One of the sadly funny things about watching the politics of this play out is that the folks that traditionally blame the government are all up in arms about the government tracking you. But they seem fine with corporations tracking you. The other bunch, which traditionally blame corporations are all up in arms about corporations tracking you. But they have no problem with the government tracking you.
And for all of that fighting, it never really mattered. The fact is it doesn't matter who tracks you, the information is available to all parties. You're being tracked.
Cross-reference this pile of tracking information to cell phone records, which can locate you within a few dozen meters at all times, and you have a surveillance system Orwell himself could never have dreamed of. It's beyond any state-ran security system ever put into place in the history of the world. Yet we all sit idly around as if none of it matters.
And for all of that political fighting about privacy and anonymity, it never amounted to anything.
Amazing.
Side note: As a movie buff, I've seen lots of dystopian movies set into some far future where the state has taken control over people's lives. Our hero somehow manages to fight the system.
What they never really cover is what happened. How exactly did people sit around and let this happen? Didn't they see this terrible future approaching?
Now I have the answer. Yes, some folks saw what was happening, but the vast majority didn't see an immediate negative impact in their lives, so they didn't care. The rest of us were just -- overwhelmed by events. Threats came from multiple and unseen directions and kept coming until we couldn't fight them. People who owned the data were careful not to share the scariness of what they were doing with the common man. Privacy and anonymity advocates were labeled scaremongers.
> But they seem fine with corporations tracking you.
Not only that. Govt also at some point figured out that if it use private companies to do the tracking for them, they can bypass all kinds of "nasty" constitutional barriers.
Govt agencies for ex. have tap into Choicepoint. How they use it I don't know exactly but it's there.
EDIT: I often slightly modify my name or other info when submitting to these companies and then see when it comes back later as spam. For a while a had a spreadsheet for each variation, but now I've given up, maintaining it.
While I'm not happy about the idea, I submit that we've tipped over a scale within technical surveillance - the same irresistible forces that are reshaping the content industries are hard at work reshaping our concepts of available privacy. It's just too cheap & easy, and getting much easier, and people want to do it (badly).
Part of a subsequent response should be transparency. For example, an organization accumulating health-related data on you should not be able to in surreptitiously influence (directly or through data brokerage) your ability to get health insurance.
Such information asymmetry, in the hands of large, powerful self-interests, is something we should seek to mitigate.
Seems like the best way to combat this "always on" surveillance is not by hiding signaling behavior, but by generating noise. If you intentionally create lots of bad data, you reduce the value of the data to the people buying it and using it.
And for all of that fighting, it never really mattered. The fact is it doesn't matter who tracks you, the information is available to all parties. You're being tracked.
Cross-reference this pile of tracking information to cell phone records, which can locate you within a few dozen meters at all times, and you have a surveillance system Orwell himself could never have dreamed of. It's beyond any state-ran security system ever put into place in the history of the world. Yet we all sit idly around as if none of it matters.
And for all of that political fighting about privacy and anonymity, it never amounted to anything.
Amazing.
Side note: As a movie buff, I've seen lots of dystopian movies set into some far future where the state has taken control over people's lives. Our hero somehow manages to fight the system.
What they never really cover is what happened. How exactly did people sit around and let this happen? Didn't they see this terrible future approaching?
Now I have the answer. Yes, some folks saw what was happening, but the vast majority didn't see an immediate negative impact in their lives, so they didn't care. The rest of us were just -- overwhelmed by events. Threats came from multiple and unseen directions and kept coming until we couldn't fight them. People who owned the data were careful not to share the scariness of what they were doing with the common man. Privacy and anonymity advocates were labeled scaremongers.