4 ms·

Cameras with facial and gait recognition everywhere you go RFID/NFC broadcasters/scanners all over the place Credit cards that track your spending and movemen

Cameras with facial and gait recognition everywhere you go RFID/NFC broadcasters/scanners all over the place Credit cards that track your spending and movement Contact tracing Daily massive data breaches Social media manipulation Every modern car has built in GPS tracking that is uploaded to the dealer and stored Three letter agency programs to capture as much metadata and content as possible Hash bashed copyright scanning enforcement on your local devices Oh and the stuff you create on these services? They own it. Everything they "sell" to you? You're renting it. -- Sorry for the rant but the reality is that this is already a dystopian nightmare and there is no way to go back.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
leotravis10 5y ago
> Sorry for the rant but the reality is that this is already a dystopian nightmare and there is no way to go back. No need to be sorry since it's the way the world is headed now. This will soon be the norm. I won't be surprised in 5-10 years those you mentioned will be even more expanded and current laws can't keep up. There's even recent talk of a national ID system in the US for instance which would expand it even more. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/voting-rights-national-id-card/619772/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/voting-...
tempfs 5y ago
And ofcourse the government while it can't collect all that information on its own can sure as hell buy or rubber-stamp warrant their way into these datasets at will in order to side step the 4th amendment all together. If people are generally willing to accept the axiom that information is power, I am continually baffled as to why they can't understand how reckless it is to allow all of this capture, sale and sharing of the intimate details of their lives. How can we possibly defend ourselves or have any control over our lives while giving this much power to profit motive corporations? It is just pure madness.
donmcronald 5y ago
Don't forget "AI" that's just the pattern matching ability of a 2 year old enforcing security policies.
treis 5y ago
These are all just tools that can just as easily be used for good as evil. You choose to look at the negative possibilities while ignoring the positive ones. As an example, if we're all tracked and recorded in public that will pretty much end non-domestic crime. Or at least guarantee that anyone that commits a crime will be caught and punished. AFAICT there's little to no evidence to tie advancing technology to authoritarianism or otherwise diminished civil liberties. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and any number of others through out history have created repressive regimes without modern technology. And in the West we are a freer and more just society than we ever have been.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  > As an example, if we're all tracked and recorded in public that will pretty much end non-domestic crime. Or at least guarantee that anyone that commits a crime will be caught and punished. Where's the evidence for this? As pointed out above, we're already being tracked, and it doesn't seem to have stopped all crime, or even cut it down in a noticeable way. As for being recorded in public, that hasn't even even stopped 7-11s from being robbed, let alone preventing or resolving all crime everywhere. > AFAICT there's little to no evidence to tie advancing technology to authoritarianism or otherwise diminished civil liberties. Do you remember how there was a time when having a scan of your naked body examined by a stranger at the airport was considered at least mildly invasive? That was just a few years ago. Now, we're used to it. That's a small example of how fast humans adapt to preserve their sense that everything is fine. The amount of surveillance we consider normal today would have seemed oppressive not long ago. > Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and any number of others through out history have created repressive regimes without modern technology. It's true that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did not use GPS tracking against their citizens, because (being dead) they didn't have the option to use it. But electronic surveillance has been the tool of every country's secret police dating back to the invention of the telephone, so I'm not sure what you mean.
  - treis 5y ago
    >Where's the evidence for this? As pointed out above, we're already being tracked, and it doesn't seem to have stopped all crime, or even cut it down in a noticeable way. As for being recorded in public, that hasn't even even stopped 7-11s from being robbed, let alone preventing or resolving all crime everywhere. All of the people in jail that were caught by surveillance that can't commit crimes is a good piece of evidence. Otherwise, it's hard to prove anything about crime because we can't do double blind experiments in the real world. Either way, we are talking about theoretical perfect surveillance. Every crime would be caught on 4k HD and the criminals location tracked. Hard to imagine how you'd get away with a crime in that scenario. >Do you remember how there was a time when having a scan of your naked body examined by a stranger at the airport was considered at least mildly invasive? That was just a few years ago. Now, we're used to it. That's a small example of how fast humans adapt to preserve their sense that everything is fine. The amount of surveillance we consider normal today would have seemed oppressive not long ago. TSA seems perfectly happy to fondle your junk instead. So whatever we've lost there isn't due to technology. If anything technology helps because it gives us a choice between naked body examination and junk fondling. >It's true that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did not use GPS tracking against their citizens, because (being dead) they didn't have the option to use it. But electronic surveillance has been the tool of every country's secret police dating back to the invention of the telephone, so I'm not sure what you mean. The point is that repression and technology are orthogonal issues. You can have brutally repressive regimes with no modern technology. And, as I said before, the trend seems to be away from repressive regimes so there's little reason to think technology contributes to their existence.
