Usually when it comes to privacy I can begrudgingly accept that governments will violate it to some degree. This is a field, however, where I think governments must be outright banned from. We must not allow a situation to appear where the TSA or the police will run a quick "brain check" on somebody. It must be avoided. This would be a one way ticket to disaster.
I don't understand this statement. I hope after Snowden we all know that data at a commercial company = data at government? What's the difference? I don't see any practical barriers to various government agencies having access to all data at all companies. With and without company knowledge, mostly secretly, with and without company and customer consent, legally and illegally. This goes for the US, all US allies and all US enemies. The intentions of commercial companies when it comes to data protection from government are pretty irrelevant.
If you (as a people) want to ban your government from access to anything specific, you must first have control over your government. Which is inherently impossible in a system that is anything other than a direct democracy. Just my very unpopular opinion. There is no nation in the world that comes close to a people having control over a government, except arguably Switzerland. But even there I have my doubts...
The standard, surprisingly popular, rhetoric I hear against direct democracy in other European countries is really very unconvincing to me: people are too stupid to vote, people can't know enough about specific subjects to vote well, people aren't interested in politics (duh, why would you in a system where you can't influence politics), people can be influenced too easily through propaganda and other nonsense arguments which would all apply to a representative democracy as well.
People don't like change I guess and they (want to) love their country the way it is. On top of that I get a feeling that people somehow look up to politicians subconsciously as somehow being above them or at least being above their neighbors. They seem to equate leadership and sales skills to being able to take hard decisions and being incorruptible / divine. It's like the "king effect" (just made this up): everybody hates the king's decisions, but at the same time the king is the hero and pride of the nation and who could possibly want any other king?
In any case, this form of direct democracy wouldn’t solve the problems the parent is talking about. To achieve that, you’d need to vote on every decisions made by every public official ever.
Every Swiss citizen can propose a law to be voted on one of the next referendums, provided that they will collect the appropriate minimum number of signatures in its support.
However, you missed the part of my comment where I wasn’t talking about Switzerland at all, I was talking in generalities about the places where it was being discussed as an idea to implement.
Take LA for example. A lot of people who post here seem to have strong opinions on how that city is run, and I’d bet a lot of them even live there. If the LA city council elections generate turnout in the mid-teens, that is considered very high. Turnout below 10% is not strange.
Switzerland’s voter turnout is actually quite pedestrian. It’s higher than a lot of local elections in the US for sure, and perhaps even high enough to prevent the kind of special interest local government policies you see all over the US. But just because something seems to mostly work in one single, small, rich European country, doesn’t mean it will work as well anywhere else.
That’s an interesting thesis, but it’s not at all substantiated. Switzerland may have a better voter turnout than LA city council elections, but it has some of the worst turnout in the OECD[0]. If I was going to take a complete guess at the reason (as you did), I’d say it’s a cultural thing more than anything else (outside the influence of compulsory voting laws).
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/21/u-s-voter-t...
I can't say it's worse than other systems, but it's also far from obvious to me that it's better.
To have such a large society being run that way would have lots of unintended consequences. Imagine a country where voters are so burnt out on voting for every policy that the response rate becomes extremely low - and the only people who vote on any given policy are the slim minority with vested interests.
They mitigate the "low response" phenomenon by encouraging political awareness from a young age and trust in public institutions. It's imperfect and it may be a massive task to make such cultural changes in the US, but I don't think there's anything inherently stopping it from scaling.
Likewise California's rural areas can get very conservative. There just happen to be a lot more voters living in the cities.
I choose to plead the 5th. The wording is "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself" which obviously covers brain scans.
Of course the police will say I have the right to remain silent and they have the right to lock me in a jail cell. And TSA will absolutely do brain scans. I guess the right to remain silent is successfully getting eroded.
Yes, because private companies are regulated. By the state.
Meanwhile, private companies have nevertheless managed to make surveillance and ridiculously detailed tracking into a whole industry.
> Also, people won't have the choice when they're compelled to be scanned on arrest vs logging in to some optional private business.
Except in reality, this stuff has long since stopped being optional. If you buy any reasonably modern car, you'll be tracked by private companies. If you have a bank account, you'll be tracked by private companies. If you write an email... you get the point. How exactly do you opt-out of that?
- Transportation. Any time you want to go somewhere by car or plane (and potentially bus/train[1]), the government has decided it has the right to search you.
- Interstate commerce. Most economic activity is taxed, and may be searched passively or actively to ensure that the state gets everything it wants.
- Communication. TV, radio, telephone, and now the internet are monitored and adjusted by the state.
