4 ms·

Imagine you're a something like a muslim in the US, and somoene like Trump is elected 5 years from now. You've been here all your life, you have a job, you pay

by swalsh 10y ago

Imagine you're a something like a muslim in the US, and somoene like Trump is elected 5 years from now. You've been here all your life, you have a job, you pay your taxes, you're just a person who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Much like a jewish person in Poland in the 1940's. Now even back then, it was not easy to escape persecution... but it was possible. In a google world though, there's nothing preventing a corrupt government, or even a corrupt corporate governence from take over, or leveraging this data to your disadvantage. Perhaps your car recognizes you, and locks you in until police come, perhaps you felt safe enough to go to a bar, and that data was forwarded. Perhaps an exaggeration, the point is, even if you trust google today. There's no guarantee that data will always be held by the people who are google today. We know for a fact the NSA had access to all google data up until at least the snowdon leaks. To me that's the concern about privacy, you have no idea how it can be used AGAINST you in the future.

CaptSpify 10y ago
> Much like a jewish person in Poland in the 1940's or a Japanese in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment We tend to think that the nazi's were crazy out-there, but we weren't too far off not that long ago, and we can get back there pretty quickly.
- overcast 10y ago
  While not to justify their existence, those internment camps were not even in any stretch of the mind "like" the German death camps.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    Oh, I totally agree. But it is a similar mindset that led them to the German death camps.
spiderfarmer 10y ago
Everytime someone responds with "I have nothing to hide" I replied along the same lines as you. But I thought about it a bit more and I think the data they have on you is only a small problem when you look at how technology progressed since WWII. Imagine how much easier it would have been today for the SS to extract jews from their hiding places. We have satellites, helicopters with IR camera's, hell, even radars that see through walls.
- bduerst 10y ago
  Bad actors exist. Hence why with every new technology comes new responsibility to use it properly - from nuclear fission to robotics to neural networks. That doesn't mean we need to reference how WW2 Nazis would use it every time a new technology is developed.
  - api 10y ago
    "What would the Nazis do with this?" is not wholly inappropriate. It's basically a way of looking at the worst case failure mode, like asking "what would happen to this nuclear reactor if all cooling and backup systems fail at once?" or "what happens to people in the capsule if the rocket explodes during max-Q?" In this case it's "what's the danger of all this lazily deployed insecure ubiquitous surveillance gear in a political worst case scenario like a descent into totalitarianism, mafia statism, etc.?" That's not an unlikely thing. Complex societies undergo bouts of collective insanity or descents into pervasive corruption with disturbing regularity on historical time scales. Personally I think the USA is one 9/11 scale (or worse) terrorist attack or one seriously painful economic crash away from an American Putin or Chavez (or worse). Which we get depends on which side manages to field the most charismatic demagogue. If that happens all this total surveillance stuff will be mobilized against dissenters on an industrial scale and with a significant amount of public support. You limit things like surveillance to limit moral hazard. Future generations are likely to look back on the wanton deployment of all this stuff and say "what were they thinking!??!?"
    - bduerst 10y ago
      >You limit things like surveillance to limit moral hazard. Not quite sure how you got that out of "with every new technology comes new responsibility". That's neither singling out surveillance nor limiting to moral hazard.

by swalsh 10y ago

CaptSpify 10y ago

> Much like a jewish person in Poland in the 1940's or a Japanese in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment We tend to think that the nazi's were crazy out-there, but we weren't too far off not that long ago, and we can get back there pretty quickly.

overcast 10y ago
While not to justify their existence, those internment camps were not even in any stretch of the mind "like" the German death camps.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  Oh, I totally agree. But it is a similar mindset that led them to the German death camps.

spiderfarmer 10y ago

Everytime someone responds with "I have nothing to hide" I replied along the same lines as you. But I thought about it a bit more and I think the data they have on you is only a small problem when you look at how technology progressed since WWII. Imagine how much easier it would have been today for the SS to extract jews from their hiding places. We have satellites, helicopters with IR camera's, hell, even radars that see through walls.

bduerst 10y ago
Bad actors exist. Hence why with every new technology comes new responsibility to use it properly - from nuclear fission to robotics to neural networks. That doesn't mean we need to reference how WW2 Nazis would use it every time a new technology is developed.
- api 10y ago
  "What would the Nazis do with this?" is not wholly inappropriate. It's basically a way of looking at the worst case failure mode, like asking "what would happen to this nuclear reactor if all cooling and backup systems fail at once?" or "what happens to people in the capsule if the rocket explodes during max-Q?" In this case it's "what's the danger of all this lazily deployed insecure ubiquitous surveillance gear in a political worst case scenario like a descent into totalitarianism, mafia statism, etc.?" That's not an unlikely thing. Complex societies undergo bouts of collective insanity or descents into pervasive corruption with disturbing regularity on historical time scales. Personally I think the USA is one 9/11 scale (or worse) terrorist attack or one seriously painful economic crash away from an American Putin or Chavez (or worse). Which we get depends on which side manages to field the most charismatic demagogue. If that happens all this total surveillance stuff will be mobilized against dissenters on an industrial scale and with a significant amount of public support. You limit things like surveillance to limit moral hazard. Future generations are likely to look back on the wanton deployment of all this stuff and say "what were they thinking!??!?"
  - bduerst 10y ago
    >You limit things like surveillance to limit moral hazard. Not quite sure how you got that out of "with every new technology comes new responsibility". That's neither singling out surveillance nor limiting to moral hazard.