I've been thinking a lot about this. At dinner parties, I'll often hear friends joke, "don't pay any attention to that Siri!" There's this awareness that we are being surveilled and a kind of irreverence to it. It's like "I'm not doing anything wrong so listen all you like!" I have to admit I feel some of that myself. If surveillance is being used to find and capture actual bad guys (terrorists, sex traffickers, murders etc.) I feel like by all means go ahead. But if it starts to be used for the examples you mentioned (catching women looking for an abortion), that's not ok. So the question in my mind is: how to we ensure personal data is being used for good, not evil? Which governments can/can't be trusted with this technology?
Exactly. From my research, unfortunately these surveillance technologies catch very few terrorists and criminals, and are mostly used as an excuse to better control the population (I'll publish detailed articles on this later), and the remedies allowed by democratic systems, while better than nothing, are too slow, expensive and with random results to represent effective counterpowers.
In my opinion, the solution lies first and foremost in the use of technologies that concretely prevent governments from engaging in mass surveillance ("can't be evil" is better than "don't be evil"), and possibly in updating constitutions so that fundamental rights natively take digital tools into account.
How do you feel about privatizing surveillance and passing it off to the government? For instance, according one NYT article, Google and Apple can identify sex trafficking offenders by scanning the photos saved to our phones.
“Images of children being exploited or sexually abused are flagged by technology giants millions of times each year. In 2021, Google alone filed over 600,000 reports of child abuse material."
“In 2021, the CyberTipline reported that it had alerted authorities to “over 4,260 potential new child victims.”
Identifying 4,000 child abuse victims seems a worthwhile use of that scanning technology to me, and it's something almost inherent to the tech companies (rather than some large expensive slow thing from the government?). I'd be curious to know your thoughts! (And I look forward to your next article!)
Yes I think it is a very worrying trend, which is increasingly supported by another worrying trend: forcing private players to do the government's work for free... and even threatening them with heavy fines if they don't comply, which is a form of servitude.
I've been thinking a lot about this. At dinner parties, I'll often hear friends joke, "don't pay any attention to that Siri!" There's this awareness that we are being surveilled and a kind of irreverence to it. It's like "I'm not doing anything wrong so listen all you like!" I have to admit I feel some of that myself. If surveillance is being used to find and capture actual bad guys (terrorists, sex traffickers, murders etc.) I feel like by all means go ahead. But if it starts to be used for the examples you mentioned (catching women looking for an abortion), that's not ok. So the question in my mind is: how to we ensure personal data is being used for good, not evil? Which governments can/can't be trusted with this technology?
Exactly. From my research, unfortunately these surveillance technologies catch very few terrorists and criminals, and are mostly used as an excuse to better control the population (I'll publish detailed articles on this later), and the remedies allowed by democratic systems, while better than nothing, are too slow, expensive and with random results to represent effective counterpowers.
In my opinion, the solution lies first and foremost in the use of technologies that concretely prevent governments from engaging in mass surveillance ("can't be evil" is better than "don't be evil"), and possibly in updating constitutions so that fundamental rights natively take digital tools into account.
How do you feel about privatizing surveillance and passing it off to the government? For instance, according one NYT article, Google and Apple can identify sex trafficking offenders by scanning the photos saved to our phones.
“Images of children being exploited or sexually abused are flagged by technology giants millions of times each year. In 2021, Google alone filed over 600,000 reports of child abuse material."
“In 2021, the CyberTipline reported that it had alerted authorities to “over 4,260 potential new child victims.”
Identifying 4,000 child abuse victims seems a worthwhile use of that scanning technology to me, and it's something almost inherent to the tech companies (rather than some large expensive slow thing from the government?). I'd be curious to know your thoughts! (And I look forward to your next article!)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html
Yes I think it is a very worrying trend, which is increasingly supported by another worrying trend: forcing private players to do the government's work for free... and even threatening them with heavy fines if they don't comply, which is a form of servitude.
See https://disruptive-horizons.com/p/kyc-aml-destroying-world