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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, news coverage is overblown.

But scale and accessibility are absolutely a new class of problem.

In the 1960s you could pay thousands of people to watch hundreds of cameras and listen to hundreds of phone lines to monitor people, but the cost was so enormous that unless you were in East Germany or Moscow it wasn't a realistic threat model.

Now with computers we can cheaply have thousands of cameras with cheap storage that's retained forever and automatic image processing that means everyone is exposed to that kind of surveillance, which is a brand new problem.

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Storage is less cheap right now

I've often shared my prediction that future historians will study us all and that every living human will be the subject of someone's PhD thesis. I'm updating that prediction to be that those future someone's will be silicon based.

Not by an order of magnitude.

Compared to "pay humans to watch hours of footage and take notes", $700 for a 16TB hard drive that will hold months of video footage is an absolute steal.

Yes but also as always a people problem. People put the cameras and monitoring systems in place and operate them, to govern other people who ultimately yield to be governed, as the alternative is made too costly / dangerous by the governors.

> as the alternative is made too costly / dangerous by the governors.

There's nothing government (corporate or political) has made "costly" or "dangerous" about not having them, society did that all by itself: people will actively pay more to have these things because they see the benefit more than the risk, video calls with friends and family, not a hacker being able to duplicate their keys from one photo.

There's 6 cameras on my desk right now, attached to internet-capable devices. Two phones, two laptops. I've got covers over all of them, which is easy, and sometimes mandatory e.g. when visiting the headquarters of certain big-tech firms.

I'd never buy a smart camera. Don't trust them not to spy on me. But I do have a Raspberry pi upstairs, with a NoIR camera module, and an AI-coded bit of webcam software. Might consider it for seeing what animal gets into the garden at night.

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