Re:What does privacy mean under surveillance capitalism?
by roenxi on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @03:44PM
(#25511007)
When talking about issues like freedom and privacy it is useful to distinguish between the government/political organisations and everyone else.
This is because a politically active group knowing your religion could reasonably lead to being murdered or expelled from a country on a mass scale (eg, the world's rich history of kicking Jews out of various places [0]). That could happen anywhere because change is quick. A for-profit corporation knowing my religion ranges from a non-issue to inconvenient except that it is likely to leak to political actors.
The government moving in to fix these issues has a pretty solid risk of doing more harm than good. Countries who had bad SARS scares tended to do well at handling the coronavirus, and other countries tended to do poorly. Similarly I really only trust the European governments to handle privacy at all well because they still have recent scars from what happens if the government can discriminate easily between its citizens.
The people who are of most concern in the privacy debate are much more likely to be hiding out amongst the vocal "oh no there is disinformation" crowd than a credit card company or medical insurer.
This is because a politically active group knowing your religion could reasonably lead to being murdered or expelled from a country on a mass scale (eg, the world's rich history of kicking Jews out of various places [0]). That could happen anywhere because change is quick. A for-profit corporation knowing my religion ranges from a non-issue to inconvenient except that it is likely to leak to political actors.
The government moving in to fix these issues has a pretty solid risk of doing more harm than good. Countries who had bad SARS scares tended to do well at handling the coronavirus, and other countries tended to do poorly. Similarly I really only trust the European governments to handle privacy at all well because they still have recent scars from what happens if the government can discriminate easily between its citizens.
The people who are of most concern in the privacy debate are much more likely to be hiding out amongst the vocal "oh no there is disinformation" crowd than a credit card company or medical insurer.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Expulsions_of_Jews