> Technological progress doesn't necessarily have to work against privacy.

I honestly see this as unavoidable. There are important problems to be solved that need more data and constant monitoring.

Want to have early warning about diseases and their spread (extremely important as we're entering the age of garage biotech)? We need more data about people, their movements and health, preferably realtime.

Want to have better weather prediction? More data.

Want to have better disaster relief? More data, more monitoring, as real-time as possible.

Want to turn social sciences into some kind of actual hard-ish science? More tracking, more data.

There are absolutely enormous benefits we could get from constant gathering and processing of data about people. There are tons of security issues here which are of course important and need to be talked about, but it seems to me that this is the only thing people are talking about now, and no one is noticing that we could use this data to further improve our lives.

While threats to one's safety are real and have to be adressed, I'm starting to believe that the notion of "privacy" as is currently understood needs to go, if we want to enjoy the continued progress of mankind.

Someone wrote somewhere downthread that society is based on trust. I think it should be based on "I trust you won't harm me with what you see" kind of trust, rather than "I trust you don't look at me even though you can" kind.

But does "data" necessarily have to be deanonymized in each of those cases?

Can you not collect the necessary data about disease and its spread without being able to immediately call up the medical history of every specific person you see? Does better weather prediction mean NOAA has to know where I am, by name, to within a centimeter at all times?

Data doesn't need names, places, faces, phone numbers, geolocation and social media accounts correlated and updated in realtime to be useful, unless you're trying to sell that to advertisers, or a government. I'm not convinced it has to be as intrusive as it is.

There are two angles to this. One, there could be some possible use for the more detailed data - but I don't want to be inventing fictious and biased examples so let's just acknowledge a possibility.

But the second, more important angle is that at this scale, there is no such thing as "anonymized data". There have already been papers showing that what is now called "anomymized" can be trivially deanonymized by mashing together other data sets and some computing power. Trying to hold on to the concept of anonymized data is futile - the reality itself is highly correlated and interconnected, and all those causal relationships will be reflected in the colected datasets. The more data sources you have, the easier is to deanonymize them all together.

So the choice is - either stop collecting data or accept that there ain't such thing as anonymity. What we definitely shouldn't do is fooling ourselves that we can do both. Datasets are and will be trivially deanonymized if anyone cares to do so.

EDIT:

> Data doesn't need names, places, faces, phone numbers, geolocation and social media accounts correlated and updated in realtime

Names - social studies. Places - social studies, urban optimization. Faces - social and medical studies. Phone numbers - dunno, probably something. Geolocation - urban optimization, crime prevention, social studies once again. The more data you have, the more interesting experiments you can devise.

I'm pushing that social studies example for a simple reason - this level of data collection is a holy grail for psychology, sociology, et al. Right now those sciences mostly keep faking "lifelike" conditions to test some theories and we all know how much problem there is with small sample sizes, unrealistic experiment setups, etc. Inferences based on natural patterns of behaviour of millions, or even billions of people would be much, much more reliable. We could finally learn a lot about ourselves, just by observing.

> there is no such thing as "anonymized data".

Of course there is.

I work in a business today that collects highly personal consumer data and does advanced analytics. We strip personally identified invention once the data is brought in so there is technically no way to to deanonymise it.

We are hardly unique.

I still assert it's only a matter of cross-correlating that data with something else.

I don't know what kind of data you're working with, but for the sake of example let's assume you're handling buying records from supermarkets. You obviously hashed people's ClubCard/credit card numbers. But let's say I get hold of the data from an ALPR on a street near one of the markets. Would correlating that with your database not help to deanonymize a lot of your data?

My point is - as the data collection of every kind increases, for every dataset you have anonymized, there will be a lot of other data sets of all sorts that can be used to deanonymize back yours.

You are also talking about the benefits of massive surveillance without any reference to its cost. A society with no private sphere would, in particular, be extremely susceptible to authoritarianism. People have repeatedly written dystopias about that prospect for a reason. I do not see that any amount of whizz-bang nice things you can do with the data, like better social science research, will remove those consequences.

My point is, everyone is talking only about the consequences. I'm perfectly aware of them (and so I don't see a point of mentioning them in my comment; everyone else keeps bringing them up). I'm definitely not advocating pushing blindly for more data collection. But then again, while authoritarianism is a real threat that needs to be addressed, some level of "privacy" people are so afraid to lose could probably be relinquished, yielding more benefit than harm.

Glass seems designed to make it impossible not to relinquish one's privacy. Granted, cellphones could conceivably be used is almost the same way, but they're not meant to be. If you're in the wearer's field of view, you give up whatever the technology can take. That's intentional, and the attempt to make that ubiquitous on the part of Google, a company whose entire reason for being is data collection, is also intentional.

Even if there is a possible net benefit, there will also be, inevitably, be a loss of control over identity and autonomy that no one can be blamed for not wanting to give up without a fight (futile though it might be.)

My issue with Glass hate is that people say it's about the camera - it's not. It's about the fact that they know there's a camera. There's a lot of cheap cameras embedded in glasses, pens or even clothing, that anyone can buy from a random 'spy shop' down the corner. We're long past point of random stalkers filming people. So all that objections against Glass killed useful technology (AR) for zero real gain in privacy.

> Even if there is a possible net benefit, there will also be, inevitably, be a loss of control over identity and autonomy that no one can be blamed for not wanting to give up without a fight (futile though it might be.)

I think we'll have to learn how to live with that. I doubt that a lot will change though.

I think it's not so much even knowing there's a camera, but knowing there's a camera which might be on and streaming to the cloud at all times. Yes, I know there's a little light. No, no one is going to trust it.

