Biometric and behavioural mass surveillance in EU Member States
greens-efa.eu
greens-efa.eu
Edit: Smarter Everyday did a great job examining the history of privacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMtrY6lbjcY
On a daily basis in the EU you do really feel how politicians have used Covid-19 to impose a crazy amount of surveillance. If moreover you travel just a bit, the amount of bullshit you have to fill / comply-with and whatnots is just insane.
You drive from, say, France to Belgium: you are supposed to fill online "locator" forms saying where you go from, where you go to, what's the license plate(s) of the car(s) you're using, you have to give the names/address of any intermediate address you're saying at. You can decide to not fill these, but you're taking the risk of serious fines, especially if you happen to contaminate someone.
Non-tecchie people are noticing the increased surveillance too: my wife and kid are flying tomorrow and my wife was telling me earlier today: "The amount of new information you have to give to confirm you plane ticket is becoming crazy".
People do feel they're being watched. Not mentioning the "vaccination pass" you now need to show at many places to be able to enter (as, for example, the restaurants).
I don't personally think the pandemic warranted such a totalitarian crackdown on citizens.
We did obey and suffer the lockdowns. We did get the vaccine. But it certainly doesn't look like we're getting our liberties back.
It is beyond insanity.
I guess my feeling is the amount of information collected about me by governments since the pandemic started is probably measured in bytes, whereas the amount of information that's been stored and shared by one or another private company is in gigabytes. I'm got a scam text the other day about a DHL package that was arriving, because some asshole has been selling my purchase history somewhere along the line. Every time you have any kind of commercial interaction with anybody you enter into this really promiscuous wash of bad security, over-eager logging, data-hoarding, and outright transfer that is how companies treat data today. That's the problem, not a couple of extra forms when you cross a boarder.
I mean, is the COVID gone? Is 99 % vaccinated so we have herd imunity? Do we have updated vaccine for the delta? Have we beaten the pandemic in any other way?
Why would you expect the measures to end, when the situation is still underway? Would you complain "it's been two days why can't I return to my home" while the water from the flood is still there, new water is approaching and new dams to stop it are being build as we speak?
If I told you a few years ago that we would be shutting down the economy, forcing people to wear masks and submit to biometric tracking and surveillance, all to (ineffectively) combat a disease that isn't even much worse than the flu, you would have rightly scoffed at me. The liberties that have been taken from us are not even remotely proportional to the danger of the "situation"
Security, whatever form you consider it, has not taken a step back since the end of the cold war. What reason or incentive could we possibly give already empowered people to be less powerful?
Two years of complete or near complete communication monitoring combined with the patriot act is going to influence our society going forward for decades. This enormous feat of surveillance was done with little trust in oversight.
> I don't personally think the pandemic warranted such a totalitarian crackdown on citizens.
This thought is way too vilified and used as justification for extensive monitoring. Though we survived the resulting fallout of the entirety of pandemic measures I'm not sure many will agree in what form we want to continue.
Speaking from Australia, the measures we've implemented have been very successful in the short term. But it is notable how useless the measures are in the big picture. Nothing that has been done appears to change the inevitability of catching the coronavirus sooner or later. We can't afford more lockdowns and the Israel experience seems to be that vaccines only do so much to slow community spread.
The options seem to be catching coronavirus vs. spending a huge amount of effort and sacrificing a bunch of basic rights avoiding the coronavirus ... then catching it eventually anyway.
It is unclear what we're buying for the expensive price tag.
- During the spike of infections in Israel (which is mostly due to the delta variant) only 58% of the population was fully vaccinated [0] and is still at just 62% currently. Portugal has vaccinated 86% of its population and #cases has only decreased/remained stable since September, despite most measures being relaxed.
- The rate of serious disease among unvaccinated over 60 year olds was nine times more than the rate among fully vaccinated.
- The number of deaths was significantly higher in earlier infection peaks (Sep 2020/Jan 2021) than in the Summer even though the number of cases was much larger
- For those who were vaccinated (Israel managed to do it very early), there is evidence that immunity waned after 6 months, which aided the latest spike. The 3rd shot has been extremely effective as shown by the rapidly declining number of cases [1]
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-study-covid-booster-sh...
