Comment by ahmeneeroe-v2
5 months ago
Once again I am struck by how tech makes the world smaller. We're back to a small village or tribal camp where everyone knows your business all the time. It appears the last 50-100 years were a golden age of privacy and an aberration, not the norm.
"everyone knows your business all the time"
Not everyone. Only the people with access to the surveillance data. This asymmetry is a big problem.
The asymmetry bothers the heck out of me. I've been personally involved in investigations of law enforcement officers abusing access to privileged information. I don't get the sense that it's at all rare.
I sort of wish we could go full ADS-B[0] with cars and have public decentralized tracking (like [1]). Level the playing field for everybody.
Since I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle I'd love to see what kind of useful applications could be created if everybody had access to the same surveillance data that government and large corporations have.
The "what about stalkers" argument always comes next. I suspect being a stalker would be more difficult if the victim (or their agents) had the ability to react to surveillance data about the stalker.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...
[1] https://www.adsbexchange.com/
I'd have to think about this. It doesn't seem true.
If you knew the location of every police car or city councilman's car, what would that change?
I’d be willing to bet they would take privacy protections a bit more seriously.
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It would change how much surveillance there was in the first place.
1 - you don't actually have access to that information.
2 - you're lowballing the problem. It's not just current location, it's your full movement history.
Oh no no no, those are private for security reasons!
> We're back to a small village or tribal camp where everyone knows your business all the time.
I would be much less concerned about the issue if it were limited to the equivalent of a small village. The problem is that it's not.
I think if you were in that small village you wouldn't appreciate the distinction ("meet the new boss same as the old boss").
Having lived in such a small village for a long while, I absolutely appreciate the distinction.
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At least you could always leave the small village. Can't really do that anymore.
You couldn't in practical terms. The vast majority of premodern people were peasant farmers who owned no capital other than (possibly!) the land & livestock they farmed and the tools used to farm them. All this having almost no liquid value in the market such as it existed at the time. It was essentially impossible to pick up and start over somewhere else. That's aside from if you even had the right to do that; depending on time and place peasants were sometimes legally bound to their landlord.
You couldn't always just leave your village. Family, friends, livelihood was all tied there. And it's still just as difficult to up and leave.
I don't know that this was true.
I was recently reading "A Hangman's Diary", which included a Forward for the modern reader. It would appear that outsiders were viewed with extreme suspicion in those times. Obvi that's just a single snapshot of a single region, but it makes sense.
"what did this person do that they left all their family and friends to come to our town"
There's archeological evidence that early humans mixed with outsiders quite a but so it's probably something that comes and goes depending on what's happening at the time.
I will argue that it was heavily decentralized, but there was never a golden era when the village didn't know what you were up to. Even if someone was well known in the mafia and street goons weren't talking, there were detectives writing down who you were talking to, and putting it all together, and saving it in a filing cabinet.