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Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

> Are we going to start saying that all inhabited spaces should be monitored by government cameras?

"Americans under the age of 30 stand out when it comes to 1984‐ style in‐ home government surveillance cameras. 3 in 10 (29 percent) Americans under 30 favor 'the government installing surveillance cameras in every household' in order to 'reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity,'"

>Going to ban cash then too?

"Interestingly, more than half (53 percent) of those who support the United States adopting a CBDC are also supportive of government surveillance cameras in homes, while only 2 percent of those who oppose a CBDC feel the same,"

https://reason.com/2023/06/07/why-are-so-many-younger-americ...

There might be a very worrying ideological shift in how people view their own privacy.

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> are also supportive of government surveillance cameras in homes

How about a compromise? If you want to do crime you can turn the cameras off for an hour a day. /s

Homes are already filled with cameras and mics that they don't ultimately control. All it would take is a change in policy to begin using these against you.

...why do we believe any of this is true though?

Because we can see evidence of it right here on HN almost every day. Once upon a time hackers in general were at the forefront of the fight for privacy, nowadays we seem to be the vanguard of its wholesale destruction.

I can say, anecdotally, people I've asked about their privacy will quite literally tell me that they don't care because they have nothing to hide.

I'd be really cautious against reading too much into this. I think often times with this type of polling data, when you dig into the details you find that people aren't as far apart as you might think, but it's more that people tend to focus on different parts of how the question is asked.

The original survey data is at https://www.cato.org/blog/nearly-third-gen-z-favors-home-gov... (I'd also note this post is from the libertarian Cato Institute, so it's important to understand where their motivation comes from). The exact question was "Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?" It's not hard for me to think that younger people, many of whom just went through years of "Zoom school" and essentially had governmental authority piped into their homes, would just focus on "sure, reducing domestic violence and abuse is a good thing". Alternatively, you see that minorities, particularly African Americans are much more in favor than white Americans (33% vs. 9%). It's possible some people are coming at this from the point of view of "yeah, this would be like police body cameras ensuring that I'm not the victim of false reporting."

I don't mean to whitewash the differences, and as someone who thinks the idea of government installing cameras in your home is the absolute definition of "the end of the free world", I don't mean to minimize it. But I think you might get very different responses if you just asked "Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household?" without the rationale behind it. I also think that if you dug into it and asked people follow up questions (e.g. "Where should these cameras be installed") you would get more agreement.

I guess my overall point is that I think the differences in responses have more to do with how people interpret the question (though it's certainly fair to be concerned about that) than more fundamental differences around "comfort with government in my bedroom" that the Cato Institute's interpretation might lead one to believe.

I don't see how this invalidates the data at all. If/when government surviellance is pushed into our homes, "to protect people" will absolutely be the reasoning used.

I agree that zoom school and body cams might be responsible for this shift in mentality. But that doesn't make it a good thing. All you've done in your rebuttal is state the reasons why attitudes towards government surveillance have shifted - you don't actually dispute that the difference exists.

My point is somewhat nuanced so I'll try to explain it more clearly. When these types of polls come out, often the reaction is "Wow, <other side> is definitely crazy, how can they want this?" But when you get down to the details, I think you'll find that the envisioned "actual implementation" of how this would play out is not as different as people think.

Simple example that could at least explain some of the difference. Younger people and poorer people (and, it the US, there is a strong correlation between economic status and race) are much more likely to live in communal setups, e.g. dormatories and apartment buildings, compared to older and more affluent people. So it's possible one group is thinking about this more as "There are already cameras in our hallways, why not hook them up to stop abuse?" while the other group is thinking "You want to put cameras in my bedroom."

That is, any pollster knows you can give extremely different responses solely based on how you word the question. I'm arguing that you could likely word this question differently and you would see responses that didn't nearly differ as much.

More than that, though, I totally agree that "'to protect people' will absolutely be the reasoning used." But I think even then it's important to understand the real underlying fears people have, and then point out that there can be other solutions that are much less intrusive and open to abuse, rather than completely discounting those fears to begin with.

Or maybe young people have new values than we do and we should let them do their thing. Trust they will figure out, since they are not any less clever than we are.

They may be clever but they lack wisdom of experience.

Funny, that's what the older folks said about us when we were young.

And they were right then too. We also lacked wisdom.

Buy they weren't right. There's a reason boomers fall for obvious scams and fake Facebook posts.

Because they are elderly and their minds don't work as well. When we were kids our grandparents were being scammed via letters and phone calls. It has nothing to do with wisdom.

Combining youthful new ideas tempered by the wisdom of experience is the ideal situation. The young person needs to accept that the older person may have already tried what they are suggesting, and the older person needs to accept that the younger person is capable of coming up with new interesting ideas that may be different than what their experience was.

Not if it affects me.

Or maybe they lack either the wisdom or experience to understand the extraordinary danger that comes with ceding privacy and autonomy to an unaccountable government.

Man this statement resonates with me.

I’ve found some folks view transferring power to benign government seems like good idea, but I think they fail to realize getting that getting that power back won’t be so straightforward if or when it doesn’t work out that government is no longer working for them or supporting their ideals, but the government is instead ruling them.

We have had to pretty good lately tbh in the US compared to some though honestly the could be questionable also depending on the values one has.

They also seem not to notice that government is never benign.

If the thought of your political adversary having a specific power makes you shake in your boots, it's not safe for your own side to have it either.

As long its not mandatory, I am 100% this. After all, it'd be great to have society that incarcerates more safety-obsessed white progressives

Clever is not sufficient. They also need to be informed.

From a practical point of view, they will be sleeping in that bed far longer than the older generations, so maybe “we should let them do their thing” and hope and pray that we won’t have to spend too much time in that bed. But then history and near-history call to remind that many instances of future generations almost cursing the lack of forethought of their predecessors when affecting fundamental changes. Those generations too have a claim in this sort of radical societal changes. Would a future generation trapped in a full-blown 1984 society think it “clever” of their grandparents that they have now put an end to “domestic violence”?

The overall red flag for me of this sort of remedy —- total surveillance to insure 100% compliance — are their absolute guarantees and promises of immediate results. Let’s take domestic violence as an example. Beyond pathological cases, in the main this is an area where we can aim for generational advancements in anger management, positive channeling of psychological stresses, and addressing other socio-economic conditions that contribute to engender this type of behavior. We won’t see immediate results but eradication seems in reach within a few generations. In the interim, there remains the possibility of social intervention via various legal and institutional channels.

> red flag for me of this sort of remedy ... are their absolute guarantees and promises of immediate results

This doesn't even cover the half of it. The problem with adding more central authority to any situation is the increased opportunities for confused deputies. In other words, abusers adapt their behavior - both conforming their behavior to the system's rules of what is considered acceptable, and leveraging those rules (and thus the power of the central authority) against their victim.

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