If people are generally willing to accept the axiom that information is power, I am continually baffled as to why they can't understand how reckless it is to allow all of this capture, sale and sharing of the intimate details of their lives.

How can we possibly defend ourselves or have any control over our lives while giving this much power to profit motive corporations?

It is just pure madness.

> Contact tracing

If only that was even happening. South Korea did it, and they made people who were exposed to covid stay home and check in regularly with an app. If we'd had the sense to do that here we probably would've saved tens of thousands of lives.

Who are the regular people asserting their first amendment rights who are being hunted down? I haven't seen that. I have seen a bunch of insurrectionists having these tools used on them, and that's frankly a laudable use of these surveillance tools.

If you're using a peaceful protest as a cover for looting, honestly I enthusiastically encourage that 'they' hunt you down, because you're just a vanilla criminal at that point. That's an ideal outcome for the justice system.

Hundreds of thousands. The US is currently at >628,000 COVID deaths. US citizens traveling abroad, or people traveling inside the US probably account for a significant number of COVID deaths outside of the US, but those are much harder to count.

Legislation, regulation, and litigation seem the most viable paths forward.

Civil disobediance, hacking, and sabotage might also play a role.

I'm leaning increasingly toward a scorched-earth approach.

No need to be sorry since it's the way the world is headed now. This will soon be the norm. I won't be surprised in 5-10 years those you mentioned will be even more expanded and current laws can't keep up. There's even recent talk of a national ID system in the US for instance which would expand it even more. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/voting-...

don't be sorry, it makes me sad that we don't see more rants like that ;)

Also, The Gov. don't need warrants for stuff stored in the cloud if it is 6 months or older. They just have so many ways to get all of your data.

Use RFID blocking wallets.

Pay with cash where feasible.

Don't run google/ios services on your phone.

Freeze your credit reports and check them annually.

Stop visiting social media.

Disable ontrac/onstar crap in your legally owned cars.

Use Tor Browser.

--

Privacy is not difficult, it just takes a bit of effort and discipline.

- Edward Snowden

Sounds to me like privacy is difficult.

AFAICT there's little to no evidence to tie advancing technology to authoritarianism or otherwise diminished civil liberties.

Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and any number of others through out history have created repressive regimes without modern technology. And in the West we are a freer and more just society than we ever have been.

Where's the evidence for this? As pointed out above, we're already being tracked, and it doesn't seem to have stopped all crime, or even cut it down in a noticeable way. As for being recorded in public, that hasn't even even stopped 7-11s from being robbed, let alone preventing or resolving all crime everywhere.

> AFAICT there's little to no evidence to tie advancing technology to authoritarianism or otherwise diminished civil liberties.

Do you remember how there was a time when having a scan of your naked body examined by a stranger at the airport was considered at least mildly invasive? That was just a few years ago. Now, we're used to it. That's a small example of how fast humans adapt to preserve their sense that everything is fine. The amount of surveillance we consider normal today would have seemed oppressive not long ago.

> Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and any number of others through out history have created repressive regimes without modern technology.

It's true that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did not use GPS tracking against their citizens, because (being dead) they didn't have the option to use it. But electronic surveillance has been the tool of every country's secret police dating back to the invention of the telephone, so I'm not sure what you mean.

All of the people in jail that were caught by surveillance that can't commit crimes is a good piece of evidence. Otherwise, it's hard to prove anything about crime because we can't do double blind experiments in the real world.

Either way, we are talking about theoretical perfect surveillance. Every crime would be caught on 4k HD and the criminals location tracked. Hard to imagine how you'd get away with a crime in that scenario.

>Do you remember how there was a time when having a scan of your naked body examined by a stranger at the airport was considered at least mildly invasive? That was just a few years ago. Now, we're used to it. That's a small example of how fast humans adapt to preserve their sense that everything is fine. The amount of surveillance we consider normal today would have seemed oppressive not long ago.

TSA seems perfectly happy to fondle your junk instead. So whatever we've lost there isn't due to technology. If anything technology helps because it gives us a choice between naked body examination and junk fondling.

>It's true that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did not use GPS tracking against their citizens, because (being dead) they didn't have the option to use it. But electronic surveillance has been the tool of every country's secret police dating back to the invention of the telephone, so I'm not sure what you mean.

The point is that repression and technology are orthogonal issues. You can have brutally repressive regimes with no modern technology. And, as I said before, the trend seems to be away from repressive regimes so there's little reason to think technology contributes to their existence.

Some cities have brought these technologies under oversight. The technologies themselves aren't inherently harmful, their misuse is.

Credit cards that track your spending and movement

Totally optional

Contact tracing

What is this even doing here

Daily massive data breaches

Laws are changing to address this from both the supply and demand side.

Every modern car has built in GPS tracking that is uploaded to the dealer and stored

Self-enrolled surveillance is indeed a huge societal problem, but cars aren't on the top of the list. We are all addicted to the GPS tracker in our pocket.

Three letter agency programs to capture as much metadata and content as possible

Encryption is on the rise.

Hash bashed copyright scanning enforcement on your local devices

Not yet, and maybe not ever if we don't stand for it.

this is already a dystopian nightmare and there is no way to go back.

It's not just that you're wrong about this, what grinds my gears is fatalist comments like this that are actively selling fatalism. Don't listen to this devil on your shoulder. The reality of the future is decided by action now.