SevenSigs 5y ago
> Sorry for the rant don't be sorry, it makes me sad that we don't see more rants like that ;) Also, The Gov. don't need warrants for stuff stored in the cloud if it is 6 months or older. They just have so many ways to get all of your data.
dredmorbius 5y ago
"No way to go back" is surrender. Legislation, regulation, and litigation seem the most viable paths forward. Civil disobediance, hacking, and sabotage might also play a role. I'm leaning increasingly toward a scorched-earth approach.
mullingitover 5y ago
This sure sounds scary, but it's just a gish gallop of scary phrases. It's a shade away from "there are microchips in the vaccines!" A bare sliver of the crimes committed online are ever even investigated (and that's crimes, not politically subversive speech). You'd think that if there was some functioning, pervasive state surveillance apparatus there would be swift punishment of the plethora of incompetent criminal schemes that people perpetrate online, but there just isn't. > Contact tracing If only that was even happening. South Korea did it, and they made people who were exposed to covid stay home and check in regularly with an app. If we'd had the sense to do that here we probably would've saved tens of thousands of lives.
- harperlee 5y ago
  It is an interesting argument, and indeed the pandemic has shown a lot of weak points in policy enforcement and government’s effectiveness, but all this could be selectively enforced upon you, and these are things that are quite easier to enable than to disable, so I think that prudency is warranted.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  It is still a highly human resource intensive process to investigate and punish crimes using that surveillance. It doesn't get used to identify who broke into your car and stole stuff out of it, because they just don't really care about that. They do care about everyone who was at the demonstrations, which affects the police directly and which threatens the role that the police have in protecting private capital. If you understand what their role and focus is then the lack of enforcement on petty crimes isn't a counterexample at all.
  - mullingitover 5y ago
    > They do care about everyone who was at the demonstrations, which affects the police directly and which threatens the role that the police have in protecting private capital. Who are the regular people asserting their first amendment rights who are being hunted down? I haven't seen that. I have seen a bunch of insurrectionists having these tools used on them, and that's frankly a laudable use of these surveillance tools. If you're using a peaceful protest as a cover for looting, honestly I enthusiastically encourage that 'they' hunt you down, because you're just a vanilla criminal at that point. That's an ideal outcome for the justice system.
loteck 5y ago
Cameras with facial and gait recognition everywhere you go Some cities have brought these technologies under oversight. The technologies themselves aren't inherently harmful, their misuse is. Credit cards that track your spending and movement Totally optional Contact tracing What is this even doing here Daily massive data breaches Laws are changing to address this from both the supply and demand side. Every modern car has built in GPS tracking that is uploaded to the dealer and stored Self-enrolled surveillance is indeed a huge societal problem, but cars aren't on the top of the list. We are all addicted to the GPS tracker in our pocket. Three letter agency programs to capture as much metadata and content as possible Encryption is on the rise. Hash bashed copyright scanning enforcement on your local devices Not yet, and maybe not ever if we don't stand for it. this is already a dystopian nightmare and there is no way to go back. It's not just that you're wrong about this, what grinds my gears is fatalist comments like this that are actively selling fatalism. Don't listen to this devil on your shoulder. The reality of the future is decided by action now.
rangerdan 5y ago
Wear a wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses, face mask and put a pebble in your shoe. Use RFID blocking wallets. Pay with cash where feasible. Don't run google/ios services on your phone. Freeze your credit reports and check them annually. Stop visiting social media. Disable ontrac/onstar crap in your legally owned cars. Use Tor Browser. -- Privacy is not difficult, it just takes a bit of effort and discipline.
- salawat 5y ago
  Difficult: something that takes effort and discipline to do successfully. Sounds to me like privacy is difficult.
  - Threeve303 5y ago
    Yeah, fair point...
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  "So, for me, it all comes down to state power against the peoples' ability to meaningfully oppose that power. And I'm sitting there, uh, every day getting paid to design methods to amplify that state power. And I'm realizing that if, you know, the policy switches that are the only things that restrain these states, were changed, there... you couldn't meaningfully oppose these. I mean you would have to be the most incredibly sophisticated, technical actor in existence. I mean, I'm not sure there's anybody, no matter how gifted you are, who could oppose all of the offices and all the bright people, even all the mediocre people out there with all of their tools and all their capabilities." - Edward Snowden

