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Comment by rvense | Hacker News Reader

It's hard for me to articulate how this makes me feel. As someone who values anonymity and, for no particular reason, would prefer not to be photographed and have my movements tracked, I feel like I am being forced from public spaces.

Regulated CCTV coverage of certain areas is one thing. This is untracked, unlimited surveillance by a private company whose goals and motives are completely removed from any semblance of public, democratic influence.

Facebook must be destroyed.

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Easy with the conspiracy theories. They may know your height, your eye/hair color, your skin color, your license plate #, where you live, where you work, where you shop, who you hang out with, etc, but you'll still be totally anonymous when they sell that information to whoever pays for it. They swear!

I know right? Only people who have something to hide would care if some bespectacled reprobate snaps down-shirt shots of them on the subway to share the 'experience' with their fellows.

When the cameras and processing are good enough, the watchers may also know your heart rate, breathing rate, who you glance at that goes by and which ones raise your heart rate, when you smile, when you frown, your pupil dilation, what items you browse in physical shops even if you don't buy, everything that can be picked out by lip reading, whether you look like you got a good night's sleep; trends in all these factors over time as they see you from multiple cameras across the months and years, and can probably predict when you will lose your job and if you're getting a divorce before you, your spouse and your employer knows these things, and which cancer you have before it's diagnosed (but will use it to raise/deny your insurance rather than actually help you).

Of course it will all be presented only to trustworthy researchers with impeccable standards of ethics who have your interests first, such as the advertising unit, and the ministry of happiness and fair opportunity for all.

All data requests from law enforcement fishing crews, "surgical" tactical vote manipulators, blackmailers, credit reference agencies, insurance companies, pre-crime detection centres, and religious morality police will of course be turned down, as that would be unethical. No price could possibly be high enough...

If it wasn't Facebook, somebody else would or already is doing this. There's no escaping public CCTV in major cities nowadays. It's not nearly as regulated as you think and is also majority run by private companies.

If you don't like this, changing the laws to ban public surveillance is the only option.

Aggregation, scale, visibility, and mobility change the risks. Quantity has a quality of its own.

> changing the laws to ban public surveillance is the only option

i wonder if it would be feasible to require that all surveillence footage from public areas be immediately encrypted so that it could only be decrypted by a certain number of judges (following a court order).

As someone who values anonymity and, for no particular reason, would prefer not to be photographed and have my movements tracked

It's sad that you are made to feel like you have to disclaim that you have no particular reason for wanting privacy. Privacy should be the default, not something we have to explain to the defenders of megacorps.

Not just Facebook. Look at ring cameras, or dash cameras. The curtain twitching has been weaponised, partly by Facebook (platform to post pictures of “the wrong sorts”), but by other companies providing those cameras too.

>Regulated CCTV coverage of certain areas is one thing

Why is it one thing? Also, who told you it was regulated?

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