Brain-to-network communication will eventually be commoditized, and the state will transitively invent some justification for monitoring it. Thus you may think thoughts which are shared with the network and for which you will be held liable.
The only difference is that today you type the thoughts on a keyboard.
I wrote an essay about this in 2011, for university.
[1] http://news.antiwar.com/2010/11/25/napolitano-eyes-full-body...
A much more likely scenario is that brainstreams would be stored in various tech giants' systems (and because analytics is important, ~nothing is discarded).
Instead of running a quick check, the police or official would pull your thought history. But no, not directly from the source. Of course not.
To maintain a veneer of legitimacy, the actual tech companies will not sell to governments or law enforcement. There will be a forest of brokers, who sell to anyone.
And if you thought advertising was invasive or creepy now, with this kind of technology we would be entering a world Philip K. Dick would have found too depressing to write about.
And observing from the outside, US as a nation is still years - likely decades - from being able to stomach general warrants. But you are already well on your way towards something like that: reverse warrants are now a thing. Law enforcement in US has already issued a warrant for recorded information on all persons who were near an event after the fact.
The logical conclusion with brain data archives will be to issue warrants for full mental activity history for X years on people who have had thoughts on a given unwelcome subject.
But even then, warrants are inconvenient. It'll be much simpler and easier to just buy access to the data in bulk, all the time. That avoids the awkward questions on storage, access and oversight.
A completely free, unregulated market is a bit like anarchy: it might work well if all of the actors were mature and aware of their responsibilities. Unfortunately the ones who wish for that the most are usually the ones least suited for it. They support these ideas not because of a noble goal of perfect freedom but because they are annoyed that there is a more powerful entity that gets in the way of what they want to do with/to others.
Take a regular state and strip away all those regulations about consumer protection, environment protection, substance abuse, contract enforcement etc, and stop all this socialist stuff like public healthcare, public unemployment insurance, and public roads, and you are left with is stateless anarchy. If you remove anything less you can always claim there's regulation and no truly free markets.
All of this is a free market in your definition, and is essentially how European states are run. But it's somehow not what "free market" advocates in the US want today.
On top of that, Euro side feels like having much much more regulations than US. Which causes it much easier for big companies, but hinder small businesses and upstarts. While technically it may count as free market, it feels like gatekeeping.
I would suggest that you read theory. This is not socialism.
What do you mean by "keeping in check?" What evil would companies do otherwise?
Dump trash or chemicals wherever it's most convenient, reduce product quality because of margins, read emails of dumb users who reuse their email-password for your social network site (Oh, wait a minute), work conditions that border on indentured servitude...
There's plenty of room at the bottom (as Feynman said in a completely different context).
Let's take a look at this one:
> Dump trash or chemicals wherever it's most convenient
To make these stop, government didn't show itself very fit at reducing the problem. How can this be changed? That's what I would find interesting to hear.
The problem with statements like this is that they are presently unfalsifiable. Even though you've stated it as fact, it's clearly only an opinion that you've arrived at based on your own perspective and experience. However, you can't prove it and nobody else can disprove it.
The general practice of extrapolating worst-possible motivation from every action is, in my opinion, one of the reasons why it's so hard to communicate rationally these days. If you envision everyone 'on the other side' of an argument as demons, maybe sub-human, why bother negotiating? Fuck 'em, maybe a meteor will strike and wipe them out or they will kill themselves off through one of their many vices.
Ironically the brain-reading capability discussed is that they might lay this bare, expose some of the incorrect asumptions and start to heal some of the relationships between cultures and people.
In practice, this has been eroded to the point of practical meaninglessness, such that the FBI director can issue a statement that clearly violates both its spirit and its letter, and few people bat an eye.
or you could just be black.
Government or Corporation should never have access to anything like this. They _never_ use it for good.
/The only/ way to not allow this to be the absolute end of privacy is to have the technology be shaped in an incredibly ethical way that makes such privacy violations fundamentally impossible.
Store close to no data. Constantly encrypt whatever data you do store and keep it on the device itself. Constantly cycle keys. Make brain scanners absolutely worthless unless the user consciously authenticates themselves.
Requiring all brain scanners to be 100% fully open (full on GPLv3 including the hardware plans) and physical networking kill switches would be a good start.
All of this is not even new advice - there are quite a few outspoken people out there against any sort of data collection. But whether you agree with them or not, you must agree that the line in the sand must be drawn somewhere - and it definitely should not allow collecting people's thoughts.
Trying to extend the Google and Facebook model of siphoning as much of your data as possible to also include thoughts should literally be a crime against humanity.