Not “inverse surveillance” as stated, but just surveillance in the hands of people. At mass deployment, mass surveillance accessible by anyone. Since when does that protect anyone’s privacy?
It answers the question, who's watching the watchers? Everyone. And the network itself is paying them to do it.
> ...extremely worrying.
It seems to me this forces people into Nash Equilibrium. Say I now know everything about you and vice-versa and anything we do to each other would be broadcast around the world for all to see and irrevocably encrypted in a worldwide database. And since "...all nodes are anonymous, if it's computationally improbable to be sure of the identity and intentions of all parties who may end up with the data, then all parties are compelled to expand node territory for their own self interest and eschew behaviour leading to M.A.D. outcomes"
> Since when does that protect anyone’s privacy?
It doesn't. And it doesn't care. I don't mean to sound rude but you'll have to throw away this veneration of privacy to grasp what this is really about; like esteeming the Divine Right of Kings, that's not going to work any more. People are fighting over the right to keep riding this precious dead horse while corporations and governments are riding over them in AI Ferraris because they know that the ones who'll will win are those who privately control the most data to train machines to do, well... everything that a human can do and more. They don't care about your privacy. It's long gone and turned into glue. People want to believe in it but it's dead. And the longer people think it's still out there somewhere waiting for them, the longer it'll take them to grasp the power that data affords any party that disregards that belief. Then one day they'll wake up and realize all their land is in the hands of the Conquistadors.
Regardless, I think you're misunderstanding the algorithm. Nodes broadcast their data to other nodes because it stands as unassailable proof an AI performed a difficult computation on human behaviour and earned those coins. So you don't have to have a node in a part of the world you want information about. As long as there's someone there who either likes cryptographic money or wants to know more about the activities of that person beyond where the node tracks them, you're going to get that information one way or another.
Having considered how I would attack this it seems trivial for the super rich and mega corps to defend against this and maintain the asymmetry however. They would merely need to buy up enough land that outside cameras could not see all of it or build walls to block the view. Then when traveling outside their land they would just need to travel by vehicle that occluded any view of them, and simultaneously have a few other duplicate vehicles move with people in them who don't have to look identical but close enough that the cameras and system cant differentiate.
Its overly expensive to a normal person, but whats a few hundred thousand or million a year to a Zuckerberg or Bezos to maintain their privacy? I know Zuckerberg already does this to some extent with his house[1]
Given our current system its unlikely you could ever make it asymmetric enough to stop the rich unless it was as bad as needing 1 million dollars to defend against every 1 dollar used to attack. At that point the rich have enough power to influence the government and just get them to make this illegal and everyone who uses it face jail time. Given that the nodes can easily be traced back based on the physical location data they are giving out, it wouldnt be hard for the government to send police to any area with a node and destroy it and jail whosever property its on.
Politician/News Agency/Insurance CEO/Hedge Fund Quant: "Oh that's disgusting. An application that tracks people and physical assets and lets you know where every citizen, rival public servant or object has been or whatever they've done before and they've posted it online for free. Where? Where is this thing?"
Someone eventually: "I don't know, one of those stupid '.network' domains"
Politician/News Agency/Insurance CEO/Hedge Fund Quant: "Ugh! Those stupid '.network' domains! (shakes head convincingly)... But I mean there's so many of them though! Which one? Which one is it on?!"
I cannot disagree more strongly. Every day our need to fight for privacy increases.
All it takes is someone to take my actions and skew them in a political light. From there on it's tiny policy shift that could end up with me in jail for some fascist political crime that isn't a crime at all. Every day our governments take more and more: we really shouldn't be doing their work for them!
Look at what's happening in China: a whole religious cleanse is taking place: Muslim, Buddhist, and even simple meditation groups (Falun Gong) are being persecuted and imprisoned.
Russia has outlawed Jehovah's Witnesses for similar purpose, citing "extremist activities".
And this is before we even get to more "political" style actions, such as white hacking and security research. We need to be exceedingly carefully with public spyware!
As is, one of their biggest enablers is being able to effectively deny access to the area.
Edit: I'd note this is generally an effective tactic of oppressive regimes. It takes dedicated, brave, well-funded people to access an area that's even semi-denied. Much less regularly. And the internet / world's attention is fickle. No updates, no photos, no video? No one pushing for justice.
Not really. The world already has a pretty good idea that China has incarcerated millions of people for what wouldn't be considered offences or adequate standards of proof in the West as part of wider political struggles. And livestreaming is going to end at the point of arrest. A system tracking the full history of every one of those millions of individuals' movements prior to incarceration would add no useful insight into the nuances of the conflict or rhetorical weight to arguments to take any form of action against the Chinese government, but would be exceptionally useful to helping said government in tracking down anyone that has ever interacted with $PersonOfInterest or visited $Place.
There's a reason that people campaigning for the world to take interest in human rights issues in their region do so by broadcasting explanations of their cause and how brave and inspiring their missing friends are rather than broadcasting their whereabouts.
These are all questions to which the answer is at best murky.
Facts answering these questions would empower opponents of Chinese oppression. Whether that would be enough to offset the privacy issues is a fair debate. But it's not like you're losing anything the Chinese panopticon hasn't already taken away.
