Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

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I'm afraid the genie is out of the bottle. ARGUS uses mobile phone sensors. Cameras are becoming almost "too cheap to meter", and too small to notice. Billions of people now walk around with mobile phone cameras, so chances are you're going to be recorded by someone in public, especially as cameras continue to evolve.

It may be some small consolation that consumer cameras are ground level, and decentralized, where as ARGUS is centralized and easier to regulate, but the way people are sharing more and more of their life stream, it's probably going to be possible for organizations that watch social networks to track people's movements.

I wonder if in some ways, this is a return to a kind of prehistoric small tribal life of everyone knowing where everyone is and what they are doing, and if anonymity and privacy of movement that we cherish is somewhat of a later invention at agriculture, and that modern technology is just increasing the size of our tribe.

Two thoughts on this:

1. I think the course to a mass surveillance society is set and inevitable. The culture shift in relation to privacy is evident. Both on the net and offline people gradually get used to the idea of being tracked, observed, analyzed, etc. The virtue of tomorrow is I've done nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide.

2. Google Glass poses an interesting dilemma. I expect it to be as prevalent as smartphones in the next 5 years. Now in this situation how do you frame a question of privacy when virtually everyone is able to live stream and record as they go without anyone knowing about it? Everyone's an agent and when you're out you will be keenly aware of it. It'll be fun to watch how this plays out :)

User iwwr summarized well the problems with the "nothing to hide" argument:

"The ability to gleam private details about people is having some power over them. The entire modern theory of government rests on limiting and dividing up the power of those in power. With mass surveillance, that balance is broken. Not only do we have private details on individuals, that knowledge is held by a small and unaccountable elite, protected by state secrets.

Even if you live completely lawfully and morally and truly have nothing to hide you can either:

1. Unwittingly do something illegal (there are too many laws on the books for anyone to know they are completely innocent); or do something that can be construed as such, since the police and prosecutors can be fallible;

2. Still live in a society where a small group of individuals can exert blackmail and intimidation on a significant proportion of citizens. Even if that power would be rarely used, it creates an environment of fear. People start to be afraid to speak against abuse, those in power stand less for their own scrutiny."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4957864

It's even worse. Since data will be stored almost indefinitely people will be able to be persecuted retroactively for things they did or beliefs they had many years ago, even if those actions or beliefs were en vogue at the time.

The danger and difference is that governments that use these capabilities are dangerous. Not only can they rightly or wrongly harm individuals, they can do so for whole populations.

If you were shunned (rightly or wrongly) by your village for some observed or inferred transgression, you could go somewhere else.

There is no longer somewhere else.

Being ostracized by one's village was often a death sentence. With no mutual protection against wild animals and no stored food, only the hardy would survive.

Unless they were able to get to and integrate with somewhere else.

But now it doesn't matter, because there is no somewhere else.

What if we went the completely opposite way? Forgo ALL privacy? Everyone has access to everyone else's data and metrics. If the genie is all ready out of the bottle, this might be the best outcome.

No, this means that petty street crime, protests, rallys, etc. are being monitored but closed-door talks between politicians, lobbyists, and finance execs are not. It's directly targeting the blue-collar outdoors and protecting the white-collar.

But in reality this isn't about fighting crime even. It's about making money. It's no secret that our wars our dying down. How will the drone manufacturers make money? They re-purpose their inventions for use at home and they'll begin selling them to foreign allies who will re-sell them to foreign enemies. Add to that the tremendous manpower behind these drones and there's billions to be made.

If all privacy is forgone the politicians privacy would be dropped too. While this is of course difficult to enforce (something like Google Glasses that constantly stream? Or even implants?) it would create a society devoid of hidden intentions. Crime would be easily solved as well, and politics would be completely transparent.

I am twisted on this issue, but it is definitely an interesting viewpoint to consider.

In practice, politicians will be exempt 'for security reasons'.

Looks like a classic case of weirdtopia [1] to me.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/

it would create a society devoid of hidden intentions

Like hell it would. People would still find a way to deal in secret.

