Canadian Cops Will Scan Social Media to Predict Who Could Go Missing

It was inevitable. We kept telling people to not give away their data like that, that centralizing that much power in the GAFAS is dangerous, that somebody will abuse it.

Few people listened, even fewer without labelling us as paranoid. Almost nobody cared.

The problem is not that there are bad actors. Any sufficiently big and complex social system will have them. We must live with them, it's part of reality, like gravity.

The problem is that the rest of the actors are not thinking a second about their life or actions. They don't build a society. They cruise through existence.

This will always lead to pain.

We do have a variety of problems with internet freedom in Canada, but it's not just children that the article mentions. It's about identifying high risk individuals in general. The article also talks about potential minority bias which is something worth considering—not as a justification for anything or with any particular implication, just worth thinking about—in that in certain areas indigenous young women are going missing and are often never found or are found dead and it's a tough problem. Hugely complicated though and you can't use any particular issue to justify mass surveillance because the consequences could be immense.

but think of the children

They just want to log everything, and they thought this was the reason that would sound most reasonable to the general population (hopefully they can blame AI for choosing this reason, because it is very poor).

Philip K. Dick was a visionary.