6 ms·

Are the concepts; security and privacy mutually exclusive? Can we have secure and safe places to live without surveillance and invasion of privacy?

by gitgud 8y ago

nxc18 8y ago
Yes, we can have security and privacy. People drastically over estimate the risks from things like terrorist attacks and high crime. Just think about the number of people and hugely vulnerable systems (even existing security is a joke - why not bomb a TSA line for example? Or accidentally carry a gun through, which happens all the time) and how rarely things go wrong. There's just no need for these over the top surveillance machines. Security doesn't stop motivated attackers anyway (see all terrorist attacks since 9/11). As far as everyday crime goes, I suspect a social safety net would take care of most of it. Most people aren't bad, but they will do bad things when they need help but don't get it. Once you get past that point, the cost of crime is probably less than the cost of trying to get perfect enforcement.
- bArray 8y ago
  Agreed. 1. Security is usually a knee jerk reaction to something that has happened and rarely correctly addresses the full problem scope, just one specific edge case that was experienced. This typically happens because people over weight the probability of such an event happening to them, due to the short nature of it and lack of control. In contrast to 9/11, you won't see nearly the funding or awareness of some of the largest killers, such as obesity, cancer, US-based violence, alcohol, opioids, etc. 2. Anybody correctly motivated can bypass said security, because it is never well thought out and doesn't cover all possible scenarios. With some time and some know-how, any individual could defeat TSA (or any other Countries) security. At the moment the only benefit is those who seek to terrorize Western society are usually desperate or ill funded. 3. Security tends to lure people into a false sense of security, so people in general are just as secure as they were, because they stop being aware of insecurities. There is a study showing that Countries with and without bicycle helmets have roughly the same number of deaths - the reason being that drivers recognize cyclists without helmets as being more vulnerable, hence going to greater lengths to avoid collision. To the point, all of these cameras are unlikely to make us more secure. What they will do on the other hand is lend themselves to abuse by government or corporate entities to any extent they think they can get away with.
  - lambdadmitry 8y ago
    I have a counterexample to make: Skripal's case. AFAIK the police pieced together CCTV footage from multiple cameras, which allowed to track and identify the suspects. Given that the suspects are likely trained hitmen and the stakes were pretty high, I can only assume that the main reason most crimes don't get solved that way is the complexity of the search. ML is poised to change that. I'm not sure I'm for surveillance per se, but I do believe painting CCTV as useless and inefficient is wrong. It can be efficient in aiding high-level investigations if applied properly.
- King-Aaron 8y ago
  > Or accidentally carry a gun through I couldn't possibly imagine a scenario where you just forget that you're carrying a gun...
  - xboxnolifes 8y ago
    Do you carry a gun daily?
    - King-Aaron 8y ago
      Why would one need to, unless you are police/military and thus required to for work?
      - stonogo 8y ago
        Nobody is required to demonstrate need to King-Aaron. Your opinions on the policy are not relevant to the practical concerns regarding its implementation. For the record, I agree with you, but this isn't really an appropriate place to soapbox about it.
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        I started carrying a gun after I was attacked and the nearby police unit continued to write a parking ticket in the meanwhile.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    If you carry all the time (which most people who carry do, better than just leaving it in your car or something) it becomes natural like carrying your keys or wallet. If you're carrying your handgun in the bottom of a purse and rarely take it out it's even easier to forget.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - lambdadmitry 8y ago
- siruncledrew 8y ago
  I see it as security is about control, and privacy is about removal. Privacy and security aren't mutually exclusive, but they aren't exactly symbiotic either. It's fair to say an individual would want both security and privacy (for example, as with your home). Like many things, it's about finding the right balance. I'm sure if you look to the extremes of security and privacy you could find a bunch of crazy examples. The wildcard is the who. That is what throws off the scales, as the security/privacy relationship moves from a micro to a macro level, and suddenly a person's real autonomy comes into question.
mindslight 8y ago
