Comment by basilikum

> REMOTE PRIVACY NEVER EXISTED BEFORE A FEW DECADES AGO!

That is plain wrong.

You could absolutely send a letter anonymously without showing your ID. You could use a phone booth without showing your ID. Increasingly more countries demand ID verification for such things like getting a SIM card that used to be remote privacy.

But much more importantly you are making a false differentiation between 'remote' and local privacy. Before the internet that made some amount of sense. What you do in the locality of your home is private and what you do in public is not, such as buying a book in a store.

However two things have fundamentally changed since then:

1. This difference largely does not exist anymore. Things that used to be in your home and private and are now in some way or another in internet connected computers that act as surveillance devices. Your movie and book library used to sit on a bookshelf in the privacy of your home and only you would know when you watch a movie. Today it sits on Amazon's or Netflix servers and they know exactly what and when you watch and read. In fact turning the digital library you "bought" into something you own by converting them into a format you can store locally and use without restrictions and surveillance (local privacy) is illegal and punishable with jail time under the DMCA.

Notes written in a note book used to be local privacy, now they are written on a computer that automatically, without consent uploads them to "the cloud", a server controlled by a large corporation that acts as a panopticon for the state.

I could go on forever. Our lives are increasingly digital. That in itself would not necessitate being "remote", but in reality that is what follows, because people do not control their devices. Instead these devices are surveillance appliances controlled by corporations and increasingly the state.

2. Technology did not just enable the means for more anonymity, but also for a completely new, fundamentally different level of automated, all encompassing surveillance.

Before the internet you went into a store and bought a book with cash. You were not anonymous in the strict sense, the cashier could see you and might even recognize you, but you did not have to show your ID for everything you buy. The cashier did not create a log with your legal name and all the items you bought. Sure, the cashier might know you bought that book, but no one else did. There was no central surveillance log of every purchase accessible to corporations and the state.

Today credit cards are exactly that. Many countries have begun attacking cash as part of the war on privacy. We are heading towards a world where you effectively have to show your ID for absolutely everything you buy and every purchase will be logged.

CCTV is old, but the footage used to sit on tapes in the possession of individual stores and tracking someone's movements with this was a massive amount of work that would only make sense for specific investigations like murder cases.

Now CCTV is everywhere and systems like Palantir collect them all in a central system that logs everyone's movements all the time. The government can just search for "people who met with X in the last month" and get a log of all these people, their complete movement profiles, the people they met with etc.

Letters weren't exactly well protected, but no one would read your letters because it was infeasible. Now we have the infrastructure to automatically read all messages sent by anyone and the government can just get notified of anyone who voices in private communications that they do not like strawberries or the ruling political party.

Western democracies are building the wet dream of the Stasi, something that just a few years ago was supposedly an authoritarian dystopia and our great enemy. We were supposedly so much better than the bad guys of the Stasi. Now we are building a future where we are still different from the Stasi, because we are making it outdated.