According to the project, cameras and microphones would capture what the user sees or hears and sensors would record what he or she feels. Global positioning satellite sensors would log every movement. Biomedical sensors would monitor vital signs. E-mails, instant messages, web-based transactions, telephone calls and voicemails would be stored. Mail and faxes would be scanned. Links to every radio and television broadcast heard and every newspaper, magazine, book, Web site or database seen would be recorded.
The said project was eventually canceled on February 4, 2004, after receiving massive backlash concerning privacy invasion and overreach of the system. Incidentally, the day it was shut down was the very day that Facebook was launched to the public. The report indicates that LifeLog may have been resurrected via Facebook.
The story becomes more mysterious as it is revealed that Bezos has a family tie to DARPA. His grandfather Lawrence Preston Gise was a founding member of this agency.
In 2018, it was revealed that Facebook has been engaging in a secretive data-sharing agreement with Amazon, contradicting its privacy policies.
According to Business Insider, Facebook had undisclosed deals with about 150 companies, including Amazon, giving them privileged access to user data. The documents revealed that as of 2017, Amazon was able to get people's names and emails via their Facebook friends, a practice that Facebook said it put an end to in 2014.
Meanwhile, Amazon supplied Facebook with contact lists to help the social network suggest more friend recommendations. The e-commerce firm told the New York Times that it used user data appropriately, but declined to comment on exactly how its partnership with Facebook worked.
Moreover, when Bezos' grandfather served as the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, he reportedly lost 300 pounds of uranium, a naturally occurring radioactive element used in the production of nuclear fuel, which is used in nuclear power reactors all over the world. Three years later, Israel tests out its first nuclear weapon.
The important events may have indirectly disclosed the hidden connections between Big Tech and Big Government and how they surveil the American people.
Bezos bought a website eerily similar to Facebook in 1998, then killed it
Launched in 1996, PlanetAll was arguably the first social networking site. By the time Amazon acquired it in 1998, the company had 1.5 million users and was adding thousands more every day.
PlanetAll co-founder Warren Adams was president of his fraternity at Colgate University and a social butterfly who wanted to keep in touch with the friends he'd made as an undergrad. After finishing Harvard Business School in 1995 and starting work as a consultant, he met his future business partner, Brian Robertson. Together, they signed a lease on an office in the back of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Cambridge.
By 1997, PlanetAll had 340,000 users and 7,000 more were joining every day, according to the Boston Globe. Nearly one-third of users were from outside North America. Fiscal year revenues topped $500,000. That summer, the company raised $4.5 million in its first investment round. Users mainly joined to find friends with whom they had lost touch. Other major internet players, such as GeoCities, which PlanetAll would later partner with, connected mostly strangers.
It was a platform that would want "to make the world a smaller place by helping people effortlessly find and stay in touch with friends, colleagues and groups important to them," PlanetAll's goal was world domination. In a statement, Bezos praised the site and said: "PlanetAll is the most innovative use of the Internet I've seen."
But years later, it was basically a memory as Bezos did not develop it. Eight years after that, Facebook became the largest social network in the world.