There aren't a lot of random spy shops down the corner, and not a lot of random stalkers sneaking upskirts of people on escalators with pen cameras hidden in their shoes.

You could make the argument that cellphones are far more powerful as tools for surveillance (and they certainly are in regards to surveilling their owners) than Glass would have been capable of. And you would have a point - for maybe the first couple of generations, and before there were several million Glasses in the wild. At that point, being a random stalker becomes socially acceptable, and being randomly stalked becomes unavoidable.

Consumer AR isn't entirely dead. I've seen it on portable game consoles. But Google's attempt to literally shove it into people's faces demonstrates that there are more than technical hurdles to overcome.

I think it's much more complex than that. Here was my first experience observing someone using Google Glass in the field, in a SF coffeehouse:

>See attractive woman.

>See bespeckled gentleman apparently leering grotesquely at the attractive woman.

>Realize he has Google Glasses on. OK, he might just be checking the weather. Perhaps in order to use this, you have to stare off into space, with your mouth hanging open like the creepmaster.

>Second-guess whether he was really using the glasses or just filming the woman.

It isn't just that one knows there's a camera, it that using the thing mucks deeply with humans' instinctual reaction in reading people's eyes and faces. It's the ambiguity around the camera and the undermining of one's instinctual reactions to eye-contact. A shoecam is a shoecam. Something mounted near your eyeballs is entirely different.

There's also the aspect that may of us already spend 50-75% of our lives looking at screens. Most people know 'that guy' who can't go out for breakfast without checking his feeds between bites of huevos ranchero. IMO, "it make anti-social activities even easier" was never a very good sell (perhaps outside the googleplex.)

>> Second-guess whether he was really using the glasses or just filming the woman.

I can't help but ask: so what? I know I might be totally biased here as I never had an issue with being filmed, but such examples make me feel we're trying to blame technology for what is our society having trouble with its own sexuality.

I accept this is an issue, though I personally don't "feel it".

> There's also the aspect that may of us already spend 50-75% of our lives looking at screens. Most people know 'that guy' who can't go out for breakfast without checking his feeds between bites of huevos ranchero. IMO, "it make anti-social activities even easier" was never a very good sell (perhaps outside the googleplex.)

Now this attitude, very common among people, is IMO unfair and feels like bullying. I am 'that guy'. And you know why I'm sticked to some screen for most of the day? Because brain-computer interfaces are not here yet. I'd be happy to use some different interface like, say, AR glasses but hey, aren't those being frowned upon because they have a camera? sigh.

>some level of "privacy" people are so afraid to lose could probably be relinquished, yielding more benefit than harm

But, I think the question is who gets to make that decision? Who gets to say how much should be relinquished and decide when there is more benefit than harm?

You could say, "well, anyone who doesn't like it can elect not to use X technology." But, that will become increasingly difficult as more and more "core" technology adopts less privacy-oriented models.

So, I am cautious about advocating an approach of continuing to push and erode privacy as long as there is some argument for additional benefit. I think it is very much a slippery slope and we have already experienced some of the slippage. A little privacy here. A little privacy there. And, it is difficult to walk it back.

So, we are redefining what we consider a reasonable expectation of privacy as a society. Too much of that definition seems to be coming from commercial interests and, I believe, many people are feeling uncomfortable with the increasing erosion of their privacy and the decisions that are being made for them.

> > Technological progress doesn't necessarily have to work against privacy.

> I honestly see this as unavoidable.

You might be interested in reading "Industrial Society and Its Future". It has a lot of well-argued points along these lines. Highly recommended.

Well, I certainly didn't expect that google search to lead me to the Unabomber's manifesto. Did you expect everyone to know that by name?

If I said "The Unabomber's Manifesto", fewer people would read it just because of the stigma attached to the name. On its own, it's a legitimately interesting piece of writing with salient points about the topic at hand.

Not exactly sure if you were trolling or not, but I skimmed it and it seems interesting. I'm definitely going to give it a read - it seems to cover intersting points, even though I don't expect to find myself in agreement with the conclusions.

Nope, not trolling. It's an amazing piece of work from a brilliant (but crazy) author.

Ok. I only assumed it as a possibility because of who's the author + Poe's law. Anyway, seems like a very interesting read so thanks for pointing me towards it!

>Technological progress doesn't necessarily have to work against privacy.

This is true, but it seems that rather than acknowledge this, many technology producers are purposely pushing the needle the other way. That is, they frequently opt for the least privacy-oriented approach, even when more privacy-oriented approaches are available at the same or lower cost.

Take FitBit. I am opposed to the tracking it does on so many fronts. But, I received one as a gift, so thought I would investigate further. Here's the short: It only syncs my data to the cloud, and doesn't even provide the option to keep it locally. This, even though it requires a desktop app and USB dongle to wirelessly sync my data from the watch to my laptop. So, it could very easily provide a local dashboard, but, it's not an option. They want my data.

Then, I look at their privacy policy. The usual stuff about not selling my personally identifiable data, but the right to sell it in aggregate form, give it up if compelled by subpoena, etc.

But, why do I want even them to know when my heart beats or when I sleep? And, do I really want to take the risk that my information can be used against me in some insurance claim that goes to court one day?

Point being, that it truly is unnecessary for their product to work against privacy, but they've opted for a longer view that sacrifices my privacy for their future profits. This erosion of privacy for commercial gain is part of the ethos that is being foisted on consumers at so many turns that it is normalizing the approach, and leaving us with fewer options where this is not the case.