> Surveillance is inevitable as a result of technological advancement.
No it isn't. Counter-surveillance is technology too. ISPs now carry the vast majority of communications, but with encryption they can't read them. IR emitters can blind surveillance cameras. They can also be defeated with much simpler technologies, like rocks and hammers.
It matters whether the law protects the people doing the surveillance or the people preventing it.
> But surveillance also means accountability. For both individuals and authorities.
Who are authorities accountable to? The only person who went to jail for the collateral murder video was Julian Assange.
> Deepfakes mean that we will need ways to verify the authenticity and timestamp of recordings. And this will be solved as well.
There is no reason to think so. Even if cameras attempted to authenticate what they produced, anyone who cracked any camera from any manufacturer could then produce forgeries authenticated as being produced by that camera. As could that camera's manufacturer or anyone who compromised their systems. Anyone could also point a camera at a screen with a higher resolution than the camera's and things of that nature.
> This could lead to a world in which violent crime and abuse of authority is almost always recorded.
Members of the Inner Party can turn off the telescreen.
The only question is whether everyone else can too.
Cameras are becoming smaller, cheaper, and higher fidelity alongside parallel improvements in storage, network bandwidth, and batteries. Projecting out long enough, and you are left with the likelihood of cheap ubiquitous and even microscopic surveillance tech. Many new cars are now continuously recording everything in their surroundings. Meta's new Smart Glasses mean individuals will be doing the same.
Not to mention that satellite technology already exists that could see the zits on your nose.
Deepfakes will be solved through a number of means. As a very basic example, the concept of timestamping and sending the hashes to a trusted verifier can help prove that a particular piece of content was produced no later than the timestamp. And quite a lot of knowledge can be gained just from certainty about when something was produced.
I had a ring and loved it. I don't really understand most of the negative coverage of it.
The Vice article says Ring is "delivering footage to cops without your consent" but if you click through the links this refers to cases where Ring handed over the footage after police got warrants. I realize Ring can act faster than most companies - but if you set up your own security system and the police got a warrant you'd have to hand over footage too. You cannot choose to not consent to a warrant in any case. Ring notifies you so it's not like they are being deceitful.
I realize a lot of people on HN are super privacy minded and a Ring is not for them, but realistically if you buy a Ring you WANT to protect your home/family in which case you would happily hand over footage if police were investigating a robbery next door. That's going to protect your home/family too, which is the entire point. I understand if you are in the 1% of people that wants a home security system but doesn't want to help your neighbors then you shouldn't buy it, but that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people.
>In a complaint, the FTC says Ring deceived its customers by failing to restrict employees’ and contractors’ access to its customers’ videos, using customer videos to train algorithms, among other purposes, without consent, and failing to implement security safeguards.
> According to the complaint, these failures amounted to egregious violations of users’ privacy. For example, one employee over several months viewed thousands of video recordings belonging to female users of Ring cameras that surveilled intimate spaces in their homes such as their bathrooms or bedrooms. The employee wasn’t stopped until another employee discovered the misconduct. Even after Ring imposed restrictions on who could access customers’ videos, the company wasn’t able to determine how many other employees inappropriately accessed private videos because Ring failed to implement basic measures to monitor and detect employees’ video access.
>I realize a lot of people on HN are super privacy minded and a Ring is not for them, but realistically if you buy a Ring you WANT to protect your home/family in which case you would happily hand over footage if police were investigating a robbery next door.
that's a pretty cherry-picked case. how does 'protecting your family' apply when your own footage is misinterpreted to convict a family member?
surveillance panopticon goes both ways, it can just as easily provide what appears to be damning evidence against the actual innocent.
here's my problem: evidence gathering has outpaced reliable evidence interpretation. Ring doesn't solve this problem, but it does amplify it. This isn't all catching criminals and guilty, as with any surveillance there are second order effects as well as just absolute inaccuracy.
How many innocent husbands/wives have been dumped by significant others by sheer misinterpretation of GPS data or otherwise seemingly damning evidence from a phone or mobile account?
The People In Charge do this daily and with far greater consequence for those that find themselves under the gavel.
> I realize a lot of people on HN are super privacy minded and a Ring is not for them, but realistically if you buy a Ring you WANT to protect your home/family in which case you would happily hand over footage if police were investigating a robbery next door.
