
Personal Panopticons - kawera
https://reallifemag.com/personal-panopticons/
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Invictus0
Yes, personal privacy is a function of the system moreso than of the
individual. If one doesn't share his contact list with Facebook, but all of
his friends do, then his contact list is de facto not private. This is a real
occurrence. Financial information is not safe; hundreds of millions of credit
card numbers and social security numbers have been stolen in recent years,
through no fault to the individual, but to the companies and institutions that
they entrusted their information to. Unless you accept isolation, you will be
forced to interact with the world using PII, and since it's useless and futile
to trust the world to protect your privacy, why should any individual bother?
Your location will be tracked by license plate scanners, surveillance cameras,
and cell phone towers. You will (soon) be identified by facial recognition.
This is the reality we face.

Privacy is something we must believe in and actively strive for as a society
in order to be in any way feasible. I don't see that happening any time soon.

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citizen_e
> “two friends are talking about recent trips to Japan, and soon after one
> gets hawked cheap flights there” — that have led users to erroneously
> conclude that their phones are listening in on their conversations.

Has this not been shown to happen?

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kilo_bravo_3
What scenario is more likely:

1\. While in Japan, or during the planning of the trip to Japan, the persons
visited websites that indicated a preference towards visiting Japan, and
sometime later an ad network connected the cookie with their past behavior and
served an ad for a flight, or

2\. Someone has created a hitherto unknown stealth malware designed to
circumvent the "microphone on" notification on smartphones and exfiltrate
audio from a user's device, deployed the infrastructure to store and process
the audio, and then done everything already needed in scenario 1 to serve ads
for a flight.

Any moderately-skilled network engineer or security professional would be able
to instantly tell if a device was sending audio to a remote server if told to
look. And highly-skilled people are actually looking.

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jancsika
> The appropriate response to these shifts cannot simply be an effort to
> recover the older normative framework and its configuration of legal and
> social provisions.

So is the author in favor of something like GDPR? I cannot tell.

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ErikAugust
I struggle with the idea that the benefits of technologies like AI, personal
data accumulation, etc cannot be separated from centralized services.

Why must it all be in "the cloud" where it can be surveilled?

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rhizome
2600 words on a Tuesday morning is rough, anybody got a tl;dr?

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KineticLensman
I'd go with...

> the most serious threats digital technologies pose are not strictly personal
> concerns like identity theft or companies’ surreptitiously listening in on
> conversations but the emergence of a softly deterministic techno-social
> order designed chiefly to produce individuals that are its willing subjects

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bryanrasmussen
the goal of every social order is to produce individuals that are its willing
subjects, whether it does this softly or not.

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KineticLensman
Yes. I don't know the correct terminology but to me a 'state' can be viewed as
a thing that enforces a social construct on its citizens. If the citizens can
openly shape and agree with the social construct, so much the better.

