That bright future and empowering innovation that most of us expected from tech companies was really a mirage…
Went the other day to an old friend's house. At the door, a Ring eye unblinkingly stared at me. For a few moments I felt like crushing the metallic monstrosity under the heel of my boot: I never consented to have my face uploaded in the Cloud. Then realized how powerless we truly are: every other house, every other shop, every other car have such an eye, all connected to the AllSeeingCloudEntity. With vision tech cheap enough to match our faceprint every single step every single one of us takes in a public space. Heracles at least had a fighting chance against the Hydra. Where do we even begin reclaiming our right to not be continuously watched?
'Don't use a browser'. 'Don't carry a cellphone'. 'Wear a mask'.
Next: 'Don't go outside'. 'Don't speak'. 'Don't think'.
Soon we are back to:
Don't write when you can speak, don't speak when you can nod, don't nod when you can wink - or something to that effect.
Don't think.
If you think, don't speak.
If you speak, don't write.
If you write, don't sign.
If you think, speak, write and sign, don't be surprised.
Fortunately for the Soviet subjects, in-person surveillance was expensive and didn't scale once the system started to crack and the number of dissidents increased from a handful to thousands.
Not so in the tech utopia. We have multiple megacorporations competing in doing every evil trick in the Soviet surveillance textbook, 24/7, at scale. Aaah, progress.
We can likely all come up with novel technology ideas to help ourselves, but it's a blight on all of society not just those who are conscious of it. They are our governments after all, we should be using them as tools for good as best we can.
Re tech solutions, I've been hearing this for 20 years. The panopticon has been built. Anti-surveillance technologies failed to materialize.
For example, the horrific Therac-25 incidents led to IEC 62304, a standard which specifies life cycle requirements for the development of medical software and software within medical devices:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_62304
I hope analogous standards will be formulated for privacy on devices etc.
How do we move the needle of public opinion?
"The Cardholder must not disclose the assigned PIN, nor any personally chosen PIN (see Item 17.8.), nor the Secure Code to anyone, not even to employees of card complete. The Cardholder is responsible for ensuring strict secrecy concerning all card security details – PIN, Secure Code and mobileTANs received on his/her telephone (to be used for authenticating a ViS/MCID transaction and valid for a maximum of 5 minutes afterreceipt) – and must take all reasonable precautions to ensure that they cannot be discovered by others. The Cardholder must refrain from writing them down on the card, keeping them in the same place as the card, telling them to anyone, or acting in any other way that would allow others to discover these details."
Hence, if you have a credit card, you must hide something. A bank, for example, would likely benefit from requiring a secure device for transactions as part of their conditions of use, otherwise it is unclear how exactly we can satisfy this contract as customers, and who is liable in case of problems. A common way to ensure such technical requirements is to refer to a technical standard that the device must conform to.
As a closely related example, here is a recent Austrian law, the Registrierkassensicherheitsverordnung (regulation for security of cash registers):
https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundes...
Note to how many technical standards the law refers to in order to ensure the security of these devices, including AES-256, SHA-256 etc. These technical standards ensure that multiple vendors can participate in bidding and all adhere to the required specifications regarding security etc.
Most people really don't get how much processing is happening and how much of it is a mechanical turk by the way of minimum wage contractors.
A problem for places like USA is that the legislators are unwilling to regulate against the interest of big companies unless the needle of public opinion is very, very, very strong to the point of it becoming the primary issue (which IMHO is not going to happen, privacy is important but there are and will be other priorities as well) - but if we're simply looking at the preferences of the population, then the public opinion is already there.
Unfortunately, as evidenced by the ubiquity of Google’s services, almost nobody is willing to give up an iota of convenience for their privacy.
Which is, in other words, due in large part to what is referred to as "myopic engineering" or "engineering myopia": this idea that, as Heidegger writes in What is Called Thinking?, "[t]he most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking."
Also, sometimes I expect a Tesla to go full “Assuming Control” mode and continue aggressive behavior of previously encountered one. Surely they record/analyze everything encountered and pass it onto central server, so no issues “remembering” me…
I notice this in the media a lot. It’s so frequent I struggle to believe it isn’t on purpose. To make people think a problem isn’t as widespread or as severe as it actually is.
It could be more like: "My computer won't start" (it currently does not start), or "don't leave this unattended or the cat will eat it" (it's actually happening right now as soon as you do).
Not doing this provides a substantial amount of motivation for choices I make in small projects I do.
While yet to think of a blog post or snazzy term for this, which won't be posted on Medium, every action, every feature, is one to consider for the value it adds, not just it for the sake of it. And every choice not to do something is equally a choice.
Should login be via Google, Facebook, email, other? Why is login necessary? Could value for services be provided with no need for login, 80% of value, 60%, then if so, and if integrating to 3rd party services what value does that add? And what does it take away in getting padlocked to a walled ecosystem that can be slammed shut with no recourse, be that Alphabet, Tencent, or any other?
Do I need to access your location and photos for a todo app? If so, that's not a todo app, or some pretty poorly thought-out feature creep is being build in from the start. Is having access to your contacts going to make me the next unicorn? It's been done already. Too competitive today for the next big thing which will be something different anyway, the next big iteration in the sense of not being very revolutionary at all. Has the potential for liability been thought of when sloppy code deletes valuable pictures, or causes a device failure that does so?
The noun that was 'creativity' has been replaced by the corporate-safe one-step-at-a-time 'innovation'. Nobody got fired for innovating. Marketers get bonuses for dressing up the mediocre-inducing term innovation as something remotely creative.
The future is here and was here all along. It's for us to see.