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Comment by zenapollo | Hacker News Reader

The world IS getting mass surveillance. The havens for privacy are shrinking. We are becoming the ants in the ant farm.

One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.

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"I have nothing to hide"

Pro-surveillance people were not born one fine day. They were conditioned for a decade making them believe sharing everything about their life is normal.

"What's on your mind?"

Spot on. I've continued to be astonished at how publicly many people choose to live, especially considering all the inevitable negative results which have been well documented for decades and continue to increase.

Except for those in power, of course.

According to some, every generation is insistent to learn the negative results for themselves, which can be counted on to advance the erosion of privacy.

Despite this I do have hope for the current gen who seems more aware.

> Except for those in power, of course.

The horrifying thing is that those people are the real targets. Most people do what they're told and eat their slop. The juiciest fruits of spying come from being able to keep someone out of power, being able to put someone in power, and being able to control people who are in power.

Even when they're targeting consumers, they're targeting the consumers who control the purse, and the wealthiest are the most valuable. Mass surveillance attacks power that poses a threat established power.

Tapping everyone's phone is something that even with AI costs far more than it is worth. That's why you look for other, rougher indicators in order to make lists of people who get expensive surveillance. While "expresses opinions online" might get you on the list, "being a congressperson" is also definitely one of those indicators, or "being an executive at a medium-large business."

We're pretending like the real problem is that they're going to be able to find out that I really like hot dogs and then collude to charge me more for hot dogs online (which definitely is a problem) but the real problem is that you can tap the car of a senator, figure out they're cheating on their husband, and use that to get permission to murder a bunch of people in Ecuador (or Arkansas.) It's a complete loss of power except for the people at the top of the chain.

You can use someone's driving habits and/or phone info in order to set them up to be framed for a murder, or any sort of crime. Accusing people of sexual assault has always been a tool because there's no hard evidence that can be asked for by law enforcement, it's just mind-reading and deciding who you like; and you can trash somebody in the media without ever charging them. Now you have the full gamut of crimes with very convincing circumstantial evidence, and actual data forensic evidence, which can easily be planted.

The West has been run by graft networks, and since WWII it's been gradually flipping to be run by extortion networks. Graft networks are at least bottom-up - you pay for better; extortion networks are top down - you pay to avoid worse. It's a movement from a caricature of democracy to a caricature of dictatorship.

The person who is at the top will not have any cameras pointed at them. There will be no way for you to determine who they are. Their lieutenants will be the most blackmailed people on the planet. Having things that can be used against you, and having the ability to convincingly lie about why you're doing things will be the most valued quality that one can have in your career. We're mostly there already.

Some are conditioned, but I think there will always be a subset of people that just feel like they are the “right people” that everyone else should emulate. The system feels like it’s there to protect them, strong authority makes them feel safe, and they have a strong instinct to conform. They’ve never been on the wrong end of a political witch hunt, colonized, or felt like they were being attacked for wrongthink, so they don’t understand why everyone else can’t just be “good, law-abiding citizens” like them. Seems utterly alien to me, but I’ve known more than a few.

I've never met anyone who's 'pro surveillance'. I've met ad tech executives and Googlers, though. Have you spoken to them about the world that's been built?

To me it feels like there's a flood of pro surveillance stories wherever I look.

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/police-say-license-pla...

https://www.alxnow.com/2026/10/02/license-plate-reader-helpe...

https://www.bakersfield.com/news/bpd-credits-automated-licen...

https://www.kcrg.com/2026/09/17/how-license-plate-readers-he...

https://turnto10.com/news/local/license-plate-cameras-help-s...

https://www.krqe.com/news/albuquerque-metro/albuquerque-poli...

Tail wagging the dog?

I've met "pro surveillance" people before. There's a surprising number of "normies" in favour of it.

I remember being shocked, about 10 years ago, when I mentioned social network spying and my sister in law remarked she thought there should be more of it to keep people inline.

