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Obama was promoting The Age of Surveillance Capitalism over seven years ago now. Industry insiders have known all this since 1999. Yet almost every single perso

• JohnFen 2mo ago
  I don't think people want this. I think people want the other benefits that those things bring, and increasingly feel that it's impossible to escape being surveilled anyway so do their best to ignore the whole issue. Being resigned to something is not the same as wanting that thing.
  • bamboozled 2mo ago
    Agree, you’re either a digital hermit or you’re part of the problem / system
    • forgetfreeman 2mo ago
      The really obnoxious part is that with the possible exception of maps all of the other "services" touted as vital parts of a digitally connected existence are so enshittified at this point that the original value proposition for all of them is absent. So we're left with this zombie rhetoric around being disconnected while "connecting" means you spend hours every day staring at bot content and ads.
      • therealdrag0 2mo ago
        You really spend hours a day staring at bots and ads?
        • esseph 2mo ago
          Most do.
        • forgetfreeman 2mo ago
          Fuck no, I stopped using my phone for anything besides maps and phone stuff before the pandemic. You peddling the idea that that isn't what all of the social platforms are these days?
      • harimau777 2mo ago
        I'm not sure that's really true. The two that come immediately to mind are Facebook or Discord for organizing with friends and language translation while traveling.
        • forgetfreeman 2mo ago
          I mean I might give it to you for Discord but Facebook is an easy win here. There's so much bot crap on Facebook Meta keeps getting dragged in front of congress over it.
    • therealdrag0 2mo ago
      It’s enticing to believe we coulda gone another way. Such as having a paid versions of these services. But free is just Soooo enticing. It hacks peoples brains.
      • lux-lux-lux 2mo ago
        That cellphone and car and television and most other things that spy on you were most certainly not free.
    • ColdStream 2mo ago
      Alas this is the structure of power. Either you have to do a total rejection of its benefits or you end up being sucked into the system as others practically force people into it for fear of being left behind.
  • cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
    Sometimes it’s also a pain to opt out. The outrageous prices of used (low telemetry) cars make them a poor value proposition, for example. Depending on the model, a used car can be a decade old with half of its lifetime miles on it already and the seller will still want $14k or something crazy like that. When you factor in the parts of its history that carfax doesn’t cover and the stream of repairs you’re likely to be saddled with, finding a 0%-2% financing deal on something new at ~$20-24k begins to look a lot more attractive.
  • margalabargala 2mo ago
    > I don't think people want this There was a comment made here a month or two ago, about someone from a SE Asia country (I forget which; maybe Bangladesh?) talking about how their government installed AI traffic enforcement cameras all over, and they went from one of the deadliest, most chaotic road systems in the world to Singapore-level rule-following in the space of just a couple months. As a result, the cameras have become quite popular because there's less traffic, travelling is easier and more predictable, and road deaths have plummeted. I imagine there are a number of similar situations in every country, where the deployment of AI surveillance has a sufficiently measurably positive impact that it becomes popular.
    • zahlman 2mo ago
      > their government installed AI traffic enforcement cameras all over What does the AI actually do? Identify specific cars and their drivers, or something? What actual enforcement actions were taken as a result, and against how many drivers before it stopped? One might wonder how much of the effect was placebo (i.e., people conforming simply due to the belief of being surveilled).
      • margalabargala 2mo ago
        > What does the AI actually do? Identify specific cars and their drivers, or something? Yes, exactly. It identifies cars and drivers who are committing traffic violations, and issues citations. I don't have the specific numbers you ask for, seeing as I can't even remember the country, but it's not difficult to imagine that if sufficiently many such cameras are installed that most moving violations on major roadways are caught and punished, then yes, people will come to (reasonably) believe that the cost of committing the violation is close to the price of the fine, rather than close to zero. It's one thing to blow by a pedestrian crossing the street, it's another to do so knowing you'll probably be charged $150 (or whatever) for having done it.
        • andai 2mo ago
          There was an article on the front page today titled something like "incentives are for schmucks", which I didn't like very much. In this case, incentives are for people who'd like to reduce traffic deaths.
  • ColdStream 2mo ago
    All successful negative things have a claim to virtue that they hide behind.
• lifestyleguru 2mo ago
  Almost every person installs security cameras hoping that one day they will "catch the criminal" unaware that the footage probably is used in all possible ways all the time, yet in case when the crime against them finally happens the footage might not be admitted as a proof.
  • bossyTeacher 2mo ago
    > yet in case when the crime against them finally happens the footage might not be admitted as a proof. Or there is simply not enough staff available to carry out the procedures needed to apprehend and charge the individual. Or a myriad of other things. People think law enforcement is easy.
