Big Brother really is watching you

You may have missed it, but George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is already here. And "Big Brother," it turns out, has an iPhone. Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt: "Today, you’re [sic] phone knows who you are, where you are, where — where you’re going, to some degree, because it can see your path. ... So ultimately what happens is the mobile phone does what it does best, which is remember everything and make suggestions. And then you can be just a better human and have a good time." Writer Tom Ohare: "On the one hand, I can see where Schmidt is coming from: Smartphones are fun and cool and futuristic ... On the other hand, yikes! I don’t want my phone to “know” enough about me that it’s predicting where I’m going to go, and I most certainly don’t want it to make suggestions for my social life. In a very real way, we’ve already begun the process of personalized search — the question [is] how far we want it to go." Orwell famously said, "Big Brother is watching you." But who knew he would ultimately do so with GPS?