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

leotravis10 5y ago

> Sorry for the rant but the reality is that this is already a dystopian nightmare and there is no way to go back. No need to be sorry since it's the way the world is headed now. This will soon be the norm. I won't be surprised in 5-10 years those you mentioned will be even more expanded and current laws can't keep up. There's even recent talk of a national ID system in the US for instance which would expand it even more. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/voting-rights-national-id-card/619772/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/voting-...

tempfs 5y ago

And ofcourse the government while it can't collect all that information on its own can sure as hell buy or rubber-stamp warrant their way into these datasets at will in order to side step the 4th amendment all together. If people are generally willing to accept the axiom that information is power, I am continually baffled as to why they can't understand how reckless it is to allow all of this capture, sale and sharing of the intimate details of their lives. How can we possibly defend ourselves or have any control over our lives while giving this much power to profit motive corporations? It is just pure madness.

donmcronald 5y ago

Don't forget "AI" that's just the pattern matching ability of a 2 year old enforcing security policies.

treis 5y ago

These are all just tools that can just as easily be used for good as evil. You choose to look at the negative possibilities while ignoring the positive ones. As an example, if we're all tracked and recorded in public that will pretty much end non-domestic crime. Or at least guarantee that anyone that commits a crime will be caught and punished. AFAICT there's little to no evidence to tie advancing technology to authoritarianism or otherwise diminished civil liberties. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and any number of others through out history have created repressive regimes without modern technology. And in the West we are a freer and more just society than we ever have been.

karaterobot 5y ago
> As an example, if we're all tracked and recorded in public that will pretty much end non-domestic crime. Or at least guarantee that anyone that commits a crime will be caught and punished. Where's the evidence for this? As pointed out above, we're already being tracked, and it doesn't seem to have stopped all crime, or even cut it down in a noticeable way. As for being recorded in public, that hasn't even even stopped 7-11s from being robbed, let alone preventing or resolving all crime everywhere. > AFAICT there's little to no evidence to tie advancing technology to authoritarianism or otherwise diminished civil liberties. Do you remember how there was a time when having a scan of your naked body examined by a stranger at the airport was considered at least mildly invasive? That was just a few years ago. Now, we're used to it. That's a small example of how fast humans adapt to preserve their sense that everything is fine. The amount of surveillance we consider normal today would have seemed oppressive not long ago. > Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and any number of others through out history have created repressive regimes without modern technology. It's true that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did not use GPS tracking against their citizens, because (being dead) they didn't have the option to use it. But electronic surveillance has been the tool of every country's secret police dating back to the invention of the telephone, so I'm not sure what you mean.
- treis 5y ago
  >Where's the evidence for this? As pointed out above, we're already being tracked, and it doesn't seem to have stopped all crime, or even cut it down in a noticeable way. As for being recorded in public, that hasn't even even stopped 7-11s from being robbed, let alone preventing or resolving all crime everywhere. All of the people in jail that were caught by surveillance that can't commit crimes is a good piece of evidence. Otherwise, it's hard to prove anything about crime because we can't do double blind experiments in the real world. Either way, we are talking about theoretical perfect surveillance. Every crime would be caught on 4k HD and the criminals location tracked. Hard to imagine how you'd get away with a crime in that scenario. >Do you remember how there was a time when having a scan of your naked body examined by a stranger at the airport was considered at least mildly invasive? That was just a few years ago. Now, we're used to it. That's a small example of how fast humans adapt to preserve their sense that everything is fine. The amount of surveillance we consider normal today would have seemed oppressive not long ago. TSA seems perfectly happy to fondle your junk instead. So whatever we've lost there isn't due to technology. If anything technology helps because it gives us a choice between naked body examination and junk fondling. >It's true that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did not use GPS tracking against their citizens, because (being dead) they didn't have the option to use it. But electronic surveillance has been the tool of every country's secret police dating back to the invention of the telephone, so I'm not sure what you mean. The point is that repression and technology are orthogonal issues. You can have brutally repressive regimes with no modern technology. And, as I said before, the trend seems to be away from repressive regimes so there's little reason to think technology contributes to their existence.