I don't follow the logic. The police are not your friends. They are not the good guys. Their job is not to protect you or your neighbor. It's to put people (possibly you) in jail--as many as they can. Handing surveillance footage over to the police only makes their job easier. It does not necessarily "protect your home/family". In general, getting involved with law enforcement, even as a crime victim or witness, is fraught. Let alone as a subpoena target or person of interest. Best to be as invisible as you can.
I don't really think this is paranoid. Encounters with the police come with a non-zero chance of being put in jail, injured, or even killed. The upside is questionable.
Many of us live in places where if a neighbor is robbed the chances the robber will come back to the neighborhood again and maybe rob us is several orders of magnitude higher than the chances that anything bad (or even mildly inconvenient) will happen to us if he give the police all information we have that might help identify the robber, and where police will in fact use that information to try to catch the robber.
In most jurisdictions in the US cops won't even investigate a burglary unless somebody gets hurt. They simply have too many higher priorities.
Yes if you can give them video of the bad guy that helps, but only a little. They now have the burglar's face, but that doesn't give them the burglar's address. Maybe your camera got the license plate number of the burglar's car? Won't help: Burglars mostly use stolen plates nowadays because so many people have cameras.
Your best hope is for the burglar to actually hurt one of your neighbors, or the burglary wave becomes so egregious that elected officials notice and put pressure on the cops.
Cameras are not magic crime-stopping devices: They still require police to take action, and when police are motivated to take action, cameras are useful. For simple property crimes which the cops won't investigate, cameras don't do much. You're better off making your home a harder target with heavier doors, bars on the windows, etc because those things encourage the burglars to move on to the next house. Cameras don't do that. Why? Because the burglars know everything I've written above.
This argument seems to be trending towards a dangerous precedent - government actors are always good and you shouldn’t have a problem giving up your privacy.
The issue with warrants against Ring is you don’t own your data and law enforcement can go around you to get your video footage. If instead they had to issue a warrant against each household, it wouldn’t be as easy to invade your privacy.
Sure you can refuse providing images - if they involve you. It's a clear cut case of self incrimination. With Ring, you are inviting a stranger onto your property to record non stop footage, and they can never refuse any disclosure.
Why would you be cautious of that, if you have nothing to hide? Suppose police has an unsubstantiated theory about your actions on a certain date, perhaps after using illegal evidence or false witnesses. They can now use parallel construction to build a case against you by using surveillance data you can't control.
They can even go fishing around the neighborhood until they find a random somebody that was out of the house at that specific time of the night. With an extra bit of circumstantial evidence, your life is derailed.
I think the issue it’s that you don’t control the system so you never know when your video is accessed. With local systems or something like HomeKit, the video is inaccessible to anyone but the user. If the cops want the video, they have to come to that persons home and ask or bring a warrant. Meanwhile, Ring cameras have a freaking portal for cops to access video as long as they claim to have something resembling a warrant.
Most people cannot see beyond the scope of their narrow lives. Therefore we see so many "it does not matter if google reads my emails". People to not think that it might be wrong that google reads everyone's mails, even people in the offices, government boards, etc. Amazon, and Google have the power to know everything about everybody.
The problem is that we do not know how companies treat and uses their data.
The problem is that it is hard to prove that something is abused, because data or somewhere. Your data could be constantly abused, and you would not know about it.
Corporations have multiple times shown that you cannot trust them with your data. Governments have multiple times that you cannot trust them. Sometimes tracks were lost because corporations intentionally removed proof of their wrongdoings on their servers!
If a system can be abused, it will be abused.
Just think what would Korean people think that people in America voluntarily install surveillance systems in their houses. Huh.
That is how we reach the final conclusion. America has never experience totalitarianism, and it cannot be brushed with a simple statement 'it will never happen here'. Even with the smallest chance of happening, it is so drastically dramatic scenario that it need to be stopped at all costs.
> if police were investigating a robbery next door
Assuming they’re doing that. It’s not always the case that police are obtaining or using warrants for virtuous reasons (see the Marion County Record raid, for a recent possible example)
>The Vice article says Ring is "delivering footage to cops without your consent" but if you click through the links this refers to cases where Ring handed over the footage after police got warrants.
I don't care if they have warrants, my property shouldn't work against me.
There have been some very significant prizes for achievements of unknown feasibility that turned out well. For instance the Longitude Act for a method of precisely determining a ship's longitude lead to the development of very precise marine chronometers. (Granted, there was a bit of difficulty collecting the prize.)
