Since it’s the beginning of a new decade, as a starting point, we thought we’d take a look at 2010 and see what the sentiment was then. Eric Schmidt set the tone when he famously said, “There is what I call the creepy line. The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

Said Business Insider, “If you don’t cross the creepy line, we suppose by definition you aren’t creepy. But making it a policy to go right up to that line “on a lot of things” is, well, something a lot like creepy.” So, where do we stand now and as for the creepy line crossed – how often and in how many ways was it breached, if not completely ignored? Some instances from the past year and the past decade:

The Digital Arms Race

1. A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities, Giving Police Vast Powers The authorities can scan your phones, track your face and find out when you leave your home. One of the world’s biggest spying networks is aimed at regular people, and nobody can stop it. In China, it’s called surveillance. When it’s Google, Apple, Facebook et al, it’s business as usual. In this New York Times piece (Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy), researchers mineda data file of 50 billion location pings from 12 million Americans’ cellphones as they moved through D.C., New York, San Francisco, LA et al. “We wanted to document the risk of underregulated surveillance. Connecting those pings reveals a diary of the person’s life. Watching dots move across a map sometimes revealed hints of faltering marriages, evidence of drug addiction, records of visits to psychological facilities.”
2. Apple, Google, Amazon, Zigbee partner on smart home. Project Connected Home over IP will work to create a new standard that will make it easier for the fragmented ecosystem of smart home products to work together, CNBC Well, that should solve a lot of consumer headaches. And with coordinated surveillance, create a lot more.
3. UN Moves Towards Handing Dictatorships Power to Control the Internet, Legitimizing web blackouts and free speech censorship. Of course, it’s all in the name of cybersecurity. We’re talking about dictatorial regimes like Russia and China overseeing the committee. Coming next, of course, should the UN have its way: Cybersecurity Measures Will Mandate Government “ID Tokens” To Use The Internet.

Tech everywhere has gone way over the creepy line. In fact, at the CES Gadget Show: Surveillance is in – and in a big way

SPACE…THE FINAL FRONTIER. In this case, we mean WeWork. Travis Kalanick started it as the cocky tech bro who would disrupt the ride-hailing business – and was ousted as CEO of his own company for the controversy that stirred wherever he went, including fostering a toxic work culture and efforts to mislead regulators. Success at all costs is one thing, but he edged just a bit too close to the creepy line. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes did him one better, having raised billions without having delivered a working product, but looking great in those Steve Jobs-esque black turtlenecks. Fraud is always creepy. WeWork founder Adam Neumann was the apotheosis and the latest in the line of the brash young tech entrepreneur – and he didn’t even have to create a tech product. He simply rented out office/co-working space, while giving all the appearances of being a tech play, and the money kept pouring in. Mostly into Neumann’s pockets. Yet investors still expect hockey stick growth, to this day. So much for lessons learned. Their respective companies are both struggling, yet both Kalanick and Neumann managed to walked away billionaires. Kalanick did create a new category. Co-working spaces were nothing new. Did Neumann seriously change the way we work? He was merely a master of illusion. Creepy.

Bigger, Faster – Better start adhering to employee safety regulations. – Drivers delivering Amazon packages reportedly got in more than 60 crashes since 2015, resulting in serious injuries and 13 deaths, as the company prioritized faster deliveries. Accidents at Amazon: workers left to suffer after warehouse injuries. Toilet paper over human lives? That is creepy. Not to worry: the humans are slowly being replaced by robotics. And self-driving vehicles. Or dual-purpose drones: package delivery and surveillance. Which brings us to…

Tell it To My Heart, My Achy, Faky Heart. People are terrified of robots taking over their jobs, but when it comes to the world’s oldest profession, it seems that we’re much more likely to give robots a pass Adult entertainment does tend to lead the way in pioneering technologies, Another way to look at it: the social era created loneliness: despite the fact that humans globally were being connected as never before, many people felt personally disconnected. Will robot-love help to solve that problem, once again replacing humans?  There’s a creepy thought. And had the song come out today, would New Kids on the Block have released a version called Synths, You Walked into My Life

Bonus: In the Age of Social, how much more time do we spend interacting with voice-activated devices than with humans? With much more to come, given the focus at this year’s CES.

Libra. It’s Facebook’s big push into crypto –potentially “turning the social network into the largest payment service in the world,” writes Siddhart Tripathi in Medium (It’s Zuckerberg’s Dangerous Cryptocurrency Lie). He’s right. Despite Zuckerberg’s assurances of strong privacy protections, well we know at this point that the Facebook founder lies. Compulsively. Even more worrisome, Libra will codify everything that cryptocurrency and the blockchain were meant to safeguard against, the latter being a decentralized platform while Facebook and its properties, including Instagram and Whatsapp, are very much walled gardens. As to his promises of privacy, CNET published a list of the biggest data breaches of the year, month by month. Facebook made it onto the list three times. Although Facebook made it onto this list, four times, not including this past December 2019 breach that exposed the user data of 267 million Facebook users. Have you noticed that Zuckerberg doesn’t bother to apologize anymore? Why should he? His personal wealth rose by $27.3 billion in 2019.

Don’t Disrupt the Disruptors. Facebook banned crypto advertising in 2018. YouTube not only banned crypto adverts. They’ve banned all mention of crypto. They’ve also banned political videos, from both sides of the spectrum, and instead promote segments from television shows. Is YouTube moving away from user generated content – and will it in future only feature content from network broadcasts, ‘approved’ news and governments? Potentially bordering on creepy and a definite anti-you turn. Not to worry – there will no doubt always be cat videos. Killing off the kitties would just way up the creep factor.

Interesting to note that at the turn of the last decade, Apple and Microsoft, Intel, Oracle and IBM were among the most valuable tech companies. Apple and Microsoft have maintained that distinction, while the others have faltered, having failed to see the future coming in the manner that it did. Somewhere in the basements and bedrooms and garages of Austin and Boston, Colorado, Utah, Atlanta and LA and NY, new tech is being developed by the next generation of disruptors, and trust us, there is a next generation of disruptors, and more and more of it with a blockchain component or on the blockchain itself, which is decentralized and cannot be controlled by a single entity – or even by the current dominant players like Facebook, Google et al. The next decade may well be the era of the blockchain. And in case you’re wondering what that means, it’s that the creepy line stops here. Onward and forward.