I've always hated this argument.

Banning efficiency, of all things, seems counterproductive. If someone (or a government) really cares, they can simply spend the resources to do full-scale surveillance and tracking the old-fashioned way. It's not like we'll refuse to pay for it, given budgets what they are today. Lack of technology didn't stop the surveillance apparatuses of the USSR or East Germany. They just had larger staffs than we do.

Either something is okay, in which case it's okay to do with a machine, or it's not, in which case it's not okay to do at all. If it's okay to tail someone with a police car, it's okay to follow them with a drone. You stop mass surveillance not by making it cost the taxpayer more, but by outlawing mass surveillance and requiring some sort of suspicion or probable cause for each individual case.

People who want to track and surveil others like efficiency, but are in general still capable of hard work. Raising the effort required stops only the most pedestrian violators.

I'm basically writing in agreement with bigiain. I want to specifically look at this quote:

> Either something is okay, in which case it's okay to do with a machine, or it's not, in which case it's not okay to do at all.

Let's reflect that it's fairly easy, in the grand scheme of things, to bring explosives on board an airplane and take it down. The reason that doesn't happen more often isn't because screening procedures are so effective -- it's because very few people want to do that.

Now, people generally don't like the idea that the government, or stores, or unfriendly neighbors, or their daughter's boyfriend, might track their every movement day and night without end. And if you proposed that it should be allowed, you'd poll a lot of "it's not okay to do at all". The reason it's happening now is because it was "okay" before, which led people to do it as soon as it became possible. But, and this is where the cost structure becomes relevant, the reason it was "okay" before is not that society made a considered judgment that this sort of thing should probably be allowed. The issue was never considered at all, because the practice was impossible and therefore considering the issue was pointless. All kinds of things are legal right now only because they can't actually be done, but that's not a compelling argument for letting people do them even if they could be done.

http://archive.boasas.com/?c=59

Automated methods of surveillance also allows for a level of surveillance that might not be possible even with a very large staff. As technologies enable and lower the barrier, more and more businesses and governments are likely to spy/check on people without reason. So it simply isn't true that without technology to aid the would be spies, that surveillance would remain the same or even at a similar level simply due to their diligence.

"I've always hated this argument.

Banning efficiency, of all things, seems counterproductive."

Counter-argument: For many thing the efficiency of enforceability is built into the penalty structure. "The public" accepts - more or less - the current penalties for speeding/parking/general traffic offences. This is in spite of the fact that most of us "speed" when we consider it safe/appropriate, that most of us will stop in a no parking zone briefly if we think we aren't going to inconvenience anybody, that we'll use our better judgement at stop signs or merge lanes or double lines and obstructed roads.

If someone proposed a "better 'cause it's _more efficient_" means of enforcing road rules, where every single infraction was immediately deducted from your bank account - we (the people) would rightly push back and demand a reconsideration of what an "infraction" is, and how much the penalty for an infraction cost. And, indeed, whether implementing such a "super efficient" system is what anybody wants.

Super efficient surveillance is similar. It's now possible in ways that it never was when we wrote the laws regulating it. If you take out a camera and shoot a few shots in a park, you might get a few odd glances, but you're unlikely to get asked to stop unless you're being creepy. If you stand outside schools and take photographs of every child arriving and leaving you'd rightly expect to get asked to explain who you are, what you're doing, and where those photos are going to end up. Even if you're a cop or FBI/NSA operative, I'd expect you to get asked about what case you're working on, who's supervising it, and what probable cause you have to justify invading the privacy of every schoolchild at this school.

These days, it's clear that shopping mall and store security cameras, and wifi base stations sniffing phone wifi IDs, are capable of collecting - and with very little doubt actually collecting right now - much more detailed and accurate data about individuals (including the "think of the children" example earlier - these systems don't discriminate about all the kids hanging out in shopping malls).

Who's being held responsible for that data? Who's tapping the guy with the harddrives full of images and cellphone ID's on the shoulder and saying "Hang on, who are you? On who's authority are you collecting all these images and IDs? Where are they going to end up? Who's signed up to accept legal/financial responsibility if this data is misused or stolen?" Why isn't he being treated with the same suspicion as the guy outside the school with the camera?

Whoa. Once the code is written and so long as the rest of the infrastructure is in place, it can be done wholesale. Cheaply. In perpetuity. To anyone.

To do so sans technology requires an undue amount of resource. Ie the energy required to surveil 1x1 personally vs algorithmically is substantial and one is much more feasible than the other (especially if you don't read the TOS - and who does?)

All that said, though, I think we are mostly on the same page: you have to accept responsibility for your actions in public. I think where we differ though is that the majority of people don't have a clue wtf is actually going on.

PS the argument doesn't hate you. It's willing to take any and all input, process it, and maybe come out changed. It loves, respects, and thrives on you.

Responeded to your comment pre-edit.

If the U.S. Government wants to know who is communicating with whom in a world without modern technology, it can hire n government workers to sit at a desk and write down the address information on all the envelopes passing through USPS in a day. Expensive? Yes. Impossible - to the entity that fought WWII, landed on the moon, and continues to maintain a pretty much stable country of 300 million people? No. Our government may suck at cost-efficiency, but it is great at throwing resources at things that scale O(n), like the number of postal workers required to handle n letters.

There are good arguments to be made that it's not the government's place to know who is communicating with whom anyway, so it shouldn't be allowed to. If this is the case, than it shouldn't be allowed to by any means.

