RE: Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for August 2, 2019
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As to data privacy, it's only illegal if the government isn't the one doing it. I'm not surprised at all.
Thanks!
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Agreed. The surprising thing would be laws that didn't give advantages to government officials and political insiders.
What makes me very happy is that hacks, leaks, and cracks make all these new surveillance techs soon available to the general public. One thing I am almost giddy about is that Fakebook has now claimed they can read thoughts.
Once this is leaked to the GP, we will be potentially able to observe the relationship of empty rhetoric to politician's actual intentions, and the failure of the two to reconcile will expose bad actors. This will be far more beneficial than the harm bad actors will be able to undertake with this tech is harmful. Facial recognition potentiates the end of covert actors, CCTV their surreptitious covert actions, and so on.
Tech always increases the power of individuals versus institutions. We react with alarm at new tech, but we should actually look forward to how it will more severely impact institutions once we have it. The more advanced tech gets, the faster it disperses, and the more powerful it is. This is particularly true of security tech, as firearms are 1000 year old tech, but WMD's can't enforce oppression and drag rebels to torture chambers. You need thugs with guns and boots on the ground for that, but the tech has long existed to preclude thugs from being able to do so, it just isn't on offer at Walmart next to shotguns for this reason.
Now that we have 3D printers, we don't need no stinking Walmart for our security tech, and can just make the good stuff at home. Just don't tell the revenuers you're rolling your own, and they won't find out until it's too late to stop you. They can't nuke your neighborhood to make you pay a traffic ticket, and when your microwave moat keeps them off your porch, well, their options become far more limited, and expensive. Consider the trend of gated neighborhoods, and how neighbors cooperating can dramatically increase their security by combining the aforementioned techs. CCTV, facial recognition, advanced security tech, and maybe even reading thoughts of malicious actors, will make it damn hard for bad guys to do bad things in such neighborhoods.
The really nice thing about this is these measures prevent crime, not just go after bad guys after crimes have been committed.
The more useful surveillance tech becomes against us, the more it's vastly more powerful against those trying to use it to harm us. Freedom is burgeoning, there's just a bit of lag.