8 ms·
Dressing for the Surveillance Age
- oblib 7y agoThis is a great bit of journalism. Best layman's accessible article I've read on this subject.
- zests 7y agoI want some anti-facial recognition clothing just for the aesthetic. It fits a certain futuristic functional clothing vibe.
- badrabbit 7y agoI hope wearing capes amd cloaks becomes a thing to hide gait. I thought 2020 would be the year we all wear capes to work!
- ColanR 7y agoOnly happens if the importance of privacy becomes as obvious as the style change.
- mdorazio 7y agoI'd prefer if anti-CV makeup and accessories became more popular as a style. Clothing that covers your face (ex. a ski mask) tends to make people pretty uncomfortable, but makeup and small add-ons have a better chance of appearing trendy while serving the same function.
- veggieburglar 7y agoIf you like this, check out Neal Stephenson’s newest book “Fall, or Dodge in Hell” for an interesting exploration. While you’re at it, it’s probably worth it to read “Reamde” first as they’re in the same storyline.
- davidgould 7y agoSave yourself 17000 hours of tedium and don't read "Fall, or Dodge in Hell". I'm a Stephenson fan from way back and have read everything, and loved a lot of it, but Fall is lukewarm garbage. Seven Eves and D.O.D.O. were not great, but Fall is really 1400ish pages of everything wrong with Stephenson's writing. Dude seriously needs an editor. The first 300 or so pages of Fall are not terrible and there are some interesting ideas and characters -- who are all abandoned in favor of several hundred pages of retelling the biblical Genesis legend from first principles and a new cast of characters who are actually processes in a computer simulated universe who are derived from the original characters but have total amnesia including about basics like identity, body form and function, and language. If a hundred pages of the interior monologue of a head injury patient in a coma sounds like a good time, this may be for you. For instance, it takes a couple dozen pages for the new characters to discover shit. I mean, literally, discover shit. First they percieve that they want to eat, then they discover how to eat, then they tell us how great it felt to eat, then they sleep and in the morning they discover they have to shit. Then they tell us shit smells bad. Once the new universe is up and running and all the characters have rediscovered everything so they can talk and walk and wipe themselves, they organize a society which is just as bad as anything they left behind. We suffer along with them. This takes hundreds of pages. And then ... oh yes ... we jump way into the future with all new characters and new settings for the final battle against the final boss. I can't even. Stephenson has never been good at endings, but this new method of just wandering away and then gluing another vaguely related book onto the back a few times is not working for him.
- ackbar03 7y agoThat's a shame, I quite liked reamde and was excited there was a followup
- veggieburglar 7y agoYou could read it yourself and form an opinion. I quite liked it. I know lots of people disparage Stephenson for going on tangents, but I read quickly and don’t mind them. Anathem and the Baroque Cycle are my favorites.
- tinkthank 7y agoI imagine this could be neat way to troll Amazon's walk-out stores. I'm not entirely sure how those stores work, but I'm guessing they keep track of you with cameras to tie you to a credit card. Someone enters the store, registers their card, but then just disappears. Suddenly stuff is disappearing off the shelves, attributable to no customer. Would the system just let them walk in its confusion or sound an alarm?
- dTal 7y agoI imagine the products themselves must be tagged in some way, or you could trick the system with sleight of hand (I don't think it's visually tracking what goes into your basket). In which case, I imagine there would be an alarm if a product floats out of the door, accompanied by a mysterious stranger while another shopper supposedly in the store is missing. Or rather than an alarm, they would probably just sort it out later and charge your card.
- TheGallopedHigh 7y agoI believe it is vision tracking that does the monitoring.
- neonate 7y agohttps://archive.md/WdjJR https://archive.md/WdjJR
- j88439h84 7y agoI wonder why they give an abstract drawing instead of a photo of the actual clothes.
- moneytide1 7y agoWe'll be seeing a generation of citizens that have been raised under these conditions and will understand how to behave in order to please the "eye of Sauron" which is essentially an automated tensor processing pipeline that "flags" surveilled instances for review by a politically elevated human, or digests quarterly citizen economic behavior and determines anomalies in advance (Minority Report) which subsequently will allocate Facebook-esque content review labor.
- L_226 7y agoJust like the Fremen, but instead of sandworms it's ML powered surveillance apparatus.
- jacobush 7y agoProbably not Facebook-esque, but actually Facebook.
- AdmiralGinge 7y agoI know it's probably old news to most of you, but Facebook's content policies are genuinely moronic. I ran a confessions page when I was a student and some of the moderation decisions were breathtakingly idiotic. They'll let racists, homophobes, anti-vaxxers (a genuine threat to public health!) and all kinds of terrible people off scot-free but an off colour joke specific to a tiny university gets the page removed and the owners are forced to build up their userbase again.
- kuu 7y agoI wonder why the article lacks of pictures
- GoblinSlayer 7y agohttps://blog.dnsadblock.com/static/7bf5b62e92323f8970bfb6c87dc65398/d2391/arvin-keynes-v4mnfkdmix4-unsplash.jpg https://blog.dnsadblock.com/static/7bf5b62e92323f8970bfb6c87...
