All stores are already equipped with security cameras to prevent theft. When you're in someone's shop, you don't have an expectation of privacy. Amazon merely took it one more step and made it easier for you to checkout.
Yes and ignoring the fact that we're baking in surveillance to almost every aspect of our life is a problem society needs to address
In just a few short years, people who have never known life without the patriot act or the fear and anxiety of walking into an airport unmolested will be voting.
I agree with you in principal. But I'm far less hopeful that meaningful solutions will come. After all, it's not been them that has enacted these secret courts, fisa, patriot act, ndaa, weaponizing govt ( irs, fbi, dhs, ...), that's been their role models, us. All in the name of safety.
I am personally a huge fan of privacy as a right. But, like free speech, it's not necessarily practical or desirable for it to be an absolute right. There's a line to be drawn in the sand, and it's purely subjective.
The bottom line is, with the current way we draw the lines, there's practically no expectation of privacy in a store. You could be filmed. End of story. You can also be filmed at work, which I feel is a lot less comfortable, but still understandable.
I think a lot of the problem is coming down to people's fear of what this could be used for, but we can't just stop making new things because the systems will be abused and subverted by bad actors. We need regulations that adapt faster to these problems. Regulations are already lagging hard on internet privacy, AI, etc. and it will continue to be far behind if something isn't done.
There's no doubt that technology can be bad. Frankly, I don't think web browsers should execute arbitrary code for every page you visit. But for every new technology, there's usually just as many ways it could be used for evil as it is for good. Your privacy in the modern age could be dramatically improved if there was no such thing as a digital camera, but that doesn't mean a world without it would be better. Cameras were not required to have horrible corruption, bad actors, or evil corporations; all of those existed long before. Technology, on the other hand, illuminated these issues to the everyday person.
If there's anything I want society to be addressing, it's how we're letting companies collect untold amounts of private information, sell it, use it in algorithms to try to manipulate society, and very often, accidentally allowing their entire databases to leak. All in the name of targeted advertising? The free lunch of unfettered, irresponsible data collection needs to end. Strictly regulating how devices can transmit and collect data could help a lot with almost every case that was mentioned, including Amazon's new stores, self-driving cars, and targeted ads.
This is a kind of historical revisionism that I don't like that inflates the self-importance of the now merely because we don't know how things will turn out in the future.
During the founding of the United States, privacy was very much a central issue. In fact, the Third (third!) Amendment to the Constitution was to prevent the invasion of privacy by an armed soldier of the government literally being imposed on a family's residence, and Fourth Amendment protected a person's privacy against unreasonable search and seizure.
Yes computers are a novel twist, but to suppose no one back then "really understood what privacy means" I find to be a form of ignorance bordering on historical condescension.
Yes, it is a surveillance powered store. That’s what it literally is. Just like Alexa and Google Home are literal always-on listening devices in your home.
Edit: A bit more context in case someone misunderstands. New technology can improve one’s life exponentially. But it is simulataneously capable of exacting great harm.
And it isn’t necessarily agenda-driven by TechCrunch. As you said, they are ads/analytics based. So it follows that they will produce content that gets maximum eyeballs.
They're only a silent, over-the-net firmware update away from having always-on capabilities, though.