> Facial recognition: School ID checks lead to GDPR fine
> The Swedish Data Protection Authority (DPA) fined the Skelleftea municipality 200,000 Swedish Krona (£16,800, $20,700) for flouting a privacy law.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49489154
Is there something more? It had a lost of points listing different institutions, but no cases. If this is all then it doesn't look a lot like government overreach.
I don't trust these people with that kind of data or any personal data. They don't actually stand for freedom when push comes to shove, it's all lip service.
Look, I'm pretty sure I'm well known to a whole bunch of security services (hi y'all!) just by virtue of my daily commute. But here's the deal - what matters is how this can be used against me, or not. There's no realistic scenario in which I'm going to come to grief from the various security apparatus I happen to pass each day.
No, what matters much, much more than whether my face and habits of movement are known to various state organs (admittedly: given that I live in the Netherlands where the rule of law is still a thing) is the degree to which I can come to grief in my personal life from shitty, sloppy private mass surveillance.
Which, fortunately, is relatively constrained here. My health insurance premium isn't going to inexplicably go up (or, for that matter, my coverage denied) because someone who looks like me (who may not be me, but I have no access to the data or ability to appeal) is living an unhealthy life in public. No, the rates are fixed for everyone, and insurers don't get to cherry-pick. While I wouldn't mind an health insurance discount for cycling instead of driving a car those 10km/day, in general I'm satisfied with the regulatory regime here in a way that I very very much wasn't when I lived in the US. Nor would I be denied a mortgage here (or charged a higher rate) based on my alleged movements in meatspace or cyberspace. Insurers and banks just aren't allowed - with meaningful regulatory oversight - to incorporate these factors into underwriting products that most people consume. (Life insurance is a different story, but also not something most people in NL purchase.)
tl;dr: it's not surveillance per se that matters, it's the consequences attached. Even if you have the right to know how surveillance data affect your ability to live your life (and to appeal), those rights are useless to anyone who lacks the time and knowledge to go chasing them. Far better as a society to, up front, say "nope, sorry, everyone needs health insurance/access to basic financial products like mortgages on primary residences/etc" and limit the scope of discrimination. Because tech gonna tech, and that's impossible to stop over the long term.
My attempt to turn it into something short enough for my brain would be:
Secrecy is where they don't know anything about you. (And that is long gone)
Privacy is where they know everything about you, but are not allowed to exploit you. (And that is the fight for the next decade)
Progess is where they know everything about you, and can assist you in your best interests. (that's my conjecture)
The individual is not necessarily the limit of happiness. IMO it's a very limited view on things, to consider individual as the epitome of affect.
But I dont believe the good of society outweighs the good of the individual - simply because society is made up of individuals- so we do need to keep individual rights and protections at the top.
I am terrified of the future if this is the normal opinion and considered 'Progress'.
The problem is indeed consequences, most privacy warriors assume mishandling of data, i.e. bad consequences.
In a world with more data we wouldn't have any preventable disease. Like at all.
In a perfect world this wouldn't be necessary. In the real world we have Cambridge Analytica manipulating elections. Volkswagen cheating regulators. Boeing deciding their bottom line is more important than lives.
And you can't prevent all disease with data alone. Most of us have some vices that we know are bad for our health but we do them anyway. And sometimes rightly so. Physical health isn't the only thing that matters in life. We make trade-offs and there's more than just data driving them. We're creatures of emotion :)
I definitely wouldn't trade off perfect health for having no privacy.
I suspect that makes you a tiny tiny majority.
>>> I just don't want companies I don't trust to own my data.
Neither do I. So i can have a world where my data is secret so companies do not have your data (not sure this is possible)
or we force the companies to be trustworthy (perhaps almost as hard but we do have many examples of doing this.)
Imagine a world where handling private data requires a professional qualification and membership, like say a banking license.
Regulations require that the location data tracking you and your family (ie Life360) is provided to the NHS researchers via encrypted file transfer, you cannot support your business with targeted advertising.
Imagine I can have my family's screentime data sent for analysis and a weekly review video is sent back to me suggesting my recent videos have been veering towards the usual QAnon gateway path and perhaps I should be careful.
