I've just sent this link to a friend with a comment which I consider too uncouth to post here. Needless to say, this stuff scares the shit out of me.

I'm far from being a tech Luddite but if this stuff continues to go the way its going without any public discussion and oversight and strict concomitant regulation then we humans will effectively lose all of our autonomy—we'll cease to be humans and become automatons who are scared of our own shadows.

Essentially, this tech has the potential to relegate the traditional authoritarian police state, the Stasi et al back into the kindergarten class—we won't know what's struck us if or when this happens.

There are evil techie shits in this world who dream up evil stuff like this, we normal techies need to rally against them before it's too late.

This is a prime example of why the study of ethics has to become a major and significant part of all science and engineering courses. It won't change human behavior but mandating it into courses will ensure that everyone understands the implications of their research and work.

That's to say that in future no techie would ever be able to use the Nuremberg Defense after they've caused the shit to hit the fan.

Blaming engineers for what is essentially a political issue will not solve the problem. There will always be smart people willing to work for either a lot of money or in the name of national defense.

If you want a change, work on and fix the political system. Get laws passed that will prevent this, and get oversight put in place that would prevent the under-the-table surveillance that seems to be more and more previlant.

No, absolving engineers from responsibility is the wrong move. People are responsible for what they make: hiding behind "oh it's the system's fault not mine!" is morally bankrupt. It's literally being a coward.

US is way behind europe in consumer protection which is ironic as US used to lead in this.

And there will always be strong young men willing to commit more immediately tangible atrocities and brutalize the weak, for money or national defense.

What would techies rallying against them even do compared to anyone else? I mean sinister half-mirror surveillance shit like this is bad but I don't see how them being against it is relevant to stopping it. Adversarial patterns maybe but that doesn't seem very effective as a counter.

Especially when sinister mass surveillance approaches tend to be big, dumb, and not caring about accuracy because it is incidental to their goals. We have been screaming at them about how fighting cryptography only hurts yourself and that their use of facial recognition at scale is illiterate but they don't care.

Techies like is HN users need to be more willing to accept less pay in exchange for it making the problem worse

Holy hell.

I used to be mildly pro-5G and vocally contra people contra to it, on the grounds that all the objections I've seen were a variation of "I don't understand what non-ionizing radiation is". But I see I didn't think far enough about what's possible with that tech - therefore I failed to apply my usual heuristic ("anything that's technologically possible and economically feasible will be attempted, no matter how immoral it is").

I'll be reevaluating my position on this (for what little it's worth now). Thanks for bringing it up!

It is kind of sad to see. The carriers saw "hey all these people are giving away WiFi for free and not giving us money", so they fixed the glitch and just made their own version of WiFi that they get money for when you use. Imagine a world where the WiFi alliance said "fuck it, 802.11 is dead, we're going to use modern technology" and just developed 5G technology but in an open way that anyone could use? Things would be a lot better. But here we are, with backwards compatibility for 802.11b that eliminates any chance of ever getting good performance (except in an RF test chamber), and so companies are just routing around the damage and turning WiFi-alike into a profit center.

At one point the mobile carriers were just planning to just flat-out steal the unlicensed band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_in_unlicensed_spectrum

I haven't heard any arguments about how 5G is going to come to rural areas, however. I think the backhaul requirements are pretty heavy. So in Manhattan, probably going to work out quite well. In the middle of nowhere? We'll see about that.

>I haven't heard any arguments about how 5G is going to come to rural areas, however. I think the backhaul requirements are pretty heavy. So in Manhattan, probably going to work out quite well. In the middle of nowhere? We'll see about that.

Presumably it will come there by being built? Rural is a crap market that only sort of gets serviced, I don't see how anyone can make a good faith argument that rural users should hold out for... I don't even know what. There's political momentum around 5g which means that there's money on the table for a rural 5g rollout. Why would any industry player waste their time laying cable in the countryside more than they have to? 5g in cities is promising not for the reasons you mentioned but simply because it's a work around for local monopoly laws.

Starlink is probably Rural's best bet.

What's wrong with 802.11?

Nothing at all! 802.11ax is fast and efficient!

Listen-before-talk instead of CDMA (or better).

That's scary. We're handing over great powers to the governments/corporates, needless to say it will be used against us.

