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Scale and cost are definitely neglected aspects of these decisions. I think this is a huge issue with respect to both enforcement of the law as well as surveil
by LeifCarrotson 2y ago
Scale and cost are definitely neglected aspects of these decisions.
I think this is a huge issue with respect to both enforcement of the law as well as surveillance and privacy. Sure, in the 1960s, a cop could sit on the side of the road with binoculars outside of town and watch for a half dozen blacklisted plate numbers associated with known criminal suspects. But today, automated license plate readers can do that 24/7/365 on every major road into and out of an entire city, tracking millions of people with an opex of just a couple kilowatts of compute.
When laws and norms written before computers say that certain activities are searches of private information and require warrants, while other activities are just observation of public information like your face and license plate, that implicitly granted a high probability of anonymity and privacy because of the cost of that observation and low value of the information relative to its cost. In the past couple of decades, those observations have become so much cheaper that the information can now be worth more than the cost of gathering it.
Amazon employee monitoring has a similar cost: Sure, human managers could discipline employees who were less productive; if someone has a problem with taking excessively frequent or long smoke breaks, lunch breaks, or bathroom breaks eventually an attentive manager will notice and talk to them about it, but it's not normal to track KPIs to the second. I suppose these aren't "key" performance indicators, they're barely relevant performance indicators, but when they're cheap to scale Amazon can monitor them.
Economics, not regulations, guaranteed your privacy and freedom: it was somewhere between irrational and impossible to employ an army of human observers to do what computers now do cheaply and easily. When that economic landscape changed, we should have made those regulations concrete.