

Consent of the Surveiled - msutherl
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/01/10/consent-of-the-surveiled/

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TrainedMonkey
In Technologies of Consent section author makes interesting point. Modern
surveillance is enabled by technology, we've never dealt with something like
that before[1]. Technology is not going away, our digital fingerprints will
only get larger. Essentially that means that we would need to restructure[2]
social/political system in order to address that problem.

[1] - Interesting side thought about that - technology allows you to survey
people who are doing the surveillance and maintaining the system with
relatively low overhead. In theory this could allow for 1984 like totalitarian
state, although I believe probability of such severe scenario happening is
pretty low.

[2] - issue with just ending government surveillance is that private companies
already have gigantic amount of data on individual people too. Consider this -
how much money would it be worth to Google to subtly run A/B tests on
individual users in order to present them with ad layout/content they are most
likely to click on?

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joyeuse6701
Now that was an interesting read. The article does not discuss the
implications of surveillance from a potential of abuse. In the article there
is a comparison of food ration consent (india), car driving consent (america),
land owning consent (most places). Do people care about the government knowing
where you live? Apparently most don't despite how invasive that would seem if
that wasn't the case to begin with. The real question is, how much would a
government with this new order of consent, really need to know about you?
Would they need an online ID assigned to a GPS location, or everything that
Google has on you to perform their function?

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ctdonath
Reading, then skimming, then skipping the article I note that the difference
of views on the subject comes largely down to the willingness of supporters
(to whatever degree) to expend a great deal of verbiage, time, resources, and
readership on the prospects of establishing such governance, vs the opposing
view of "leave me alone".