Agreed. can we just live in a world where we can have a little bit of privacy. I'm OK using a card to pay for a journey, if that means it takes me a few seconds longer to take it out of my wallet.

Alot of this kind of technology is implemented without your consent, take facial recognition in airports. You have to go through the process with no easy alternative.

The comment 'if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about' is so old and such a weak argument. People have fought for years to defend the freedoms of people and it is being thrown away and disregarded by corporations and governments.

How quaint. Extrapolate 100 years into the future... we live in a zoo ruled by AI and very few people if anyone in charge. No one can escape or make any meaningful choices of any consequence. Maybe they will partially be in a hive mind and maybe not.

And along the way, we were always saying “ooh, this will be used against us someday”. Well of course all this will be built and “used against us”. How you gonna stop progress?

As an individual, I can decide to not work on such things. Didn't Google employees take a stand against something similar? and Google had to backtrack.

I not only understand this sentiment but also live myself by these rules. But for every person who refuses to work on this type of tech there are hundreds ready to fill the gap and happy to defend and gaslight critics.

We've been playing this game since decades[1] and the pace has been accelerating (and keeps on doing so). There is no way to stop this because the state always plays the long game, and the odds are rigged against us.

[1] Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society" (pdf) https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...

[2] James C. Scott "The Art of Not being Governed" (pdf) https://libcom.org/files/Art.pdf

[3] James C. Scott "Seeing Like a State" https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-state / pdf: https://libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20Jam...

I will always upvote James C. Scott. More people on this site should read his stuff

Agree. I haven’t read all of Seeing Like a State yet, but it does contain quite a few hints about how to protect yourself from the power of states.

For example, states like to make their subjects “legible” to the state in specific ways, so deliberately becoming illegible is a defense mechanism.

Personally, I have been enjoying that the facial mask has surely been making facial recognition more challenging, though of course this is short-lived.

Not only have we been playing this game for decades, because of the ratcheting effect of so many privacy infringements, it's almost impossible to go back to a happier time.

If someone else works on it, then it will still happen. And what then?

Often there's a talent penalty to morally questionable projects.

companies are perfectly capable of compartmentalizing information and also adapt/evolve their messaging so it never looks as bad from the inside. this works for both very large companies and start-ups.

And rational, smart employees can still be gamed with the simplest of tricks, e.g. "What the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove." -- Robert Anton Wilson https://www.seriouswonder.com/raw-what-the-thinker-thinks-th...

That just means they're crude and oppressive as opposed to smooth and oppressive. If you're expecting the market to fix this problem, it won't.

It depends on how you frame the "morally questionable projects".

There's no talent shortage for 5G.

I see no talent shortage for special forces that go in foreign countries to maim and kill all in the name of freedom and democracy.

Of course it will happen. It's like atomic energy, some physicists decided to not work on it and some did work on it. There's nothing we can do about it.

AI can’t even drive a car in the snow, I’d give it more than a 100 years before I’m in a zoo made by one.

> "this will change the world and bring internet to rural areas

while the reality is that if it is difficult (and expensive) to deliver internet to rural areas using 3G/4G, it will be more so with 5G with its higher frequencies...

Yeah, it's a sham, yet:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-wireless-trump/trump-...

Fascinating read thus far ( I have only gotten through device-free localization ). Thank you for sharing these.

I am somewhat concerned that even that overview paper lists law enforcement as potential future customers. The target audience is clearly well-defined.

At least in the usa, the elderly are a severely under served community. Predicting an emergency based on observed biometrics would be incredibly useful to many of them and these sorts of dismissals are exactly why the digital privacy movement has increasingly lost steam with regular people.

I'm not contesting that these technologies and services aren't also going to be used for dubious purposes but the idea that they have no social value is a meme for privileged people who earn enough to be dismissive of the potential savings.

> Predicting an emergency based on observed biometrics would be incredibly useful to many of them and these sorts of dismissals are exactly why the digital privacy movement has increasingly lost steam with regular people.

Nothing about predicting an emergency is incompatible with privacy. It could be done by your own device under your own control without disclosing the data to any third party. The only necessary third party communication would be the call for help, which itself would only happen in an emergency and not under normal conditions.

