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All of this information can be derived from a dashcam, and they're ubiquitous today. And yes, in 10 years time there will be no such notion as 'private travel'
by roel_v 11y ago
All of this information can be derived from a dashcam, and they're ubiquitous today.
And yes, in 10 years time there will be no such notion as 'private travel'. Between your phone's GSM/CDMA, bluetooth and wifi signals and dashcams, security and traffic cameras, there will be dozens of parties who monitor every move any person makes outside of their home in urban or suburban areas (be it by car, foot or bike). With different forms of computer vision, that data is sorted and linked to other recordings of objects and there will be dozens of databases that have exact information on where everybody is, 95+% of the time.
One of my pet research projects (although I'm not making much progress in terms of actual work or publications) is on a system of tracking 'people' in a generalized form. It's basically a concept of 'strands' of information along different axises ('location', 'finance', 'internet', 'health' and a few others) which can be joined by an overarching matching algorithm infrastructure. Furthermore, each 'strand' has a 'source' and one can join datasets by deciding 'this source I know is reliable, take this as truth' or from several less trusted ones by using voting or bayesian inference. It's basically a formalization of 'doxing' - an overarching framework to work with personally identifying data from sources of varying degrees of trustworthiness.
I'm sure many people are working on something like this already, but in private and with the goal of using it against 'us' (for a broad definition of 'us'). The only way (ok, maybe not 'only' way, 'one of' the ways) to defend is to acknowledge that privacy is dead and to develop offensive capacities; much like the only last resort against tyranny is a well-armed populace.
- kriro 11y agoDashcams are illegal in Germany due to data privacy laws. Pretty much the excact scenario a Google car would face.
- roel_v 11y agoNo they're not. They've been denied as evidence a few times in court, and you can't publish images/video with recognizable people on them, but that's not a problem if all you want to do is monitor/track people.
- kriro 11y agoI stand corrected. Seems to be legal as long as you don't violate standard data privacy laws.
- icebraining 11y agoAll of this information can be derived from a dashcam, and they're ubiquitous today. They are? Where? According to the SF Chronicle, "hardly anyone in the U.S. uses dash cams except police and commercial truck and taxi drivers." Here in Europe, many countries don't even allow them (we have a different concept of "expectation of privacy" around here).
- roel_v 11y ago'Here' = in Europe. It's only illegal in Austria.
- icebraining 11y agoWhere in Europe? They certainly aren't here in Portugal nor in Spain, and I don't remember seeing them in Belgium, which I've visited recently. As for the legality, I wouldn't be so sure. Owning them is certainly legal, but filming the public street indiscriminately is usually considered against the Data Protection Directive, and I don't see why would dashcams be excluded.
- roel_v 11y agoAcross Europe. OK I guess 'ubiquitous' might be an overstatement, but I regularly see cars with dash cams in Belgium, The Netherlands, France and Germany, which is where I have driven the last few years. I can't find any Europe-wide actual sales data, but I don't see why there would be huge differences in other countries. Also, they're readily on sale in e.g. Spain, Portugal and Hungary (just 3 countries I checked). Which of course doesn't necessarily mean that they're being bought en mass, but which does give an indication.
- Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 11y agoThey might not be illegal here in Germany, but dash cam videos are regularly thrown out as evidence by courts. (And that's quite surprising, the bar is very high for that to happen in Germany. No fruit of the poisonous tree here.)