    • lifestyleguru 2mo ago
      If a right or affluent person is a victim of crime the resources will be available, funny is that people who think they are outsmarting someone with their security cameras are rarely among them.
  • XorNot 2mo ago
    No I install security cameras as a deterrent measure to keep people at my door front measured in their interactions, particularly when it may just be my wife at home alone. They are mounted extremely obviously for this purpose. I greatly hope they never catch anyone doing anything.
    • lifestyleguru 2mo ago
      It's delightful to have paranoid neighbours who install cameras to enforce appropriate behavior in the neighbourhood. They always assure the camera doesn't record anything outside of their property and that they never check the recordings. Given the reason why they installed camera one can absolutely believe them. It's very calming.
• lotsofpulp 2mo ago
  I have seen enough instances of government authorities abusing their power (or even civilians using the courts against another civilian) to know that the best defense you have in a situation where you are the victim is to have your own recording. Easiest example is having your own dash cam (don’t know why all auto manufacturers don’t have Tesla style camera recordings, especially given that all new cars come with cameras anyway). Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference.
  • 986aignan 2mo ago
    > Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference. Maybe you could use a trusted timestamping service to stamp keyframes or stills from your video while you're recording? If the time of the recording is not in question, it would bound the kind of video editing people could plausibly claim that you could've done. It's not foolproof - if you have enough face data of the person you want to frame and you've been to the room where the conversation takes place, you could have made a fake video beforehand and spliced it into the conversation at the time of the recording. But that would at least take a lot of preparation and quite a bit of luck and timing to find a place in the conversation that's just long enough to copy your edited version in without arousing suspicion. For dashcam videos it would be difficult to merge your edit with existing traffic, etc...
  • XorNot 2mo ago
    > Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference There's a pretty substantial legal difference between the contested opinion of two people in court versus deliberately fabricating evidence to try and deceive a judge. Suddenly your civil matter is now a criminal one.
• NooneAtAll3 2mo ago
  the main solution is the same as with many other problems - education on what's wrong + making the right way as easy as possible it's easy to fall into complain hole, as that seems to fulfill the 1st part but 2nd part is as much or even more valuable
  • fn-mote 2mo ago
    > making the right way as easy as possible I wish I knew what you were talking about here. It seems like the easy way would be to forbid the collection of this data… but that is obviously not happening, so I need a different part 2.
    • NooneAtAll3 2mo ago
      consider what GP complained about - everyone carrying phones that data is collected from/by, and useing Meta products making easier the alternatives to phone tracking means promoting life outside phones, promoting cellphones/OSes that don't spy on you and explaining ways to minimize tracking (like disabling apps' access to the internet) making easier the alternatives to Meta means promoting competitors, promoting communication/image/information channels outside Meta, promoting life outside Meta products defeatism is even worse than grumbles - it fulfills neither of the goals
      • lux-lux-lux 2mo ago
        Offering ‘just don’t use modern communication’ as a solution when ‘ban data collection and retention’ is right there feels like a way to derail the conversation rather than an honest proposal.
• asmodeuslucifer 2mo ago
  By leveraging mobile network infrastructure – towers, spectrum, antennas, and some hardware – ISAC can detect, locate, and track objects (including passive ones with no electronics). This will enable a wide range of use cases such as UAV airspace monitoring, autonomous vehicle safety, industrial automation, and immersive AR experiences. Commercial deployment is expected alongside 6G rollouts in the 2030 timeframe https://www.ericsson.com/en/6g/isac https://www.ericsson.com/en/6g/isac
  • zhoBEENG 2mo ago
    Thank you, this deserved a link. I was being lazy.
  • jagaerglad 2mo ago
    I wonder how precise this will be? A flying object sounds reasonable but could it actually track say individual people walking on a street further down the line?
    • ColdStream 2mo ago
      I suspect while not individually, it will provide another data point that can be collaborated. One should never underestimate the power of combining data sets.
    • quietsignal 2mo ago
      Although this is a preprint it shares some discussion and ideas on how to mitigate potential privacy challenges of ISAC. https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1069 https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1069
    • pbmonster 2mo ago
      From the hardware side, extremely precise. Most discussions assume the sweet spot for ISAC is in "Frequency Range 3" (7 - 24 GHz, decent penetration and range, very good resolution), and in that range you can pin down objects with millimeter precision (both position and velocity). So, not only can you detect people walking down the street, you can detect them breathing when they stand perfectly still. This, of course, requires 6G base stations to be spaced pretty tightly (hundreds of meters apart) and to feature sophisticated phased array antennas. But both can be assumed in cities (they're planning to completely replace WIFI with 6G, so every current WIFI access point will become a 6G micro cell). Walking humans can be detected much easier, but radar SNR is funny, that only gives you 4x-6x the detection range. Software (signals processing) for all that will be... a lot of difficult work. Object separation/tracking, multipath reflections, clutter suppression, ect.