My super market purchase history and credit card use at the takeaway suggests I am eating less healthily than my previously agreed limits - would Inlike to start the middle aged man Supermarket order list which gets me ingredients and recipies that might achieve my goals
I know this sounds dystopian- and I need to spend some time writing it up - but frankly I need help with life, and I think most people who evolved for chasing antelope and intellectually wrestling with a tribe / family no bigger than a wedding guest list need help handling the modern world.
We should have the modern world set to good defaults (why not have every salary drop 5% into a index fund from age 18) - and this sort of "intrusive" data management is one way to scale that
How many people go to McDonalds despite knowing it's basically poison?
How many people do drugs or cigarettes or even alcohol knowing it's bad?
I don't think this is a minority at all. A lot of people just don't care enough.
> Imagine I can have my family's screentime data sent for analysis and a weekly review video is sent back to me suggesting my recent videos have been veering towards the usual QAnon gateway path and perhaps I should be careful.
Lol I always disable screentime as I view it as solving a non-isue. But what will you do if the user ignores the "perhaps you should be careful". The news already advises us that QAnon ideas are factually incorrect. This doesn't stop people, it almost feels like it does the opposite (QAnon supporters will view this as confirmation that the state is against them).
So this is not very effective. It won't actually work without mandating it. Meaning complete state control and censorships. Which means no freedom anymore. Also, it will even reinforce the QAnon narrative of "big state forcing ideas into our heads". Because, really, that is exactly what you will be doing. You will basically be fighting them by making them right. Does that really make sense?
> My super market purchase history and credit card use at the takeaway suggests I am eating less healthily than my previously agreed limits - would Inlike to start the middle aged man Supermarket order list which gets me ingredients and recipies that might achieve my goals
Again, most people that are overweight know they're eating wrong. Including myself. It does not stop them.
What I do wish is more availability of good food for takeaway. Living alone it's a major bore having to cook and all the takeaway choices are bad. But that's beside the point. Informing people does not help and we're doing this already. Forcing them takes away all their freedoms. They will rally against it. Would you like to live in a prison where someone else decides what you're going to eat?
> We should have the modern world set to good defaults (why not have every salary drop 5% into a index fund from age 18) - and this sort of "intrusive" data management is one way to scale that
We're already doing that. It's called "taxes". The government doesn't "index fund" it but funds are a speculative thing. They have no return if they are ubiquitous. Besides, our governments prefer borrowing instead. Good or bad, they're so far into that rabbit hole they're never going to get out.
> I know this sounds dystopian- and I need to spend some time writing it up - but frankly I need help with life, and I think most people who evolved for chasing antelope and intellectually wrestling with a tribe / family no bigger than a wedding guest list need help handling the modern world.
Yes it sounds very dystopian. And don't take the "Chinese model" for something that has come as a response to modern society. On the contrary, it's based on Confucianism which predates our western society and religions (he died about 500 years BCE). Personally I think his ideas about servitude to the state might have worked back then but they are not working today. It's something that was useful when life was hanging by a thread. It's not for solving first world problems :)
Do many people need help? Sure. But I'm sure many people needed help too during the industrial revolution or middle ages. In fact they needed a lot more help. They were dropping like flies back then. I agree our minds are not made for connecting the world on a global scale. But we deal with that already. Think about your Whatsapp list (or whatever IM you use). You don't have everyone in the world in that. Just your buddies. You find circles on the web with people with common interests. Such as here. We're recreating our own comfortable little villages. We already make a huge difference in people "we know" and that we don't. Again this predates the internet and started being a thing from the time we started living in cities.
I'm sorry you need help. Go look for it, you will find it! But I don't think building the society you intend will really solve any issues. It will just brush them under the carpet, just like it does in China.
Also, if you really want this... I'm sure the Chinese government will let you move there :)
The problem with mass surveillance isn't only what is done with the data. It's that it's being done in the first place. I personally hate the feeling of governments and corporations spying on me every hour of every day 1) . Whether it affects me or not. I don't want my own phone to look over my shoulder. I don't want to watch what I say online. I just want to be myself. I feel this surveillance as a constant pressure on me in life these days.
1) Person of Interest quote intended :)
All of our governments are simply playing catch-up at this point. Unless the western-influenced can prove their superiority with growth and progress, I think everyone here has to acknowledge they have a better overall governance model (elections are a small but significant part of this)
To give some possible examples of what I mean by "less representative", let me suggest that growing wealth inequality makes the poor realise they are not being heard by the rich; that communication technology allow niche ideas to spread causing the balkanisation of reality (which causes cracks that governments can't easily paper over); and that in some countries the voting system doesn't allow the healthy evolution of parties to respond to the new realities (exacerbating "future shock").
