A 2017 movie about the perils of high tech.
The Circle is a social networking & hardware company -- obviously meant to be Apple -- whose home office is a giant circular building (like Apple). The company has like 80% of the world subscribing to their social networking site. They begin to collect data on their customers, they say in order to make it easy to buy stuff and find lost kids and send help when there's an accident.... But Mae, the hot new employee, isn't sure the total loss of privacy is a good thing.
Stars Emma Watson (from Harry Potter) as Mae, and she's incredibly gorgeous. Also stars Tom Hanks and Patton Oswalt and Finn from Star Wars.
The movie gets a few things wrong. One, the cut-throat competition inside a company like Apple or Microsoft are totally missed. The founder, Tom Hanks, is this benign figure often seen strolling the campus. The employees are "expected" to attend company parties and adventures on the evenings and weekends, and chastized when they don't. The company invents a webcam that can be placed anywhere, giving them eyes on everything, but no mention of how these things are powered. They said they broadcast "direct to the satellite" but then placed them indoors?
The movie is meant to be a cautionary tale about loss of privacy, but by 2017 that had already been given up willingly by billions of Facebook users.
On another level, the movie brings up but does not really discuss the central issue of our current high-tech time: Does everyone have a right to privacy? Is 100% transparency necessarily a bad thing?
People go into hiding for a variety of reasons. One is not liking what they see out there, and there are a lot of monsters online (another issue never addressed). But someone with no secrets is someone who cannot be manipulated, cannot be shamed, cannot be accused of duplicity. It seems to me that one of the reasons bad people get away with doing bad things is that they can conceal themselves, conceal their motives, and then deflect all the blame for what they've done to somebody or something else. Accountability comes with transparency, and when you're honest, good people recognize it.
Bad people also take advantage of it -- which is why they hide in the shadows.
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