One could still make .. how do you say, "telephone" calls?
Phones still have a lot of compute and sensor hardware that standalone apps can make use of. Heck, my Galaxy S3 can be a desktop replacement with MHL-out and USB or Bluetooth interfaces. And a lot of patience.
I can view most one the web but it does require multiple refreshes, new sessions, etc on my iOS device. I only sign in to throwaway accounts ( to infrequently post) via desktop.
I definitely agree if you compare it to MS Edge. However, it appears you are being downvoted for disagreeing with the Mozillian crowd in this thread by critiquing their beloved Firefox which is somewhat seen as treasonous.
Try to play nice with the Mozillians here by praising their saviour Rust on each Firefox release since they will hunt us down if we complain about crashes, unsafety or any other bugs in Linux.
Indeed, since public officials are actually accountable for the things they do, not the other way around. I would be cautious though, because many people just wouldn't want to become public servants anymore.
If they don't want to be tracked performing their job responsibilities I think we don't want them as public servants so good. Power comes with responsibility is a good system.
Telling people you're doing something, but giving them no other options, isn't good enough.
There are roads near me which do "toll by mail" where they snap a picture of your license plate, and then bill you the toll even if you don't have EZ-Pass. There are signs which announce this, but unless you're planning to drive 90 minutes out of your way, those sections of highway aren't avoidable.
Even if there are other viable options, the average citizen doesn't really understand the implication of losing their privacy, so they can't make an educated decision about whether to give it up. A simple sign doesn't solve that fundamental problem.
Sure, it's a step in the right direction, but you said "I'd be content with...", i.e. you're content with stopping there, which isn't nearly a good enough spot to stop.
So in the end people who don't want to be tracked in their movement by the government only have the option to drive through small back-in-the-woods roads, while the new "highway toll" is to have your data harvested?
"Nothing to hide" is indicative of condoning inverted/actual totalitarianism, until the Chinese-inspired tracking system follows you around every moment of your life and gives you a social credit score that tells you that you can't fly on a plane or take a train. Or looks extra hard for any technicality felonies you commit unwittingly in your professional career as reprisal if you speak out against their abuses. So maybe you might want some privacy now?
Also, I guess you won't mind publishing all of your passwords, physical location at all times, never wearing clothes, living in a transparent house and being video and audio recorded 24x7 either. (Yes, it's unreasonably absurd ad infinitum.) Still not wanting any privacy? How about other people can have as much privacy as they want, and stay the heck off my lawn? ;-P
having a person follow you around is not the same as an AI. you're comparing apples and oranges. I think having laws to control how and when the data is accessed as well as a degree of transparency into that access along with safeguards/oversight is reasonable. to simply say that we shouldn't use the technology is luddite fearmongering.
should we have kept filing cabinets full of papers instead of databases for tracking criminals across state lines as well? see? I can make bullshit comparisons too!
2. I suppose you would be ok, then, with a police officer tailing you everywhere you go, recording everything you do, everywhere you go, everything you say, and to whom, peering in the windows of your home if you forget to keep your blinds drawn? Just in case that information happens to be useful to a government at some point in the future?
Yep, and its also not a reasonable thing to say "If you go outside you accept total surveillance." Since going outside is a requirement for life.
I find it acceptable that if I go outside I might get caught on some store security camera and that video sits on a hard drive for a week and then gets written over but I do not find it acceptable that the store camera recognizes my face and stores my presence in an easily searchable internet connected database.
There seems to be a lot of conflation on this subject between "expectation of privacy" in the practical sense and "expectation of privacy" in the legal sense. Like, you'd better fuckin believe I expect not to be followed by cops or secret agents everywhere I go. I expect it on the persistence forecast basis and because I understand that it's practically impossible to allocate manpower in that way, assuming they don't think I've done anything wrong in particular.
I also expect that the government, local and federal both, will try to erode my effective privacy in any and every way they can afford and get away with.
None of that has much to do with e.g. the fact that legally, if a cop peers in my window and sees bales of cocaine stacked on the floor of my living room, or whatever, he can come in and take them from me and arrest me.
