Phrase: Game of cat and mouse
A game of cat and mouse is a competition in which people try to win by outsmarting, receiving or tricking each other.
If you’ve ever seen the cartoon Tom & Jerry, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Now, of course, Tom & Jerry is just a cartoon, not real life, but similar things happen in real life all the time.
Recently a thief escaped from a police station in Osaka, and they have been unable to catch him.
In a game of cat and mouse, he is continually outsmarting them.
For example, he recently snatched a bag from a woman on the street and then stashed her smartphone in the back of a delivery truck.
The police, thinking the thief had the phone in his possession, tracked the truck.
When they eventually stopped the truck, the thief was nowhere to be found.
He had outsmarted them.
This guy seems quite intelligent, and it’s all a cat-and-mouse game to him.
Using the internet is also becoming a cat-and-mouse game.
People are gradually becoming savvy in how tech giants can track them and collect their data.
For some time now, we’ve had ad blockers and virtual private networks (VPNs) to help us, the netizens, avoid being tracked.
Internet companies, however, have tried to counter this by making their settings very complicated and hard to navigate.
Quite recently, the company Cambridge Analytica used a survey to collect data not only about the people who filled it out but also about all of the people they had friended on Facebook.
It’s a constant game of cat and mouse between the companies which want to track us to sell us something and the netizens who want to be able to choose what data we allow to be collected and who we allow to manage it.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 66.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.