SevenSigs 5y ago

> Sorry for the rant don't be sorry, it makes me sad that we don't see more rants like that ;) Also, The Gov. don't need warrants for stuff stored in the cloud if it is 6 months or older. They just have so many ways to get all of your data.

dredmorbius 5y ago

"No way to go back" is surrender. Legislation, regulation, and litigation seem the most viable paths forward. Civil disobediance, hacking, and sabotage might also play a role. I'm leaning increasingly toward a scorched-earth approach.

mullingitover 5y ago

This sure sounds scary, but it's just a gish gallop of scary phrases. It's a shade away from "there are microchips in the vaccines!" A bare sliver of the crimes committed online are ever even investigated (and that's crimes, not politically subversive speech). You'd think that if there was some functioning, pervasive state surveillance apparatus there would be swift punishment of the plethora of incompetent criminal schemes that people perpetrate online, but there just isn't. > Contact tracing If only that was even happening. South Korea did it, and they made people who were exposed to covid stay home and check in regularly with an app. If we'd had the sense to do that here we probably would've saved tens of thousands of lives.

harperlee 5y ago
It is an interesting argument, and indeed the pandemic has shown a lot of weak points in policy enforcement and government’s effectiveness, but all this could be selectively enforced upon you, and these are things that are quite easier to enable than to disable, so I think that prudency is warranted.
lamontcg 5y ago
It is still a highly human resource intensive process to investigate and punish crimes using that surveillance. It doesn't get used to identify who broke into your car and stole stuff out of it, because they just don't really care about that. They do care about everyone who was at the demonstrations, which affects the police directly and which threatens the role that the police have in protecting private capital. If you understand what their role and focus is then the lack of enforcement on petty crimes isn't a counterexample at all.
- mullingitover 5y ago
  > They do care about everyone who was at the demonstrations, which affects the police directly and which threatens the role that the police have in protecting private capital. Who are the regular people asserting their first amendment rights who are being hunted down? I haven't seen that. I have seen a bunch of insurrectionists having these tools used on them, and that's frankly a laudable use of these surveillance tools. If you're using a peaceful protest as a cover for looting, honestly I enthusiastically encourage that 'they' hunt you down, because you're just a vanilla criminal at that point. That's an ideal outcome for the justice system.

loteck 5y ago

Cameras with facial and gait recognition everywhere you go Some cities have brought these technologies under oversight. The technologies themselves aren't inherently harmful, their misuse is. Credit cards that track your spending and movement Totally optional Contact tracing What is this even doing here Daily massive data breaches Laws are changing to address this from both the supply and demand side. Every modern car has built in GPS tracking that is uploaded to the dealer and stored Self-enrolled surveillance is indeed a huge societal problem, but cars aren't on the top of the list. We are all addicted to the GPS tracker in our pocket. Three letter agency programs to capture as much metadata and content as possible Encryption is on the rise. Hash bashed copyright scanning enforcement on your local devices Not yet, and maybe not ever if we don't stand for it. this is already a dystopian nightmare and there is no way to go back. It's not just that you're wrong about this, what grinds my gears is fatalist comments like this that are actively selling fatalism. Don't listen to this devil on your shoulder. The reality of the future is decided by action now.

rangerdan 5y ago

Wear a wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses, face mask and put a pebble in your shoe. Use RFID blocking wallets. Pay with cash where feasible. Don't run google/ios services on your phone. Freeze your credit reports and check them annually. Stop visiting social media. Disable ontrac/onstar crap in your legally owned cars. Use Tor Browser. -- Privacy is not difficult, it just takes a bit of effort and discipline.

salawat 5y ago
Difficult: something that takes effort and discipline to do successfully. Sounds to me like privacy is difficult.
- Threeve303 5y ago
  Yeah, fair point...
brokenmachine 5y ago
"So, for me, it all comes down to state power against the peoples' ability to meaningfully oppose that power. And I'm sitting there, uh, every day getting paid to design methods to amplify that state power. And I'm realizing that if, you know, the policy switches that are the only things that restrain these states, were changed, there... you couldn't meaningfully oppose these. I mean you would have to be the most incredibly sophisticated, technical actor in existence. I mean, I'm not sure there's anybody, no matter how gifted you are, who could oppose all of the offices and all the bright people, even all the mediocre people out there with all of their tools and all their capabilities." - Edward Snowden