Re:The ‘Preserving American Privacy Act’ would ban weaponizi...
by InclinedPlane on Friday February 15, 2013 @11:55PM
(#5230449)
As Stalin once said "quantity has a quality all its own", oddly apt for this situation.
It's one thing when public observation by the authorities is sporadic and rare, it's another thing entirely when technology makes it possible to track, record, and collate every single second of your life spent outside private property.
Imagine for a second what this might look like. If every time you were "in public" there was a video record, an audio recording, and a voice transcript (carefully filtered so that it was only of conversations that could be overheard, for example). We expect that when we are in public there is some loss of privacy, but not to that degree, not utterly. Such complete surveillance could track people's movements and relationships which would make many details of otherwise private information a lot easier to determine.
This is not only disturbing, it's a massive explosion in police power. Imagine how difficult it would be to avoid police monitoring if every doorway in all of the major metro areas and major highways are tracked by drones. Even if you were able to be in disguise a combination of kinesthetic analysis of your walking gait and physical characteristics and sheer process of elimination would put you back in the spotlight quickly.
Now, this sort of scenario isn't overly likely in the US, yet, but we should be sensitive of the fact that there are phase changes and qualitative differences that accrue due to mere quantitative changes in capabilities.
It's one thing when public observation by the authorities is sporadic and rare, it's another thing entirely when technology makes it possible to track, record, and collate every single second of your life spent outside private property.
Imagine for a second what this might look like. If every time you were "in public" there was a video record, an audio recording, and a voice transcript (carefully filtered so that it was only of conversations that could be overheard, for example). We expect that when we are in public there is some loss of privacy, but not to that degree, not utterly. Such complete surveillance could track people's movements and relationships which would make many details of otherwise private information a lot easier to determine.
This is not only disturbing, it's a massive explosion in police power. Imagine how difficult it would be to avoid police monitoring if every doorway in all of the major metro areas and major highways are tracked by drones. Even if you were able to be in disguise a combination of kinesthetic analysis of your walking gait and physical characteristics and sheer process of elimination would put you back in the spotlight quickly.
Now, this sort of scenario isn't overly likely in the US, yet, but we should be sensitive of the fact that there are phase changes and qualitative differences that accrue due to mere quantitative changes in capabilities.