> Expect: 1. To look for (mentally); to look forward to, as to something that is believed to be about to happen or come; to have a previous apprehension of, whether of good or evil; to look for with some confidence; to anticipate; -- often followed by an infinitive, sometimes by a clause (with, or without, that).
Yeah, that's the point. In justifying this sort of ubiquitous surveillance, the phrase "expectation of privacy" (and related verbiage) is being grossly abused.
Your mobile phone provides much better tracking than what tracking can be achieved with FR. Your mobile is a giant microphoned fink you're carrying around, providing exactly your worst imaginations of what FR might eventually become.
Counter question. Do you expect/are ok with that the moment you leave your house you are constantly followed by a person with a camera recording everything you do. Which shops you visite etc.?
Because this is basically what this will sooner or later boil down to, except that's more subtle (i.e. instead of having a person following you you have a innumerable amount of cameras sharing the recording burden, but producing the _same end result_).
Also, you might want to say you don't have to hide anything.
But consider how "god" the cyber security of the police is (or most times is not). Also consider that there are frequently cases of police misbehaving by e.g. stalking or discriminating. (I mean there is a lot of police and they are human so it would be surprising if there wouldn't be such cases). Lastly consider how long it will take until police stations would want to sell some most likely very badly anonymized data about people in the city to e.g. shops.
People expect a degree of anonymity in public as well--disappearing into crowds or groups of people.
That too will be gone soon when biological recognition services are in the hands of people. I suspect it won't be long until you can arbitrarily pull your phone, grab some video/image and/or audio data, pass a few (hundred) signature markers off to a service and identify people with a variety of metadata associated with them.
>>Counter question. Do you expect/are ok with that the moment you leave your house you are constantly followed by a person with a camera recording everything you do. Which shops you visite etc.?
>>Because this is basically what this will sooner or later boil down to
Worthwhile to point out that this applies predominantly to the US. In many countries, public pictures can only be taken with the individuals' consent, Germany for example and many other European countries have a 'right to your own image/likeness' or a concept along similar lines.
That said the difference between law enforcement collecting your data and private citizens should also be obvious.
If you purposely ignore the power of new tech. Might as well say nothing changed with the invention of earth moving machinery because you could have done the same thing with a shovel.
I don't think he's missing the point so much as you're missing his, possibly intentionally.
The point is that the degree to which something is possible at scale has an impact on the practical applications of that thing, and therefore on the people subject to its application. Viz., earth moving machinery (and related engineering) has made possible things that would previously have required orders of magnitude more time and/or manpower, likely making them economically infeasible except in rare cases where money was no object.
He didn't say anything about property rights. That was you... for some reason.
Our existing laws and ideas of privacy were build based on the limitations of the current tech. Yes you could take a photo of a random person in public but it wasn't very useful or harmful to do so. Now we have supercharged spyware tech we have the ability to cause a lot of harm without being in violation of any existing laws because such a thing simply wasn't possible previously.
We actually had anonymity of the crowds back then, which facial recog tech circumvents.
The problem is also that there are a LOT of laws, and it's very easy to manufacture a crime.
I would also suggest reading about people who have been subject to unwarranted surveillance just because of their views, and the damage it does them. A good example is the environmental groups in the 90s in the UK.
Saying technological changes don't subvert the underlying structure of a concept is like saying war didn't change after the introduction of gunpowder or flight.
These technological changes add additional dimensions, they may not radically change the initial structure but they lead to radically different outcomes than anticipated which society doesn't have to accept.
The camera was invented and this became a problem for public figures. It became more of a problem with digital photography. Much more of a problem with camera phones. And became the privacy nightmare we are now dealing with around the rise of Twitter and Instagram.
I'm expecting not to be tracked by 50 axis cameras with analytic software the moment I step out my front door and go for a walk or run in my city. To not have my path tracked or reviewed should someone unaccountable decide to do so.
Snowden has a great quote that points out how ridiculous that line of thinking is:
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
LOL, what?