> If the apparatus of total surveillance that we have described here were deliberate, centralized, and explicit, a Big Brother machine toggling between cameras,

> If the apparatus of total surveillance that we have described here were deliberate, centralized, and explicit, a Big Brother machine toggling between cameras, it would demand revolt, and we could conceive of a life outside the totalitarian microscope. Really not sure how to turn this into actionable legislation, but the fundamental problem isn't the data collection. Rather, it's the massive reduction in cost in organizing and querying the data. The laws and norms were set up when the only way to tell if someone had walked down a specific street was to pay someone to watch or to knock on doors and talk to people with faulty memories. Cameras couldn't store years of footage, databases weren't invented yet, and machine facial recognition was pure fantasy. Like, in the 19th century it'd be absolutely ridiculous to insist that you have a right of "privacy" that means that people can't recognize you when you're walking around in public. And for a long time, pointing a camera outside your window was basically just like looking out it, and it got treated that way. A database of camera footage looking out at a majority of public streets, recording 24/7 with 5 years of back footage, indexed by time + location + facial recognition match, on the other hand, exploits people's privacy in a way that is far more than the sum of parts. Essentially, my view is that some databases are repugnant to public policy and should be illegal to build and to query. GDPR has well shown the problems involved in legislating this, and there's a massive free speech argument that torpedoes the whole thing anyhow, so I'm pessimistic about actually fixing things.