Privacy is an integral part of security - one cannot have security without privacy! Witness the various locations (eg the hotel in the article) that treat a small encroachment on their privacy as a security threat! What has severely muddied the water is the term "security" has been bandied about by governments (and other large centralized entities) to refer to their own security, often at at the expense of our security. In order to sell the lie, we're encouraged to think that their security implies our security, which is obviously bullshit when you look at the positions their various security measures actually put us in - eg bunched up, undressed, split up, and disassembled in the airport groping line.
- pm 8y ago
  I hadn't really thought about the difference between my security and the Government's security, but the distinction you make is important.
  - mindslight 8y ago
    This is very pronounced at eg a federal building. At an airport, there obviously is a decent part of one's security that corresponds to the government's security. The real problem, and why drawing the distinction is important even there, is that the government is choosing to do things that may or may not make government/group security slightly better because they/it cannot see a downside. When in reality it/they is hurting all the individuals' ability to take care of ourselves (eg my above description), even with respect to utterly banal threats like theft.
eksemplar 8y ago
Are we getting safety in return? We’re giving up virtually all our rights to privacy, but are we really any safer than we were in the 70’ies? Violent crime is certainly down in general, but is that because of increased surveillance? Terror and postal episodes are more frequent, so the surveillance certainly didn’t prevent that. Some surveillance is arguably helping prevent terror without us knowing, but we’re not even having a debate on what works and what doesn’t. Street cameras in particular seem to me to be a lot more about retaliation and crime solving rather than actual prevention. You still get murdered, but now society catches the killer.
- draugadrotten 8y ago
  > Street cameras in particular seem to me to be a lot more about retaliation and crime solving rather than actual prevention. You still get murdered, but now society catches the killer. Catching criminals is certainly a good thing to do. It may also prevent crime since criminals often commit more than one crime if left on the streets. Crime prevention is not the only thing that needs to happen. Compare with firefighters that will both need to prevent fires and put out the fires that happened anyway. There is also the perceived need for justice - "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done." Cameras will help in this context. Are cameras really a privacy problem in our GPS-enabled Wifi BLE cellphone tracking device infested world? A world where your face is tracked on every photo uploaded to Faceboo, and your Wifi and bluetooth MAC are logged in every AP you pass on the street and sent to advertisers and security agencies for storage and processing. Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI. We may end up with a Minority Report style society. Is the prevention of crime worth the trade-off? The only way to win is not to play.
  - maze-le 8y ago
    GPS devices are not on themselves active senders, you can choose not to have Wifi or cellphones. You can opt-out to do face tracking on Facebook, its just your friends you have to worry about. MACs can be spoofed. In short, you can pretty much avoid or conceal all the activities you posted above, not a CCTV installation though. If it is near your home or work, you can definitely forget even trying to avoid it, except for reconstructive surgery. >> Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI. Well, I heard lots of claims to this, but never seen a reasonable POC. Most of these claims turn out to be mere geospatial statistics and analysis. Interesting to do, but it won't give you more information, than your local police precinct already knows (where are the 'troubled' neighbourhoods). Given time, more people (even bureucrats) will develop a bit of scrutiny against "AI solves everything" approaches. At least I hope they do...
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I think obviously so. There's a very simple way to illustrate as such. In particular much of the crime that affects us and surveillance attempts to stop is not particularly new. It's mostly people just killing and hurting each other in ways that are centuries old. Surveillance of society as a whole has increased on a very sharp exponential scale, yet there's been no clear causal connection to a decline in crime. If surveillance was useful, let alone necessary, to a society being made as safe as it could we would have expected to see a proportional decline in crime with some reasonably decent evidence of a causal link. But that is not present, at all. So we're really just submitting to surveillance and sacrificing ever greater swaths of personal privacy for no real gains.
a_imho 8y ago
I would not consider a perfect surveillance state a particularly safe place. Even without holding conflicting opinions.