I've also met people who think all internet access should be through government sanctioned id and monitoring, which I also find shocking.

I haven't been able to pin this down to a single political view point, these people come from across the spectrum.

I think it boils down to each individual's personal experience.

If you live surrounded by people who will hurt you, steal your stuff, or act in reckless ways if they think no one is watching; then pro-surveillance sounds more appealing.

If instead you feel that the people around you will behave even if no one is watching them; then privacy concerns take precedence.

I don't necessarily live in an area where I expect people around me to behave. Most people do and I have some good neighbors, but its also a rural area with a drug problem.

I also don't want surveillance to protect me though. Its my job to protect myself, and ideally to be part of a community that looks out for each other. It isn't the governments responsibility to protect me if said protection comes at the expense of my own freedoms.

I don't want to be a rat in a cage just so I can feel safe.

In the political alignment chart, authoritarianism falls on y axis, whereas left/right is x axis. This explains why you find people from both sides supporting it. They're essentially the same side as far as this topic is concerned.

I've often been annoyed by the left/right divide being spoken about as linear. Its always felt more circular to me, you go far enough to the led or the right and its hard to tell the two sides apart.

Authoritarianism as a second axis is interesting, though I don't know what the opposite would be. Communism, the actual idea with effectively no one in charge? If so, in practice those extremes seem to end up in the same place, one or a few people in charge of everyone else with a very tight grip on power.

I agree that extremists of all stripes are troublesome for various reasons. The sibling comment by `odo1242` already answers the y-axis question. I want to note that these are idealizations, and may not perfectly map to the parties labeling themselves as such.

> may not perfectly map to the parties labeling themselves as such.

Well that's for sure. In the US I don't see the Democratic as liberal, nor the Republican party as conservative based on policies they promote.

In the political compass, the two axes are liberal/conservative and authoritarian/libertarian. So it would be “libertarian”. This includes philosophies like anarcho-capitalism (bottom right) as well.

protect-the-children and catch-the-criminal is a lot more tangible to most people than the concept of privacy in public or digital spaces

they may not be asking for it.. but once you make it a yes/no question and the public has to decide, they will support it blindly

Looks at the current president/federal gov’t - that used to be the case, but doesn’t seem to be anymore?

That would depend on how you define "pro surveillance." I've talked with plenty of people who support surveillance cameras in public space, are fine with government agencies purchasing private data that would require a warrant for them to collect on their own, and regularly prefer convenience features even when I have tried to share the privacy concerns with how they work.

People can choose whatever they want, my goal isn't to make people want more privacy. I rarely talk about privacy issues with someone and hear them agree or be concerned enough to think twice, they tend to just laugh it off when they talk about something and then immediately see ads for it.

It's typically labelled "tough on crime" or "pro police"

I really dislike such politically motivated names. People do generally use those terms to promote surveillance, but I can 100% support strong policing (meaning well funded police investigations and community outreach) without abandoning my own rights.

I do want police to be able to investigate potential crimes that our society collectively agreed we don't want to happen. I don't want to give up my rights to privacy, protections against search and seizure, etc.

Both perspectives are inherently political in nature, the nomenclature used is simply representative of the origin perspective.

"Pro police" and "tough on crime" don't accurately describe a view that is actually pro surveillance.

The two former terms are political in nature because they don't accurately describe what they are supporting and instead attempt to put lipstick on a pig, as it were. Sure you could argue that "pro surveillance" is political, and technically any term can be made political, but it does describe the actions being promoted.

I agree, because we share a desire to protect privacy rights. But the topic itself is political, regardless of position or the supposed validity of that position. Fighting for privacy rights is a political position.

Oh, I sure have. It’s not all ignorance, unfortunately.

I've met at least 1 pro flock camera person. On the grounds that they helps police fight crime.

With your feet in the air and your head on the ground ...

Larry Ellison? Alex Karp?

