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Comment by wood_spirit | Hacker News Reader

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wood_spirit

Your journey will be witnessed and recorded by all the other vehicles on the road…

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And your unique cadence and breathing patterns will make you identifiable from 100 meters away.

And your phone is in your bag.

Easy. Every other time you go out give yourself a charlie horse. The data will be shit.

"Most free", not "totally free".

Also freedom doesn't necessarily require privacy.

It does. The chilling effect of surveillance is very real.

That's due to learned associations between being observed and being shamed or controlled.

Then give me (hell, you pick a person) complete access to your communications. Give up all privacy, even just for this given person. Will you still be free? Or somewhere along the line, does information turn into power?

A hammer won't turn into a weapon unless it's wielded as such. Privacy is necessary for freedom only because humans have a rich history of wielding information as a weapon. If we can't learn to have power without using it to control others, we won't survive as a species.

Yes, and? That’s like saying “you’re only afraid to touch the burner due to learned associations between touching it and getting burned.”

As long as there is a person with access to that surveillance, it will be used to shame and control people. If England had the surveillance it has today 100 years ago, they would have ousted Alan Turing for being gay long before he would have had the chance to help them win the war.

I'm not sure that wielding information as a weapon is as integral to human behavior as heat is to burns. I hope not, anyway. Maybe it is, but freedom isn't unique to us.

I think that it does. How can you have freedom if you're always being watched?

You either get fully confident or you lose all shame.

Which are things that most people cannot do. And that's a good thing.

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