child services authorities. “[A]t least five local authorities have developed or implemented a predictive analytics system for child safeguarding. At least 377,000 people’s data has been incorporated into the different predictive systems.”  The analytics look at data points such as school attendance, housing association repairs and arrears, and police records on antisocial behaviour and domestic abuse.