Marta Peirano, a Spanish journalist, writer and respected data privacy and security activists blasted 5G in a recent interview as being nothing but a big lie for a few elite companies to process yet more data in order to manipulate people to sell objects, services, experiences, political candidates, you name it.
The United States and China are racing to be the world’s leading provider of 5G wireless networks. The world waits to see which tech giant will be its new lord and master that spies on us and sells us shiny things, a Chinese one or an American one. The world’s online infrastructures will be managed by a corporation that does not even pay taxes or complies with legislation where it operates. Peirano sees governments as merely clients of these companies. They use the infrastructures to control the population, produce 'fake news' or persecute dissidents.
The frightening thing about 5G, is that tech giants are doing a fine job at manipulating our behavior without it. Most of us are stuck on our phone’s all day on social networks where our news feed is selected by algorithms and our clicks are turned into targeted ads. We can’t even get to the end of a news story since our attention span has dropped from a pathetic 12 seconds to just eight seconds. That’s less than a goldfish.
And 5G will upload more of our data and take away some of the basic privacy controls we had. Location privacy for instance. That’s gone with 5G. Anyone with access to your ISP’s cell tower data can hone in on your exact location far more precisely than they can with 4G because 4G can be broadcast about a mile from a single tower. 5G network technology has a much smaller coverage area. 5G networks need more small antennas dotted together around rooftops and street lights inside shopping malls etc. Dozens and dozens of 5G towers will need to be placed around an area that a single 4G tower would have covered in the past. If you have your data on whilst walking down the street in one of our future cities, you’re exact location will be evident.
The 5G infrastructure will be able to exploit data at an astonishing rate. We’re told that 5G will bring us autonomous cars. Maybe, but these cars will be uploading data about you nonstop. And we hear how it will bring us surgical operations at a distance. Yeah. Whilst collecting data to be used against us in mortgage decisions.
These days, any application is generating a tremendous amount of data that somebody is going to try to monetize, and it seems saying hello to 5G means saying goodbye to data privacy.
And if the data privacy problem doesn’t concern you, the health warnings around 5G are surely worth eight seconds of our collective attention.
Due to the lower power of 5G transmitters, there will be more of them. That means the dose of radiofrequency radiation will be higher. 1G, 2G, 3G and 4G use between 1 to 5 gigahertz frequency. 5G uses between 24 to 90 gigahertz frequency. That’s more RF Radiation which is possibly cancerous to humans and other living things.
But 5G is still in the post, even if many a receiver doesn’t want to sign off on the delivery.