Are the concepts; security and privacy mutually exclusive? Can we have secure and safe places to live without surveillance and invasion of privacy?

by gitgud 8y ago

Are the concepts; security and privacy mutually exclusive? Can we have secure and safe places to live without surveillance and invasion of privacy?

nxc18 8y ago

Yes, we can have security and privacy. People drastically over estimate the risks from things like terrorist attacks and high crime. Just think about the number of people and hugely vulnerable systems (even existing security is a joke - why not bomb a TSA line for example? Or accidentally carry a gun through, which happens all the time) and how rarely things go wrong. There's just no need for these over the top surveillance machines. Security doesn't stop motivated attackers anyway (see all terrorist attacks since 9/11). As far as everyday crime goes, I suspect a social safety net would take care of most of it. Most people aren't bad, but they will do bad things when they need help but don't get it. Once you get past that point, the cost of crime is probably less than the cost of trying to get perfect enforcement.

bArray 8y ago
Agreed. 1. Security is usually a knee jerk reaction to something that has happened and rarely correctly addresses the full problem scope, just one specific edge case that was experienced. This typically happens because people over weight the probability of such an event happening to them, due to the short nature of it and lack of control. In contrast to 9/11, you won't see nearly the funding or awareness of some of the largest killers, such as obesity, cancer, US-based violence, alcohol, opioids, etc. 2. Anybody correctly motivated can bypass said security, because it is never well thought out and doesn't cover all possible scenarios. With some time and some know-how, any individual could defeat TSA (or any other Countries) security. At the moment the only benefit is those who seek to terrorize Western society are usually desperate or ill funded. 3. Security tends to lure people into a false sense of security, so people in general are just as secure as they were, because they stop being aware of insecurities. There is a study showing that Countries with and without bicycle helmets have roughly the same number of deaths - the reason being that drivers recognize cyclists without helmets as being more vulnerable, hence going to greater lengths to avoid collision. To the point, all of these cameras are unlikely to make us more secure. What they will do on the other hand is lend themselves to abuse by government or corporate entities to any extent they think they can get away with.
- lambdadmitry 8y ago
  I have a counterexample to make: Skripal's case. AFAIK the police pieced together CCTV footage from multiple cameras, which allowed to track and identify the suspects. Given that the suspects are likely trained hitmen and the stakes were pretty high, I can only assume that the main reason most crimes don't get solved that way is the complexity of the search. ML is poised to change that. I'm not sure I'm for surveillance per se, but I do believe painting CCTV as useless and inefficient is wrong. It can be efficient in aiding high-level investigations if applied properly.
King-Aaron 8y ago
> Or accidentally carry a gun through I couldn't possibly imagine a scenario where you just forget that you're carrying a gun...
- xboxnolifes 8y ago
  Do you carry a gun daily?
  - King-Aaron 8y ago
    Why would one need to, unless you are police/military and thus required to for work?
    - stonogo 8y ago
      Nobody is required to demonstrate need to King-Aaron. Your opinions on the policy are not relevant to the practical concerns regarding its implementation. For the record, I agree with you, but this isn't really an appropriate place to soapbox about it.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      I started carrying a gun after I was attacked and the nearby police unit continued to write a parking ticket in the meanwhile.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  If you carry all the time (which most people who carry do, better than just leaving it in your car or something) it becomes natural like carrying your keys or wallet. If you're carrying your handgun in the bottom of a purse and rarely take it out it's even easier to forget.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - lambdadmitry 8y ago
siruncledrew 8y ago
I see it as security is about control, and privacy is about removal. Privacy and security aren't mutually exclusive, but they aren't exactly symbiotic either. It's fair to say an individual would want both security and privacy (for example, as with your home). Like many things, it's about finding the right balance. I'm sure if you look to the extremes of security and privacy you could find a bunch of crazy examples. The wildcard is the who. That is what throws off the scales, as the security/privacy relationship moves from a micro to a macro level, and suddenly a person's real autonomy comes into question.

