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> all anyone can talk about lately is politics Good! It would have been great if this more active participation in the political process started a long time ag

by pdkl95 10y ago

> all anyone can talk about lately is politics Good! It would have been great if this more active participation in the political process started a long time ago, but better late than never. > The overwhelming response has been not caring One of the reasons for this is that the focus is usually on the surveillance itself. Humans are bad a risk assessment, and most of the time common fallacy that "I have nothing to hide" is approximately correct. Like smoking, the average person is unlikely to be affected by surveillance in the short term. The accumulation of risk over time is never seen first hand. I suggest that the important understanding that is needed to evaluate the risks of surveillance is that data never goes away. It's easy to be indifferent when you understand surveillance as an isolated event. Instead, the focus should be on growing databases that allow anyone with access to reconstruct entire lives. Practical demonstrations (like Google's map of already-collected location data) are even better. > will embrace the expansion of the surveillance state This is what happens when we allow problematic behavior to become normalized. Unfortunately, the too many of the people that did understand surveillance technology decided to say "I don't see any current risk" and chose convenience and features at the expense of future security.

doctorpangloss 10y ago
> Like smoking Smoking causing cancer was substantiated by some of the strongest correlations in medical science history. Regular smoking increases cancer risk by 60x (odds ratio) in contemporary studies in the US. I'm not sure where you'd observe something anything strong like that with regards to surveillance, or indeed nearly anything the government does. Even urban air pollution increases cancer risk by less than 2x (odds ratio). Surely eliminating urban air pollution was a huge accomplishment of government intervention. And yet look at how small that O.R. looks compared to smoking. Smoking isn't "accumulation of risk over time." It's an absolutely horrible thing you start doing to your body immediately. And maybe this comes to your conflating some pop-psych notion of people being unable to assess risks with other failures of health and well-being. People are physically addicted to smoking; quitting aggravates real pain. Nobody is "addicted" to government surveillance. In this country, pervasive surveillance could be dismantled with the stroke of a pen, much like closing Guantanamo or mass incarceration of low-level drug offenses. Why are these orders politically difficult to achieve? I don't know, but risk assessment fallacies aren't to blame.
- westoncb 10y ago
  I think what the parent was getting at is people are bad at evaluating risks whose potential negative consequences won't manifest for decades. It's true of smoking, and it's very likely true in the case of surveillance. There aren't similar studies demonstrating this for impact of surveillance on the wellbeing of nations over periods of decades because it's totally infeasible. However, there is a good amount of evidence that it's very dangerous (and you can come to a similar conclusion by reasoning)—so the question should be whether it's worth the risk in the face of uncertainty.
  - lrem 10y ago
    There were such "studies". One result of such is the German refusal of accepting a surveillance state. Edit: parentheses around studies relevant, I know the difference between a correctly designed controlled study and a historical observation. Point still worth making.
- pdkl95 10y ago
  > Smoking causing cancer was substantiated by some of the strongest correlations in medical science history. Of course. As westoncb pointed out, the actual risk of smoking isn't what I'm talking about. The visible damage from smoking is only seen later (i.e. when symptoms of cancer or emphysema start to appear), so it is extremely difficult for the average person to properly evaluate the risk. Humans use approximate pattern patching and heuristics when evaluating risk; this fuzzy approach to input data saves energy but fails spectacularly in some situations. > I'm not sure where you'd observe something anything strong like that with regards to surveillance You're exhibiting the exact problem I'm talking about: you are only considering current problems. There may not be any problems at the moment for you to observe. While that's great for today, the databases that contain an increasingly accurate profile about your activities still exists in the future. You are (severely) underestimating the risk of your data accumulating in (approximately) permanent databases if you haven't included things like: * A judge during sentencing or parole hearing using a model that claims you are high risk because social media posts you made today correlate with the "high risk" group de jour. * Your religious, ethic, or political group becomes the next scapegoat. Previously recorded data allows the members of that group to be easily identified "for public safety". * On the business side, your future insurance company raising your rates because prohibited information (e.g. ethnicity, income) could be inferred from the data you are currently generating. Those are just a few of the obvious risks that we know about. As time progresses, more risks will be discovered. > "addicted" That aspect of smoking is entirely orthogonal to my point. Smoking is merely one obvious example of poor risk estimation. > It's an absolutely horrible thing you start doing to your body immediately. Yes. It's a damaging process that wont be easily visible to the average person when they are subconsciously judging the effects of their previous cigarette and if they should buy more. Over the last few decades we have had some success at educating people about the actual risks to counteract these common errors in perceived risk, which is exactly what we need to do for data sharing and the surveillance problem.