Ad Googlers: Who was the guy sitting next to Trump and Musk lately? The title AI Zar goes to whom exactly?

everyone who posses knowledge of the level of surveillance they are subjected to and does nothing about it is implicitly pro surveillance

I'm not a big fan of the "silence is violence" view. Are we really going to blame looming surveillance dystopia on people who are working 60 hour weeks to heal the sick, address world hunger, or care for young children because they didn't become privacy activists?

Is that typical of people who hold this view?

Every time I mention working on privacy laws like GDPR on USA level I get heavily downvoted and attacked - so not only you've met people who are "pro surveillance", a lot of HNers that say otherwise will aggressively fight against legal frameworks that punish engineers and business leads that collect unnecessary data.

As soon as you'll put out a concrete proposal, you'll get massacred for being "anti business".

Any opinion online about anything that involves large corporations is almost entirely astroturfing.

In my experience, the pro surveillance people are many times just rural folk that are extremely right wing. They think that these technologies will narrowly be applied to whatever minority they dislike while having a huge blind spot about how this will directly apply to themselves as well over a longer time span. That exact scenario is how it also plays out currently with social welfare where they will demonize minorities that use social welfare while sucking on the teat of the government for everything from their farms to their healthcare.

That's sort of wildly stereotypical.

You can find a ton of urbanites/suburbanites who want surveillance to ticket speeders, reckless driving, loud exhausts, etc. And they're out buying Ring cameras and alarm systems because they're worried about house/car break-ins and theft.

And if you take a radical online urbanite leftist and start talking about right-wingers sending rape and death threats to women/minorities, and the kind of online communities that breed those kinds of people, you will likely find sudden enthusiasm for surveillance.

I tend to assume that regardless of political affiliation, pro-surveillance mindset comes from blind trust in the institutions doing surveillance, whether that's the government or google. This is often driven by ignorance and/or a failure to reason about implications of large-scale systems, rather than any particular political ideology. I think at least in the US, the cold war and our electoral system and culture's totalizing nature has conditioned us into drastically overemphasizing ideology as a factor in people's decisions and reasoning, especially of our outgroups. This tendency, kind of a groupwise variant of what's called the Fundamental Attribution Error, is a common failure of human reasoning, but this culture has exacerbated that tendency to a large and I think detrimental degree. It's why you see so much propaganda focused on painting various preferences, beliefs, and even inborn traits as inherently ideological in nature

I don't know that it is blind trust in institutions.

I think the problem is primarily what you wrote about "outgroups", where once it is the "other" that is targeted, then people support it. They just don't do the math about how that is happening, what institutions are doing it, or how those policies and methods could eventually be turned against them.

And yeah, there's Fundamental Attribution Error at work. Still, I think there's some more narcissism-spectrum-related logic at work where people don't have the self-reflection to consider that conditions they impose on others could wind up getting imposed on them.

> One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.

I think it's three things; (a) They're just being paid not to care, (b) short-termism, and (c) are naively hoping they get to stay in the club on the other end of the surveillance. Hard to convince nearly anyone to give up short term profit for long term societal benefits.

Cynically I worry we are seeing the decline of democracy and our new overlords are seeing that too (many accelerating it). Surveillance is necessary for control. The AI, mass surveillance, and drone combination is getting pretty scary TBH.

I can’t even imagine the dystopia of the future where you are always on camera and due to LLMs you are constantly being monitored- your actions, your purchases, your social relationships, and you are graded as such constantly. We have the technology for this now, so if someone wanted, they could implement the above dystopia today.

It would be like creating an always present omnipotent God.

uniformed services and some kinds of professionals already have agreed to terms on conduct and records. The people who agree to that say "of course" when it comes time to subscribe Everyone Else to the same constraints. That is my own thinking, it might cover some proportion of the cases there...

It feels like resistance to all this money is futile. Just look around here. All of this shit was built by programmers while we bicker over privacy, security, and surveillance endlessly. You can't fight the obscene big tech compensation.

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