
We're Sleepwalking into a Surveillance State - bookofjoe
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/opinion/phone-data-privacy.html
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mindfulhack
I don't know what to do.

The benefits of being tracked are many. It helps your productivity, quality of
life, and breadth of what you can get out of it.

But what happens when the state or the corporation decides that YOU are
someone they suddenly decide they don't want to be in their system?

They have far too much power, and our legislators seem incapable of doing
anything about it. It's out of control, and it's also creating a gross
inequality of wealth.

Is this Orwellian power bubble going to grow until an apocalyptic burst
happens 20 years from now? Or can we start turning the cameras on _them_ and
truly democratising surveillance? How about a series of exposés on the exact
real-time locations of powerful and famous people by using cheap legal
commercial surveillance tools? What is it going to take?

\---

It's not just surveillance of the population, it's also 'remote control'. We
can be psychologically and behaviourally controlled, like puppets, from a
single source, through 'nudging'. They can control not only what we see, but
now, get an increasingly comprehensive set of instant, real-time feedback data
on our bodies' reactions to this centrally nudged media.

~~~
ken
Can you explain the mechanism? All I see is an excuse to show more ads. I
can't name a single way that being digitally tracked improves my
"productivity" or "quality of life".

~~~
mindfulhack
Two common examples (among many more):

\- Google Maps in saving a great deal of time when travelling from one
physical location to another.

\- Google News, in Google serving me up information I legitimately want to
know, only because it tracks so much of the activity I'm doing online. This
actually helps my productivity, it relates back to my line of work.

The list goes on. Full and meaningful participation in society in 2020
requires being tracked.

------
corvuscorvid
That ship sailed in W's first term. Nor, did we sleepwalk into the
surveillance state; we voted for it, with ballots and dollars.

~~~
bradknowles
Someone voted for it, with ballots and dollars. But it wasn’t me.

I think it might have been Citizens United, but I don’t have the first hand
evidence to prove that belief.