by pdkl95 10y ago

doctorpangloss 10y ago

> Like smoking Smoking causing cancer was substantiated by some of the strongest correlations in medical science history. Regular smoking increases cancer risk by 60x (odds ratio) in contemporary studies in the US. I'm not sure where you'd observe something anything strong like that with regards to surveillance, or indeed nearly anything the government does. Even urban air pollution increases cancer risk by less than 2x (odds ratio). Surely eliminating urban air pollution was a huge accomplishment of government intervention. And yet look at how small that O.R. looks compared to smoking. Smoking isn't "accumulation of risk over time." It's an absolutely horrible thing you start doing to your body immediately. And maybe this comes to your conflating some pop-psych notion of people being unable to assess risks with other failures of health and well-being. People are physically addicted to smoking; quitting aggravates real pain. Nobody is "addicted" to government surveillance. In this country, pervasive surveillance could be dismantled with the stroke of a pen, much like closing Guantanamo or mass incarceration of low-level drug offenses. Why are these orders politically difficult to achieve? I don't know, but risk assessment fallacies aren't to blame.

westoncb 10y ago
I think what the parent was getting at is people are bad at evaluating risks whose potential negative consequences won't manifest for decades. It's true of smoking, and it's very likely true in the case of surveillance. There aren't similar studies demonstrating this for impact of surveillance on the wellbeing of nations over periods of decades because it's totally infeasible. However, there is a good amount of evidence that it's very dangerous (and you can come to a similar conclusion by reasoning)—so the question should be whether it's worth the risk in the face of uncertainty.
- lrem 10y ago
  There were such "studies". One result of such is the German refusal of accepting a surveillance state. Edit: parentheses around studies relevant, I know the difference between a correctly designed controlled study and a historical observation. Point still worth making.
pdkl95 10y ago
> Smoking causing cancer was substantiated by some of the strongest correlations in medical science history. Of course. As westoncb pointed out, the actual risk of smoking isn't what I'm talking about. The visible damage from smoking is only seen later (i.e. when symptoms of cancer or emphysema start to appear), so it is extremely difficult for the average person to properly evaluate the risk. Humans use approximate pattern patching and heuristics when evaluating risk; this fuzzy approach to input data saves energy but fails spectacularly in some situations. > I'm not sure where you'd observe something anything strong like that with regards to surveillance You're exhibiting the exact problem I'm talking about: you are only considering current problems. There may not be any problems at the moment for you to observe. While that's great for today, the databases that contain an increasingly accurate profile about your activities still exists in the future. You are (severely) underestimating the risk of your data accumulating in (approximately) permanent databases if you haven't included things like: * A judge during sentencing or parole hearing using a model that claims you are high risk because social media posts you made today correlate with the "high risk" group de jour. * Your religious, ethic, or political group becomes the next scapegoat. Previously recorded data allows the members of that group to be easily identified "for public safety". * On the business side, your future insurance company raising your rates because prohibited information (e.g. ethnicity, income) could be inferred from the data you are currently generating. Those are just a few of the obvious risks that we know about. As time progresses, more risks will be discovered. > "addicted" That aspect of smoking is entirely orthogonal to my point. Smoking is merely one obvious example of poor risk estimation. > It's an absolutely horrible thing you start doing to your body immediately. Yes. It's a damaging process that wont be easily visible to the average person when they are subconsciously judging the effects of their previous cigarette and if they should buy more. Over the last few decades we have had some success at educating people about the actual risks to counteract these common errors in perceived risk, which is exactly what we need to do for data sharing and the surveillance problem.