But zooming out, I think a society/government's job is preventing destruction and growing. That may not be in a way that's dangerous to other governments, but high relative growth can make other governments irrelevant. I'm claiming that the value from unabashed large scale data surveillance that CCP gathers is very large, and that might be a significant enough factor moving forward that privacy-first countries might simply not be able to keep up with it, and become irrelevant.
From this viewpoint, if the EU is doing this, we have no large diverse conglomerate that can serve as an experimental control any more. We can't even tell if privacy "is a good thing", for the final metric of growth. Not US, not EU, not India. Africa is still not in the same league.
Every single one of them have basically succumbed to privacy vs. security false dichotomy (https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/). Every single one thinks the way forward (at least for now) is mass surveillance.
Maybe they think the gain from not having public crime is big enough to justify the cost. In which case CCP was "right" - convergent evolution means something (for now).
The rest is fluff that should be put down with violence if necessary.
You must find data coming from the real world very hard to analyze through this lense. You might want to try these popular alternatives:
"The government's job is to defend the privileges of the few"
or the latest trend:
"The government's job is to defend itself"
Societies self-govern and create structures. Some of those structures are companies, some are government. Sometimes the government regulates companies, and sometimes companies regulate the government.
Edit: even in the US for example, ONLY the judiciary is concerned with defending individual liberties. If that's all that's necessary then we wouldn't need elections, just a military and that's that.
You seem to heavily discount the amount of work it takes to become post-scarcity - most societies in the world fail to achieve this, even for simple things like cell phones in 2021.
(In the US) The judiciary is very obviously not the only branch concerned with protecting individual liberties. Law makers pass laws with the intent to do so and the President can command the military to do so if necessary.
The world is on track to completely eliminate starvation and abject poverty in a few years, maybe a decade or two.
Projected life span and quality of life is at an all time high on average, and crime is overall down which is another indicator of plenty rather than lack. It is utopian minded idealism that everyone should have everything they want (including cell phones) and the world should become 'post-scarcity' (whatever that means). I have found utopian minded idealists to be the least experienced with regards work.
Also, economic growth is not the measure of a state that's good for its citizens. I think we're doing a lot better than China there.
This just means we have to keep fighting it.
I'm not saying they're right, I'm saying they're "right". I'm redefining "right" as "long term success".
It's like everyone uses mobile phones now and the luddites who don't are simply irrelevant. Maybe the anti-tech folks are actually right in terms of harm it causes, but because of the other party's success, there's they're not relevant. The right-ness is not relevant for this case.
Similar to how you might do pagans-vs-christians. Maybe we as a society will evolve to support and encourage pagans and diversity and stop encouraging supremacist religions like Christianity, BUT - they've "won" against all the pagan religions in the middle east and europe. With Islam, against everything all the way up to central asia and SEA, down into Africa. Maybe the holdouts like the Hindus in India will ultimately build better and more resilient societies (they haven't been converted yet, unlike many others) but so far, nothing.
The question requires time and more data to resolve - but the tentative resolution is that people don't care about privacy. So societies don't care either.
That said, I'm a huge privacy/crypto nerd - I even think privacy-vs-security is a false dichotomy. THEY don't. Apple doesn't. Most VCs and Google thing privacy and valuable insights from data are dichotomies and mutually exclusive too, but they're mathematically provably wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_encryption
And because effective resources are generally limited, these differences will lead to relative difference in market share, like maybe how many people one entity can sustain.
From there, it might lead to differences in how productive each person and the entity itself is, which leads to a spread of that productivity to other entities. The US has generally enjoyed the crown here for at least a hundred years - even now, cutting edge research is still in the US. The US "culture" is essentially internet culture and it will rub off on everyone who uses most US services (even innocuous ones like Google).
In sum, I'm equating long-term relative growth rate to societal/governance success. China isn't a great comparison to the US, but it's a very good comparison to, say, India (with caveats).
Over the next 50 years, I think it's a decent comparison to the US/EU as well, as the populations are now more similar (with immigration).