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The motive is precisely because it is less lucrative/useful, and surveillance costs money. The 900 number thing is only lucrative because anyone, even a small

The motive is precisely because it is less lucrative/useful, and surveillance costs money. The 900 number thing is only lucrative because anyone, even a small child, with physical access to a phone has enough agency to bill arbitrary things against that phone number. The dialer (or their guardian) can be forced to repay that bill in some cases, but society obviously lets them incur it. The way you would delegate surveillance of yourself to another party is to give everything you own to that party in exchange for the ability to live on their property and never interact with the rest of society. Giving up all agency does not look like creating some legal fictions, it looks like withdrawal from society. I'm not sure I agree with grandparent's assessment, but I don't think these are the strongest arguments against it. I think a better argument would appeal to incidental surveillance: my car has no agency, and nobody is interested in tracking the car for its own sake, but it is surveilled as a way to watch me.

mindslight 5y ago
> Giving up all agency does not look like creating some legal fictions, it looks like withdrawal from society I don't disagree and I've been on both sides of such agent relationships. But I feel like we are ultimately bickering over framing, due to the original article's terrible framing that fails to address underlying causes. It's not so much that I disagree with the original comment as that I don't think it fosters actionable conclusions. Performing mass surveillance doesn't cost that much, demonstrated by the popularity of collecting "big data" - ie "we'll find a use for this some day". Rather than saying that surveillers decide to only collect data on the subjects with agency (because doing so to everyone would cost too much), it's more productive to talk in terms of surveillees taking steps to prevent the surveillers from having access to that data in the first place. Like sure if I turn my phone off to prevent my location from being tracked, the phone company could technically dispatch a costly private investigator to follow me around until I turned it back on. But that's outside the scope of what we're practically discussing.

mindslight 5y ago

> Giving up all agency does not look like creating some legal fictions, it looks like withdrawal from society I don't disagree and I've been on both sides of such agent relationships. But I feel like we are ultimately bickering over framing, due to the original article's terrible framing that fails to address underlying causes. It's not so much that I disagree with the original comment as that I don't think it fosters actionable conclusions. Performing mass surveillance doesn't cost that much, demonstrated by the popularity of collecting "big data" - ie "we'll find a use for this some day". Rather than saying that surveillers decide to only collect data on the subjects with agency (because doing so to everyone would cost too much), it's more productive to talk in terms of surveillees taking steps to prevent the surveillers from having access to that data in the first place. Like sure if I turn my phone off to prevent my location from being tracked, the phone company could technically dispatch a costly private investigator to follow me around until I turned it back on. But that's outside the scope of what we're practically discussing.