David Brin's "The Transparent Society" explores this very idea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

"The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy."

I can't recommend "The Light Of Other Days" (Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter) enough for an exploration of this topic. It's a fictional novel where a specific technology gradually erodes privacy to quite an extreme level - It's very interesting speculation in the light of the way that current technology is trending. Great book.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Light-Other-Days-Arthur-Clarke/dp/00...

For the simple reason that not everyone you deal with is altruistic and has your best interests at heart. "anything [said] can and will be used against [the defendant] in the court of public opinion".

Release of all information, without the required changes in human behaviour can only lead to self-censorship on a grand scale as people try and cover all the flaws an blemishes that might result in them not getting promoted (because the other candidates go to the gym more often and lead healthier lives) or getting that mortgage because you like to drink wine a little more than the average person and so your long term health might be put at risk.

The list of possible problems is endless.

You are committing something like the "perfect candidate fallacy".

For a bank, making your future more predictable would likely just result in a different rate on the loan (either higher or lower, but they are interested in writing any loan that they think they can price sufficiently well).

For the job, the candidates with better measurements would likely get promoted faster, but over time, the companies with more meaningful measurements would (should?) be more profitable, and there would probably still be interesting work for people with lesser "stats". If a measurement is leading to higher profitability, there is at least one argument that it is fair.

Even for something like healthcare it shouldn't be that scary, if we (as a society) don't want predicted costs to factor into the availability of health care, then we shouldn't pretend to operate under an insurance scheme.

None of that is to say I have any desire to live in a transparent society.

I was not thinking of perfect candidates but rather having a lot of information that was previously inaccessible to those without means and money offers considerable scope for mischief. Even the most innocuous of habits can be used by those with a grudge or who you are in some way competing with to sow seeds of doubt and cause peers or superiors to question your motives, veracity or trustworthiness.

I think I get what you are saying, I guess I find such petty tyranny intolerable today, so more of it isn't very scary.

(I do realize that it is often a complicated thing to deal with)

The flaws and blemishes are less meaningful if you can see everyone else's flaws and blemishes as well.

Having their own flaws doesn't stop people from punishing others for those same flaws.

In a negative-sum game perhaps. When comparing to someone else who also has flaws or blemishes, or in settings where you risk your own credibility by being a hypocrite, it won't happen.

So if we move in this direction as a society, we'll have to make doubly sure that the total lack of privacy applies to the political and corporate decision makers as much as, or more than, everyone else.

>What if we went the completely opposite way? Forgo ALL privacy? Everyone has access to everyone else's data and metrics. If the genie is all ready out of the bottle, this might be the best outcome.

What good will that do?

For one, the people reading and using other people's data (mega-corporations, states, agencies, etc) are not going to forgo any of THEIR privacy.

So, in effect, you are just arguing "let's all go even more 'naked'".

The more, the better for them.

By "everyone" do you include the government? This always seems to be the big exception. We've moved in the direction of secretive government that wants to know everything about you, which is the opposite of what I'd prefer to see: open, transparent government that respects basic liberties.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Why would you think "we" could do that?

It will always be illegal to fly YOUR drone over the White House. Always. Proceed from there.

I think there's a difference between forgoing privacy when in public and forgoing privacy when in private. Having anybody be able to see me when I'm on a city street is one thing, having anybody be able to see into my bedroom is another.

Yes, when faced with apparently insuperable force, why not just lie down and concede?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

Somebody is saying this is inevitable - and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true. -- Richard Stallman

Whenever and wherever freedom and enlightenment rear their head in the form of specific people and specific insights, they are systematically fought. By all sorts of specific people for all sorts of specific reasons -- but not by laws of nature, or the laws of progress or whatever is dreamed up. Whatever road we're currently going down, it's one of many possible ones. And every step along it is made of people, decisions, and responsibility.

Funny you mention that. It does not work.

http://youtu.be/q3Ypefy31K4

Disgusting.

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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