mindslight 8y ago

Privacy is an integral part of security - one cannot have security without privacy! Witness the various locations (eg the hotel in the article) that treat a small encroachment on their privacy as a security threat! What has severely muddied the water is the term "security" has been bandied about by governments (and other large centralized entities) to refer to their own security, often at at the expense of our security. In order to sell the lie, we're encouraged to think that their security implies our security, which is obviously bullshit when you look at the positions their various security measures actually put us in - eg bunched up, undressed, split up, and disassembled in the airport groping line.

pm 8y ago
I hadn't really thought about the difference between my security and the Government's security, but the distinction you make is important.
- mindslight 8y ago
  This is very pronounced at eg a federal building. At an airport, there obviously is a decent part of one's security that corresponds to the government's security. The real problem, and why drawing the distinction is important even there, is that the government is choosing to do things that may or may not make government/group security slightly better because they/it cannot see a downside. When in reality it/they is hurting all the individuals' ability to take care of ourselves (eg my above description), even with respect to utterly banal threats like theft.

eksemplar 8y ago

Are we getting safety in return? We’re giving up virtually all our rights to privacy, but are we really any safer than we were in the 70’ies? Violent crime is certainly down in general, but is that because of increased surveillance? Terror and postal episodes are more frequent, so the surveillance certainly didn’t prevent that. Some surveillance is arguably helping prevent terror without us knowing, but we’re not even having a debate on what works and what doesn’t. Street cameras in particular seem to me to be a lot more about retaliation and crime solving rather than actual prevention. You still get murdered, but now society catches the killer.

draugadrotten 8y ago
> Street cameras in particular seem to me to be a lot more about retaliation and crime solving rather than actual prevention. You still get murdered, but now society catches the killer. Catching criminals is certainly a good thing to do. It may also prevent crime since criminals often commit more than one crime if left on the streets. Crime prevention is not the only thing that needs to happen. Compare with firefighters that will both need to prevent fires and put out the fires that happened anyway. There is also the perceived need for justice - "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done." Cameras will help in this context. Are cameras really a privacy problem in our GPS-enabled Wifi BLE cellphone tracking device infested world? A world where your face is tracked on every photo uploaded to Faceboo, and your Wifi and bluetooth MAC are logged in every AP you pass on the street and sent to advertisers and security agencies for storage and processing. Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI. We may end up with a Minority Report style society. Is the prevention of crime worth the trade-off? The only way to win is not to play.
- maze-le 8y ago
  GPS devices are not on themselves active senders, you can choose not to have Wifi or cellphones. You can opt-out to do face tracking on Facebook, its just your friends you have to worry about. MACs can be spoofed. In short, you can pretty much avoid or conceal all the activities you posted above, not a CCTV installation though. If it is near your home or work, you can definitely forget even trying to avoid it, except for reconstructive surgery. >> Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI. Well, I heard lots of claims to this, but never seen a reasonable POC. Most of these claims turn out to be mere geospatial statistics and analysis. Interesting to do, but it won't give you more information, than your local police precinct already knows (where are the 'troubled' neighbourhoods). Given time, more people (even bureucrats) will develop a bit of scrutiny against "AI solves everything" approaches. At least I hope they do...

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

I think obviously so. There's a very simple way to illustrate as such. In particular much of the crime that affects us and surveillance attempts to stop is not particularly new. It's mostly people just killing and hurting each other in ways that are centuries old. Surveillance of society as a whole has increased on a very sharp exponential scale, yet there's been no clear causal connection to a decline in crime. If surveillance was useful, let alone necessary, to a society being made as safe as it could we would have expected to see a proportional decline in crime with some reasonably decent evidence of a causal link. But that is not present, at all. So we're really just submitting to surveillance and sacrificing ever greater swaths of personal privacy for no real gains.

a_imho 8y ago

I would not consider a perfect surveillance state a particularly safe place. Even without holding conflicting opinions.