Goodbye 4th Amendment.
Would be cool if these intelligent folks but their efforts towards improving privacy.
This is a neat application of WiFi signals, but the accuracy is nowhere near good enough for this to reliably ID random people.
I’m way more worried about online corporate surveillance that actually can ID me reliably with 100% accuracy and get a lot more info about me besides where I am, than I am of government surveillance of my walking gait through walls.
As tech marches on, "not commonly available to the public" becomes a smaller space.
Separately, I'd hazard a guess that they still use FLIR in an indiscriminate way, and just conjure up a little parallel construction when needed.
I share your concern for what will become of privacy as exotic new surveillance techniques become widespread. The legal treatment of expectation of privacy seems tied to whatever is the societal norm of the age, and that mark has shifted dramatically in my lifetime.
Only one of these is objectionable.
The other two ought to be pursued so we can further advance the human race and improve the quality of everyone's lives. They're totally justified.
The thing is though, money does that already if your society doesn't have strong inheritance taxation, so I'm not sure it's really such a problem.
That's not a threat to humanity.
> And Costa Rica?
> And most individual countries in Europe?
All of these countries, for practical purposes, do not exist.
They do not have influence on the world stage. They may as well be China, considering how easy these countries will bend to Chinese money.
So either you develop the surveillance tech, or you must look the other way when China develops it. If you disagree, your economy will be ruined.
The whole developement of nuclear weapons is a story of the when, of the how fast and of the should I and would have looked certainly different if it’s protagonists all had based their decisions on the ethical rationalisation you proposed here. Who knows, maybe even the Germans would have gotten nuclear weapons?
The hard question obviously is: where do you draw the border? If you invented the paperclip and it was beeing used in the holocaust’s bureaucracy blaming you would be a bit far fetched. If you invented the gas showers of the KZs whose only purpose it was to mass-kill prisoners, not feeling ethically responsible would be totally mad. In between there you have got Werner von Braun with his V2 rocket, which isn’t exactly easy to judge. He enabled space travel, yet the bombs killed many british civilians quasi randomly and out of the blue and the number of slave workers killed during construction was even higher than the number the rocket killed.
Inbetween these three examples there are infinite shades of ethical dilemma while your argument paints this as a binary question about whether something could or should exist or not — and if the answer to the could is True, who cares about the answer to the should, right?
I propose something else. If you value your own intellect you should abstain from ideas that could be, but shouldn’t and rather attack things that could be and should be or maybe even things that should be, but couldn’t by the thinking of today.
We engineers, scientists, thinkers and artists are giving birth to things that become reality, but it is our indivisual decision if we do:
You will rarely find a writer telling you he had to write that dehumanizing dangerous text, because if he wouldn’t have done it somebody else would have. We can stray farther from this even and paint an example where a old lady collapses at a bus stop. Now you could have someone robbing her as she lays there (”If I wouldn’t have done it someone else would’ve”). Or you could have somebody going for first aid and calling the ambulance (”If I wouldn’t have done it someone else would’ve”).
The statement “someone else would’ve done it” is not really a ethical reason to do anything. The question you should ask yourself is: in what kind of society do I want to live and do my actions contribute to it and if so at what cost? What if everybody acted like I did?
But then of course this is the wrong question to ask. This is nothing more but a complicated version of a multi-party, repeated Prisoner's Dilemma problem. Except that you don't know your negative payoff when an opponent chooses to defect, but it may well be minus infinity (you get holocausted or nuked into paleolith). And then defection by any single party gets you the negative payoff. So if you only ask the question you suggest and ignore the rest of the options, you are doomed.
I'm afraid that the world's politicians (most of them at least) are completely sane, and all this "race to the bottom" stuff going on is just the result of the game theory & life being what it is.
I think context is key, and we shouldn’t theorize conflicts in everyday life in the same way as all out nuclear war or other existential situations. Maybe that is just the naive idea of a guy who benefits from the wealth and peace produced from a Europe which for the first time in centuries doean’t feel the need to kill each other for (in hindsight) more or less meaningless reasons.
Bad things still happen even they’re outlawed, but that doesn’t mean we just throw up our hands and proclaim that there’s nothing anyone can do about anything, and dismantle the entire legal system.
Someone will do it, but someone will also do the counter-thing to it. In this example someone might research how to prevent people from being identified through walls, and I would hope that those people are the more skilled ones.
plenty of intelligent folks working on this for example
There's way more money in bootlicking
So publicly sharing this research is an effort towards improving privacy, by letting other researchers & the public know what the risks are.