Irvine Welsh Quotes

Although we leave traces of our personal lives with our credit cards and Web browsers today, tomorrow's mobile devices will broadcast clouds of personal data to invisible monitors all around us.

Everything is accessible to everyone all the time, and I think there are wondrous things to treasure with what the Internet has made available to journalists. But I think it's also had some effects that are less pleasant. It has chipped away at a sense of privacy and secrecy.

We live in an age where anonymity is growing in magnitude like a bomb going off.

In the U.S., we are free to speak our minds and to spend money without being forced to reveal our identities - except when using the Web. Browsing the Web leaves digital tracks everywhere in the form of log files, and anyone who hosts a Web site can be easily traced.

Our movements and feelings are constantly monitored, because surveillance is the business model of the digital age.

There is no privacy in our culture anymore, so I have to try and carve that out for myself, but I'm OK with it.

The Orwellian vision was about state-sponsored surveillance. Now it's not just the state, it's your nosy neighbor, your ex-spouse and people who want to spam you.

What I would love to see is art that explicitly addresses not personal intimacies but anonymous intimacies: the vast collections of facts about you and me that now exist in giant server banks.

You don't get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. You're always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.

Human beings are not meant to lose their anonymity and privacy.

The digitally native generation has no idea what has been lost to the freedom of intimacy that has no fear of being recorded.

Parents can't monitor what you are doing on Snapchat.

There is a long tradition in China for writers and journalists to take pen names, partly as protection from retaliation by authorities. If Facebook requires the use of real names, that could potentially put Chinese citizens in danger.

It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.

Every time you log in to Facebook, every time you click on your News Feed, every time you Like a photo, every time you send anything via Messenger, you add another data point to the galaxy they already have regarding you and your behavior.

If you are everywhere, then you've sacrificed the very thing that you are complaining about, which is your own privacy.

I think we're seeing privacy diminish, not by laws... but by young people who don't seem to value their privacy.

There are so many classic Big Brother warning books: the Internet is a horrible, controlling thing, as if it has a consciousness or political agenda.

Google, Facebook, and the thousands of other companies that seek to join their ranks do more every day to collect data about you and I than any surveillance state could ever accomplish. They track our behavior, our communications. The moment to moment decisions we make in every room of our house

The idea that you can be totally anonymous in the digital age is increasingly hard to execute.

The Internet, Facebook, synagogue pamphlets, and the plethora of TV channels and cellular networks in our lives increasingly blur the boundary between the public and private sphere.

I was the first real generation to have their teens on the Internet.

I think I'm slightly older than the generation that was really bred on social media - I had Facebook in high school, but I was growing up in a time where these things were relatively new, and every generation below me is growing up having every single thing they do seen. And that is kind of frightening.

When you have tools with which to stalk everyone all the time, the most seemingly aloof person wins.

The whole 'Electronica' project is about the ambiguous relationship we have with technology: on the one side, we have the world in our pocket; on the other, we are spied on constantly.