But how does a shopping mall not have the right to watch people move through its store? If it's wrong to watch the EM signals people emit as the move through, then is it also wrong to watch the light they reflect? I've seen employees doing traffic analysis in museums pretty frequently - in fact art museum security guards do it all the time. They could do the same in a mall. They could even park an employee with a clipboard on the second level and map out people's movements between stores below. Focus on one store at a time, find out where all the people leaving that store go. You'd still get the same result - the general trends of how people move around the stores, based on our evolutionary "tracking" ability - the Orwellian step of correlating neural impulses from the eye as belonging to the same object in different positions. Which is exactly what this cell phone tracking system does, except with MAC addresses instead of faces and hairstyles.

I say this to emphasize that not all tracking is bad. Correlating different sensory input with past and future inputs is a large part of being human. Hell, in a small town 50 years ago, the general store owner probably knew you and what you've bought before and who your friends are. The post office worker could recognize a scandalous pattern of letters are tell your family about it. That's way more invasive than this. Involvement of machinery is not the difference between good and bad tracking.

"I've seen employees doing traffic analysis in museums pretty frequently - in fact art museum security guards do it all the time. They could do the same in a mall. "

Fundamental difference though: a security guard with a clipboard jotting something down as I go past is one thing. I can come back tomorrow or next week, and he can jot something down again - but it's very difficult to correlate the two. If you're capable of grabbing my phone's wifi MAC address though, you know (with a reasonably high degree of certainty) that both visits were me. And you can share that data with the other museum across town without me knowing (and they can share it with my insurance company, and my insurance company can be targeted by hackers working for art thieves… Not _super_ plausable, but what if we subsistute "museum" with "bike shop" and "art thieves" with "criminal bike gangs"? Or substitute "museums" with "gun shows" and "art thieves" with "gun thieves"? http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2013/05/17/379402_tasma...

No, they can't share it with your insurance company, because your MAC address is never correlated to other personally identifying information. Best they can do is the brand of your smartphone.

Yeah, but he whole "pervasive surveillance" thing means there's no meatspace equivalent of Perfect Forward Security here. It only takes _one_ instance where someone can map my MAC address to an identity for the entire recorded chain to lose it's anonymity - one venue "in the system" where I make a credit card purchase or divulge my identity. Hell - if we're being paranoid, a sufficiently determined wifi access point operator has a _lot_ at their disposal to attempt to de-anonymise a specific phone. iOS for example under some conditions transmits the MAC addresses of the last 3 access points its connected to. There's a reasonably high chance on of them's my home and/or work wifi - use some tool that'll sniff all those ARP requests and geolocate them[1] to get partial address data. A determined enough attacker might be snooping any traffic that the phone puts through the network. Using non SSL protected POP3 or IMAP - guess who's got your email address (and password!)? Does your Twitter/InstaGram/Pintrest/4Square/SnapChat/whatever client always use SSL? Are ay of them vulnerable to sslstrip or MITM-able with unsigned certs? How many websites does your phone browser happily send unencrypted cookies to that're capable of providing strong hints to your identity? (Even HN did this up to a few months ago. "superuser2" doesn't reveal much about you, but knowing I'm "bigiain" in HN is enough to uniquely identify me.)

Now you've got me wondering just how many of the widespread free wifi rollouts are relying on this as part of their monetisation. McDonalds free wifi would be a great network to do this on. My local shopping center free wifi is almost certainly run by the same company as all of the othe AMP Capital shopping centers in Australia. And now that I think about it, they're pushing the center wifi hard, with things like Pinterest promotions and "like us on Facebook" and "download our iPhone app" - all things that could easily deanonymise my MAC address...

[1] https://github.com/hubert3/iSniff-GPS

Agreed (and sorry for the edit confusion). My qualm is that people aren't intricately aware that it's happening. Because technology makes it so efficient it can happen wholesale, at little (compared to physical 1 on 1) expense.

I also agree that tracking could be beneficial. But, if there were an inflatable robot that popped up over everyone's shoulder when they were being tracked for this convenience, there would be a different opinion, IMO. Right now - likely because it's so new - the general populous has no clue what they are trading for such convenience. That - to me - is the problem.

>Either something is okay, in which case it's okay to do with a machine, or it's not

Actually, if you follow someone around everywhere they go, even in public, unless they've famous and you're a paparazzi you're likely to get charged with stalking.

So the problem people have with this is the lower cost to the store? They'd be happy with the tracking if the store had to spend more resources to do it? I doubt it.

I think the point is they wouldn't stand for it if minders followed them all over the store.

Security personnel undercover as shoppers already exist and are widely deployed to surreptitiously follow suspicious people. We can and do and will continue to stand for it.

There is a difference between security personnel (who may be responsible for observing hundreds or thousands of people per shift) and wholesale aggregation, analyzing, and collection of data.

We stand for it only because the people being tracked are likely to be criminals. We understand that if we do not engage in criminal activity we will very likely not be followed. If my local store started tracking me for no good reason I would go elsewhere.

>If my local store started tracking me for no good reason

You can know that the store uses secret shoppers in general but unless the secret shoppers are terrible at their jobs, you wouldn't know whether or not you're being tracked.

Also, doing traffic analysis and strategically placing displays in retail stores has been happening since long before cell phones. Just put someone behind one-way glass, on the mezzanie level of a mall, or even right on the floor with a clipboard.

I do not disagree that tracking happens. What I disagree with is your implication that the scale at which it happens is irrelevant. It isn't. A security officer tracking me in a mall or a secret shopper recording my actions constitutes a single data point. Mechanically recording of all my movements within the store by tracking my cell-phone removes entirely all of my anonymity.

This kind of stuff is creepy, Orwellian and it can fuck right off.

Which is cheap compared to, say, a private investigator. Not to mention that it scales a lot more easily -- and such data is a lot more fine-grained and more easily manipulated than any report you'd get from a P.I. trailing someone.

It's okay for them to have the data only if the reporting functionality is poor? What?

Either it's private or it's not.