• neonstatic 2mo ago
  > For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus. My sad realization is that the Buddhists were right all along. The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance. What you are describing here is greed. People want to get useful things for free. This is the core of the problem. If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted. Instead, they want stuff for free and they choose to be willfully blind to the spying.
  • bilegeek 2mo ago
    > If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted. The spying may have started with free products, but it has metastasized into every aspect of life, free or not. It always does. > choose to be willfully blind to the spying Many don't. They also, by and large, don't have a choice. Data brokers, Flock cameras, WiFi-based radar[1]. You really can only do so much as an individual before the only escape is being a hermit in a cave. > The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance Which then gets distilled into the only drivers of corporations. Corporations that then destroy all moral options for individuals. [1]https://theweek.com/tech/wifi-signals-now-tracking-users-at-home https://theweek.com/tech/wifi-signals-now-tracking-users-at-...
  • ragequittah 2mo ago
    Funnily enough I've found for the most part the counter to all this spying also tends to be free products. Signal, pi-hole, ublock origin, graphene OS, Opnsense, Linux, etc. I have yet to find paid-for apps that are superior to the free ones in this regard. If I want an image editor I'm using Gimp, not Photoshop. Libreoffice is better than Microsoft Office if you don't want to be spied on. Most of the cost is learning about the alternatives and how to use them.
• tdeck 2mo ago
  It's hard for me to take this perspective seriously when you describe a cellphone as "entirely optional". Our society is structured around the assumption that you'll have not just a cellphone, but a smartphone. Without acknowledging that, how can we have a realistic discussion? Many businesses require you to use a smartphone in some way. Some government services also require one. Before cellphones, there were payphones everywhere for people to use when they needed to get into contact. Now there are hardly any left in most countries, so your ability to communicate would actually be worse than in the pre-cellphone era. Sure you could ask someone to use their phone, but if a stranger asked me that these days I would likely refuse.
  • zhoBEENG 2mo ago
    I do not carry a cellphone. I am employed and live in a major city. I never think about not having one. I know multiple other people, also employed, living both rurally and in cities, who do not carry cellphones. It is entirely optional.
    • sd9 2mo ago
      Counterpoint: I could not do my job without one. Clients expect support over WhatsApp.
      • zhoBEENG 2mo ago
        For sure, but you still do retain the option to leave it at work, unless you have some kind of 24/7 sales job. I do think privacy at work is not an option for most people.
      • esseph 2mo ago
        > Clients expect support over WhatsApp Seems very country / region specific?
    • anonzzzies 2mo ago
      Less and less though and you need to go through quite a bit of trouble sometimes already. Banking, gov apps, I know more and more companies you cannot enter nor clock in without smartphone etc. Sure, you can just resign, move country, try to find another bank; in the end you will run out of options as they are all moving there.
• ryu2k2 2mo ago
  People wouldn't want this if they were adequately educated.
  • vouwfietsman 2mo ago
    No, this is not the way to go. Consumers cannot possibly understand all potential ways in which they can be screwed over, and even if they could, it is entirely likely that there are no good choices because consumers will have to choose between e.g privacy violation or environmental destruction, or privacy violation of some degree vs another degree. This is why governments exist.
    • 9rx 2mo ago
      > Consumers cannot possibly understand all potential ways in which they can be screwed over In a democracy, consumers and the government are the exact same thing. Since they ostensibly do not understand all of the potential ways in which they can be screwed over, how is calling themselves government going to magically change that? Maybe you are imagining a dictatorship instead, where the government is only a subset of all consumers, but even then the dictators are still just feeble consumers themselves remaining within the subset of all consumers. Being a dictator doesn't make you omniscient; still only human like all the others. Government exists to clean up the outliers who are not behaving in line with the wishes of the consumers, but that cleanup can only occur when their undesirable behaviour is out there for all to plainly see. You cannot enforce what you don't recognize. > consumers will have to choose between e.g privacy violation or environmental destruction, or privacy violation of some degree vs another degree. Temporarily, perhaps, but in a functioning market one of those consumers feeling underserved will rise up to offer what's missing, eventually satisfying consumers again. However, ironically, consumers often consider that undesirable behaviour and use government to block that rising from occurring. For some reason consumers prefer to protect the market incumbents even when they claim to not like what the incumbents are doing.