It's the proverbial blind man whose hand has happened to land on the tusk and he tells his companions, "It's a spear!". You're not seeing the whole elephant because you've never seen one.
It benefits you when other people have knowledge about the world. It benefits you if other people have the knowledge to drive safely. It benefits you that your neighbours have a basic knowledge of germ theory and don't throw their sewage in the streets like medieval peasants. It benefits you that your fellow voters have at least a basic education and can make somewhat informed decisions. It benefits you that medical knowledge isn't locked away in some vault in Alexandria but it's in the mind of the doctor whose preventing an outbreak of some disease you happen to be susceptible to.
Did you not read the things I was able to learn just from my first node? We can give so many people free access to information that would push back darkness, fear and superstition just a little further. And these people would do and build things that would make your life better.
So instead of channelling the Archbishop of Canterbury telling Bible translator John Wycliffe that too much knowledge will corrupt the commoners, open your eyes.
I can see a plethora of negative impacts and influences on the ability for a person to express themselves, in what would have been a "natural" set of responses, if your project is even remotely successful.
You think the whole of the human condition can be mapped and measured onto a landscape? Although I have serious doubts that you can: Great! I'd suggest you train it on what is called "Modal Music", whose very fundamentals use the same language (landscape, narrative) that you describe. It's found in many Mediterranean music styles (greek, turkish, arabic...).
I'd suggest that people are not just one thing. We don't hate all the time, we don't laugh all the time, we don't work all the time. I think treating humans as an equation is just as demeaning as the current political elite and marketeers treat us, but that's not (ironically) a big concern of mine. I think this project naive and the consequences not well thought through.
The day you tell everyone your CVV codes on your credit cards, that you use a public bathroom with the door open, that you go to work naked, that you take the curtains off the walls, that you publicly list all of your passwords, is the day that I'll take you seriously.
Personally, I view your project in a manner akin to upskirting. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but our moral compasses are facing in very different directions it seems -- despite the fact that I can see you're trying to make something beneficial, whereas I only see horror. Where you see a stop gap in the surveillance state we currently live in, I see it as a precursor to even more horrible practices, for which an increase general violence will be inevitable. Whenever there is a camera there is surveillance. By running algos over this surveillance, it will make those in power more powerful before your rose coloured view of your perfect world even gets close to being materialised.
I am utterly horrified that you seem proud by these words of yours:
> I now know most of my neighourhood's average height, individual walking gait identification pattern, estimated salary based on car model, family structure, daily schedules, how many (visibly) pregnant women, on what days in July the guy across the street mowed his lawn, the pattern he mowed it in the 8th time and that it was the same day my other neighbour had 5 guests over for a get together. I can rewind and replay it from multiple angles in 3D. If I really want, I can convert it to spreadsheet format, etc.
Every single thing you mentioned here can be used against us. I hope that you spend some time reflecting upon this. Ultimately, I hope that you gain some wisdom and think differently.
Uh, agree to disagree. If someone invades my privacy, I'm not upset because I didn't get to invade theirs.
And also the present asymmetry is in the average person's favour. Google's interest in tracking my whereabouts begins and ends with which ads I'm most likely to click on. My family, employers and people I've irritated recently have considerably more interest in making and acting on other inferences (correct or otherwise) about my life from movement data.
In a transparent society the most powerful will still find their ways to be less transparent than everyone else, while leveraging this difference in transparency to the maximum extent possible.
Information alone is not power. It is also about the ability to act on it, to use or abuse it.
This argument reminds me of those pro-gun arguments: we can't prevent guns from falling into the hands of wrongdoers, so let's allow everyone to arm themselves – soon we'll reach an equilibrium where the fear of retaliation acts as deterrence.
I don't agree with this kind of thinking at all, the way to deal with destructive technologies is not further proliferation.
Eventually, everyone at all times will be under constant surveillance, even in Western nations. Just look at the UK. Walking around London there is an undeniable asymmetry of constant, pervasive surveillance.
Unless you are suggesting the violent approach (people walking around smashing CCTV), I don't see why you would oppose this.
Option 1: Oblige voters and pass a prohibition that regular people are not allowed to surface the data through Grassland. This would maintain the status quo for that particular polity but ONLY if NO OTHER polity in the world, to whom CAPITAL can flow chooses to act in their own self interest and takes Option 2 i.e. 'defect' in the Prisoner's Dilemma[1]
Option 2: Realize that having constituents incentivised to surface this data themselves means denser node coverage and less friction; Level 5 self driving cars (with better than human situational awareness); more efficient stock markets because of information decreasing risk and the opening of new markets and industries never before thought possible; less ignorance, violence, fear, unaccountably and resources needed between law enforcement and their communities; and a guaranteed (as long as the node's running) source of income for their voters. And not to mention the fact that they won't be forfeiting AI dominance and capital to those political bodies that have chosen Option 2 themselves.
All misunderstandings and fears of Grassland stem from an ignorance or misunderstanding of Game Theory. And until now this was little cause for concern. But now it's very dangerous to the public interest. And will become even more so when Deep Schizophrenia gets released.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/prisoners-dilemma.asp
And Grassland nodes are just software that can read a feed streamed from any digital camera in the world P2P. So in order to stop it, you'd have to somehow ban the ownership or use of all cell phones by everyone, everywhere.