When I read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" I became more concerned, yet somehow remained head-above-water optimistic. When I see articles like this one shared on HN the optimism all but disappears. Our worst traits (e.g., greed, vanity, etc) are being used against us. We're making entertainment out of our own demise.
When I as a European see that, I fear that we might share a similar future.
Currently we are laughing at the US being always busy imprisoning and killing their own citizens. The US is as weak as it never has been, and your presidents are a joke in the face of international crisis.
I'm not sure US citizens will understand that this is the game they decided to lose themselves. All those shitstorms are caused by social bots for a reason, you know. And the reason almost always is a political one.
Divide and conquer. Education could have taught you that, but your society messed that up, too.
The issue with all that I am seeing now over there is that I know this will come to our society, too. All the wars and revolutions have been fought for nothing :-/
Maybe it's the logical conclusion behind any economic system?
It does not matter if Google has all my YouTube videos.
It does not matter if Google keeps my passwords.
It does not matter if Google has knowledge about where I go everyday.
It does not matter if Google knows what I buy, what I search what I desire.
It does not matter that Google knows that about 70% of population.
It does not matter that Google knows everything about me, my wife, my kids, my neighbors, my lawyers, my doctors, my teachers, my leaders, my bosses, my country officials.
Yes. That said, per the book mentioned, it's not even what they know. It's what they're are willing to do with that information.
Think of it this way, my doctor knows a lot about me (at least in terms of health). My doctor isn't trying to exploit that and use it against me. Google et al present as if they're benign but the pattern of their actions seem otherwise.
The general public devalues the value of their privacy, and they underestimate (read: don't even recognize) how that is being used in not their best interest. It's 1984 without the darkness.
Also doctor is also not involved in ad business, because the effects would be spectacular. My doctor also does not has access to data to ministers, or people at the office of my city, which also makes the situation quite different. My doctor does not have regular meetings with the government, and I think somebody from Google has. Laws for treating healthcare data are also quite different from the way Google handles them.
Recently I visited a friend of mine who had a smart speaker. I hate such things, therefore I started singing. There were many words in my song, "Donald Trump", "explosions", "Al-Queda", "N word", "Alex Jones on 9 11", "Alexa buy me a new volvo", "white supremacy", "our president likes explosions" were some of the lines. Repeated. Many times.
Whenever voice recognition software is used by my friends, I show them my little trick, which shows if they care about their privacy.
We already might be living in the verge of 1984, but not yet at the full potential, not fully realized.
You should read book I mentioned. I'd "enjoy" it. It's a beast (read: long) but she goes deep and is super thorough. I believe it was on FT's short list for Book of the Year the year it was published.
The people who say, "I don't care if they have my data, I have nothing to hide," don't understand that Google et al are thinking, "Thank you very much. Thank you for your generosity. Now watch as manipulate you and exploit you and you won't even realize it."
Personally, I believe we're closer to The Matrix than we are to 1984. But that's another chat for another day.
For the sheer number of surveillance cameras and phones around today, we should be getting far more UFO pictures.
Mandatory XKCD.[1]
There are, however, some very high performance jet powered model aircraft.[2]
Amazing what thrust vectoring can do when you don't have a pilot to worry about.
> For the sheer number of surveillance cameras and phones around today, we should be getting far more UFO pictures.
Surveillance cameras usually aren't looking up. They are for catching Bigfoot, not UFOs. :-)
As far as phone cameras go I used to agree. Then I started feeding birds, which led to trying to learn the names of the birds in my area.
When I'd see a bird I didn't yet know I'd try to get a photo. That worked pretty well for birds that landed to eat the seeds I put out. For birds that I saw flying by I usually only got evidence that there was something in the sky.
I've had similar poor outcomes when I've noticed a plane that wasn't one of the usual airliners or UPS/FedEx cargo planes or Boeing test flights or smaller private planes that we get all the time and tried to get a photo.
If they don't have a problem pointing a camera at their neighbor's house, surely they won't have a problem with their neighbor pointing a high-power IR laser at their camera.
It will either be centralized or decentralized.
Individuals freely recording and sharing and collating their data can also be dystopian, of course.
But surveillance also means accountability. For both individuals and authorities.
Deepfakes mean that we will need ways to verify the authenticity and timestamp of recordings. And this will be solved as well.
This could lead to a world in which violent crime and abuse of authority is almost always recorded.
It also means no privacy, enabling digital lynch mobs, and enabling totalitarianism.
Fending off lynch mobs, preventing totalitarianism, and finding ways to carve out sensible levels of privacy are all open perennial questions.