But that isn't how these things are implemented. Instead they typically upload your sensitive personal information to a corporation, which not only has no benefit to you, it commonly gets used against you as they use it to influence your behavior in ways that increase their profits (i.e. increase your costs).

Having a high resolution radio thing which is completely under your control can be an interesting feature. Having a high resolution radio thing which is in your living space but under someone else's control is an outrageous privacy violation that most people would strongly object to if they understood the implications. Which makes it little surprise that the purveyors prefer that people not understand the implications.

My point was that monitoring elderly people will be an early PR justification for mass, omnipresent biometric surveillance. And they'll act like it's some big surprise discovery that they're just now making even though it's been the main plan all along.

Plus, why would you need omnipresent biometric surveillance to do what localized monitoring could do just fine? By all means, use local mm wave radar if that's useful, but why impose large area biometric surveillance onto hundreds of millions of people without transparent opportunities for consensus?

And my point was that your comment came off as dismissive towards the topic of the justification. The parallel point was that presenting this sort of dismissal might fly on Hacker News but it's also why mainstream support has been iffy. I'm not arguing that the entire apparatus is good simply because it can service the elderly, I'm arguing that having a dismissive attitude towards these types of micro-issues, like helping the elderly, is why the movement has been losing steam with the general public. The general public has general needs and dismissing services because of lofty abstract principles might make for appealing tech-centric arguments but it totally fails to provide an alternate solution to the original problem. The topic is political in nature and so political desires can't be ignored or else support will wane.

Stating concerns about the ever increasing erosion of our rights is not a dismissal towards the elderly. Or the children. Or victims of crime. Or people living in the fear of terrorism. Or whatever other excuse that's used to justify abuses of power.

> At least in the usa, the elderly are a severely under served community.

A statement that requires qualification to be meaningful. Medicare, Medicare HMOs, and Medicare/Medicaid dual coverage add up to giving elders better healthcare coverage than any other demographic in the US.

Falling, and the injuries / changes in quality of life that falling brings, is a serious issue for seniors. https://www.ncoa.org/news/resources-for-reporters/get-the-fa...

A few years ago, I worked for a small startup looking to use wearable devices to detect early changes in gait as a means to effectively deliver early intervention techniques. The science around the topic is solid - there is good research backing which parameters of gait are most predictive and what therapies are most effective for any given scenario.

The problem we always encountered was compliance. Customers (senior living facilities, insurance agencies, etc) want to know that the devices are being used. Seniors are notoriously slow to adopt tech, and adding another device to daily life is the last thing most seniors that we spoke to wanted to deal with.

We got to interview with YC for this idea but were rejected. Skimming the companies from that batch I later found https://www.totemic.com/ They use back-skatter technologies to provide a compliance-free fall monitoring system. After spending two years in the problem space, I knew a superior solution when I saw it.

Making a throwaway account isn't license to be rude to people.

Do better.

not sure how pervasive biometric monitoring is supposed to address elder abuse, but "elderly are a severely under served community" is perhaps the most historically rootless and wrong-yet-unfalsifiable thing i've read this week. 'bad things happen to some old people' is not contrary evidence and has nothing to do with the medical attention and resources available for the elderly in our society in both absolute and relative terms.

The example was already given, biometric monitoring could be used to help elderly people who want to maintain their freedom instead of being shoe-horned into a home but it could also be used to decrease staffing costs as well if it can be done in a non-invasive (in the medical sense) fashion. I'm not sure what your grudge against the elderly is or why it's hard to comprehend that as people age their medical needs increase but nothing about this is news to people who work in a field that services older demographics. This whole line of dialogue is a red herring though because, regardless of if you agree or not, the point was that this sort of technology has real use cases that are driven by consumer demand. You can romanticize these experiences all you want but the reason that tech like this finds consumers is because it's meeting real needs. This idea that the populace at large is only okay with data collection because they don't understand it is just a way for privacy advocates to sidestep responsibility for any useful tech that their policies might render impossible.

You could also tag bad cardiological readings for a bad credit score. Elders would really love that. They cannot even hold back with their demand. This is why you hear screams of joy if you mention 5G in homes for the elderly.

This is at the "think of the children" level of argumentation.

Give them an apple watch, it'll do a better job as an emergency device, without compromising everyone's privacy, and at a fraction of the cost.