      • vouwfietsman 2mo ago
        > In a democracy, consumers and the government are the exact same thing. This is a straw man. Consumers are represented by representatives who should have their interests in mind, e.g the consumer votes for someone who in turn votes for outcomes. This means that there can absolutely be a difference in knowledge between the government and its citizens, and so no, they are not the exact same thing. One group is trying to do their job of being a citizen, while the other group should be doing their job of representing the interests of the citizens that voted on them in whatever is relevant. One job clearly should not involve making sure your privacy isn't constantly and covertly violated by foreign nationals, and one job clearly should. Which is which is an exercise for the reader. > but in a functioning market Great! Where can I find me one of those?
• cyanydeez 2mo ago
  so obama was doing what in 2019? are you an LLM trained in 2023?
  • a3w 2mo ago
    I see no 2019. They changed it to 1999. So, six years before he was a senator. Could be, but seems implausible.
• dingocat 2mo ago
  > Most humans use Meta products regularly; also optional. For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus. This is a perfect example of the revealed-preference fallacy. The use of providers like Meta does not reflect a well-informed, freely chosen preference. Meta spends a ton of money to squash competition, remove viable alternatives, and to make their products addictive.
  • loeg 2mo ago
    > This is a perfect example of the revealed-preference fallacy. The fallacy here is that you think people should have difference preferences than they actually do. "People disagree with me? They must be ill-informed."
    • zbentley 2mo ago
      It is sometimes true that a large group of people hold a preference due to being misinformed, though. I don’t think a kneejerk assertion that GP is assuming their opinion is true and anyone who disagrees is an idiot is merited here. Meta has done a lot of shitty things to acquire and addict users, and is analogous to a massive regional monopoly in the U.S. Both of those indicate that users of Facebook might be less than rational (in the economic sense) about their choice of social media product.
• grvdrm 2mo ago
  Traversing life without a cell phone is a fun experiment. Here and there I forget mine and spend a day without the distraction - glorious way to spend time.
• cluckindan 2mo ago
  5G edge devices already have support for mmWave and beamforming. The ability to track the micromovements of a person’s trachea as they think in words (”internal monologue”) and reconstruct their thoughts from movement data reduces to a software problem: the hardware is there and the algorithms have been established in literature.
  • zhoBEENG 2mo ago
    That is very interesting. I wasn’t aware of their ability to act as acoustic sensors. It makes sense, but it’s not my field so I hadn’t thought about it. Any link to the trachea vibrations to reproduce inner monologue source? I think the major shift with the 6g standard is that general purpose sensing is now explicit to the design and intended use of the system.
• preg_match 2mo ago
  There are multiple things we need to acknowledge: - Consumers largely do not know these things. They are either not disclosed, or buried within a TOS that they cannot read. This is all done on purpose. The reason the TOS is obtuse, long, inaccurate, and updated weekly is so you won't read or understand it. - In most markets there is no choice. For smartphones you do not have a choice, both Apple and Google do extensive surveillance. If you want to bank, get a job, and all around be successful, you have to swallow the surveillance cost. If you want a new car, again, no choice. If you work a job, again, no choice on the computer or software. - It is not reasonable to expect consumers to do extensive research on everything they buy. Consumers have lives, children, jobs. They're not going to sit and spend 10+ hours researching every thing they buy, especially when most of that research is fruitless. - There are tradeoffs with everything. Yes we can use Linux, I sure do. But for other consumers, now they need to spend a lot of time understanding that. Yes we can use Graphene OS, but certain apps won't work.
• zahlman 2mo ago
  The outrage isn't feigned; it just comes from a minority of people. The masses aren't established to "want this"; they may just not care.
  • goatlover 2mo ago
    They care to the degree they become aware of it and it's potential misuses.
    • ColdStream 2mo ago
      This is something Richard Stallman has pointed out many times before. You need to tell people about these things, most of them simply do not know the extent of the issues but once they do know it, most are at least sympathetic to the cause.
• ramijames 2mo ago
  For anyone that didn't read that book, I can't recommend it highly enough.
• seventytwo 2mo ago
  What a wild, victim blaming take. Zero people want to be surveilled. They want the other benefits that come with technology and reluctantly accept, as a cost, some lower of privacy.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    The German CDU (basically their Republican party) is currently campaigning with the slogan "More mass surveillance!"
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• Escapade5160 2mo ago
  As someone who regularly attempts to give up a cell phone, it is not optional. A not insignificant number of things require it. It is the expectation society is now built around and therefore it is not an option. A car without telemetry is for the time being still optional. I take very good care of my old vehicles hoping I never need a new one.
• harimau777 2mo ago
  I don't think they are optional in today's world. There's a lot of places where it would be prohibitive to try to live without a smartphone and what does it even cost to remove telemetry from a car?
• dackdel 2mo ago
  hey i just want to be able to install graphene os on my iphone hardware. if only.
• anigbrowl 2mo ago
  6G standard for cell towers is planned to include ISAC (Integrated Sensing and Communication) Yikes, was not aware of this