- 0xBA5ED 7y agoAt this point, there are enough systems working in parallel that fooling one of them, some of the time, doesn't seem worth the effort.
- Theodores 7y agoIf evading the cameras and their trackers really matters to you then you just need to wear a high visibility jacket and ride a bicycle at all of ten miles an hour. They will never catch you! I jest, but, as soon as you are out of a motor car, there is no number plate which is like a database entry without a primary key as far as the police are concerned. They can't do much without the driver information stuff. On the bike you can wear a helmet with a cap, reflective glasses, a breathing mask, gloves and much else that disguises your identity, without anyone being suspicious. You are just a cyclist, not likely to be the criminal. The bicycle also gives options for cycling along canal towpaths and many other urban routes that are just not readily viewable by CCTV. You can also stop to collect your breath whenever you want, which can be suspicious on other modes of transport. Imaginably in places like Copenhagen and Amsterdam there will be law enforcement able to nab cyclists, but, in places like the UK and the US where cycling is not how it works, the safest way to not be tracked is to wear high visibility clothing and to ride a bike at 10 mph. They will never catch you that way!
- DoreenMichele 7y agoWhen you come from a small town, as I do, where everyone knows your face, public anonymity—the ability to disappear into a crowd—is one of the great pleasures of city living. The thing is that most of humankind lived in small tribes or villages, everyone knew everyone's business and privacy practically didn't exist. The anonymity of city life is relatively recent and has often been used to further social behavior that wasn't acceptable, like secret affairs or criminal activity. When everyone you know lives in a really small area, a lot of stuff is apparent by inference and can't really be hidden. This ends up de facto reining in behavior without anyone necessarily telling you to stop. To be clear, I'm not trying to justify a surveillance state. I'm just commenting on the irony of people acting like anonymity is some long-standing norm in human society. It's really not. It's relatively new and relatively uncommon.
- blackandblue 7y agobut... that excerpt you quoted is saying what you wrote? author went from small town where everybody knows you and everything to the (supposedly big?) city where you can merge in. and author finds it great. most people are decrying mass surveillance. not small scale overseeing. many people i know are not concerned that neighbors are looking after each other...
- user81048 7y ago> people acting like anonymity is some long-standing norm in human society. It's really not. It's relatively new and relatively uncommon. It's not a "long-standing norm", it's a fundamental right, as most, if not all, fundamental rights we have today. > When everyone you know lives in a really small area Even in small towns and villages people had privacy inside their houses, farms etc. But from now on, it's constant surveillance everywhere, all the time.
- 0xBA5ED 7y ago>It's not a "long-standing norm", it's a fundamental right In the U.S., anonymity is a "fundamental right" only in certain circumstances and it differs by state. It's not a blanket right. >Even in small towns and villages people had privacy inside their houses, farms etc. This is still a thing if you choose it.
- fdghfg 7y agocashless society and soylent green coming soon. one step at a time.
- deegles 7y agoWays I can think of to identify if someone is/has been in a crowd (in rough order of difficulty): 1. Cell phone data from bluetooth [1] 2. Cell phone data from your carrier [2] 3. Cell phone data from Google/Apple/etc [3] 4. Face recognition with automated methods 5. Face recognition with human super recognizers [4] 6. Gait recognition 7. Using WIFI to detect body shape [5] 8. Using lasers to detect your heartbeat [6] So once technology gets advanced enough, you'll have to wear something and take measures to protect yourself from potentially all of the above if you want true privacy... which would ironically immediately single you out :) [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluetooth-wireless-tracking-privacy.htm https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluet... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/6/18214667/att-t-mobile-sprint-location-tracking-data-bounty-hunters https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/6/18214667/att-t-mobile-spri... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/us/data-privacy-fbi.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/us/data-privacy-fbi.html [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_recogniser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_recogniser [5] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/using_wi-fi_sig.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/using_wi-fi_s... [6] https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/27/the-pentagon-has-a-laser-that-identifies-people-by-their-heartbe/ https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/27/the-pentagon-has-a-laser...
- raxxorrax 7y agoLasers can be reflected. Best target the cameras, because their photosensitive chips are actually quite sensitive and you would have solved two problems at once. I don't think that technological feasibility implies broad use. That would be pretty terrible with a lot of technologies. I could permanetely X-ray your house for example. Aside from advances in image recognition which I think largely is due to the available data, the main factor for camera surveillance will become a problem is that high quality cameras have become that cheap.
- Miltnoid 7y agoI find it incredibly ironic that the New Yorker doesn't let me read this article in incognito mode.
- addHocker 7y agoWhat actually helps prevent this is poisoning the surveilance device population landscape with not just noise, but a accurate simulation of what happens. Install a dozen cameras which tell lies from a choreographed simulation.. Add a thousand simulated cellphones, loging from cell to cell.. If you destroy the ground truth, you destroy surveilability.
- aidman 7y agoThe article links Adversarial Fashion [0] with some nice looking and functional designs. Is there a similar service for customizing them? I'd gladly pay a premium if I could use custom plates instead of the constant ones from the artist [0]: https://adversarialfashion.com/ https://adversarialfashion.com/