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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

And so it begins.

There is a new age coming, one where we realise surveillance is ubiquitous and more importantly carries benefits for us as well as loss of what we thought of as privacy.

This is probably a good thing. These blimps will not be the last of atmospheric and LEO orbitals that will criss cross the globe and provide always-on services we suddenly cannot live without.

We do need to manage who holds and uses information that relates to us personally, but in the end our children will always know where they and their friends are, will be able to look at any point on the globe instantly (want to see the giraffe running across the Serengeti right now) and the losses, well, we will deal with them. The benefits are going to be huge.

Tim Berners-Lee, look what you started.

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Why are you assuming this is automatically a surveillance tool? It's not a drone with the explicit intent to search for something. It's a way to get Internet to people.

High resolution ground photography and mobile location tracking came to mind.

Google often cooperates with government and police.

> Google often cooperates with government and police.

Next you're going to tell me that they're considered a legal entity in many countries.

You read my mind.

Government and police are already logging the net. If you think you have any privacy online you haven't been paying enough attention.

They are. And it turned out to be a huge failure, at least here [0].

In any case, you'll have a lot more privacy if you stop using Google services.

[0] http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/23918/denmark-government...

I am not using surveillance as "bad things governments spy on us with" but "side effects of joining billions of people to humanities central nervous system" - all of a sudden the clues and inferences about our lives that previously could only be gleaned by our neighbours (when we left the house, with whom) are on an electronic bulletin board and available to almost anyone who cares to look.

If this takes off, wifi repeaters and solar charging stations will appear in villages and towns, and guess what with that detail each user will hand over position, time and search information - every drop able to glean more about them than the secret polices best efforts.

Our only hope is it is like rain - it surveils the just and unjust alike

Isn't it a bit much to give Berners-Lee credit for this? I was with you up to that point. :)

He was definitely an important step in getting to this point. The WWW is what made the internet mainstream. That and ICQ.

If he hadn't taken that step, somebody else would a bit later. Even Microsoft tried to do their thing.

Microsoft tried to compete with Novell Netware, which was strictly focused on internal corporate network services. it was only much later that Bill Gates noticed the internet and WWW. But if the WWW hadn't existed, most likely MS would have followed the path of AOL and CompuServe, creating a walled garden for subscribers-only. It's unlikely that any corporation would have created the open web like TBL did.

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