alt Hacker NewsThe problem with all these discussions about banning stuff is that privacy is always on the back foot. It's by design. People who want to surveil and manipulate us are actively investigating new ways of doing it, they get paid for it and they risk nothing in the long run. All of these discussions about specifics are just reactions. They aren't even reactions to the surveillance itself, but rather to a discovery by someone that a new surveillance machine has been constructed and launched.
So the current feedback process involves: construction → exploitation → reporting → public awareness → legislation. This is too slow. Moreover, operating in this environment is exhausting.
We need a different feedback loop altogether. I'm not sure which one would work best, but something different needs to be considered.
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A culture that values privacy, out of respect, necessity and/or fear, has potential to sabotage each step of the process even if it were not to change.
There was a point, at least in my bubble, where there was a general sense that government surveillance is bad (expect against those people). I think coming out of the Cold War, then 9/11, and followed by propaganda obfuscating the increase, purpose and prevalence of private surveillance took us from "no, we aren't Stalinist Russia" to "I don't care, I have nothing to hide" to just "I don't care" when it comes to the topic of surveillance at all.
Unfortunately, it will take great shocks to instill it so the next generation can learn from the suffering of the previous, and then forget it when privacy is taken for granted again.
Yeah, abuse of privacy should be the crime, the same way theft is. How exactly the crime is committed shouldn't matter. Companies can have every right to make a compelling argument that what they did was not an abuse of privacy when they are defending themselves in court.
And critically, it is not someone becoming aware of private information that is the abuse of privacy, it is exploiting that private information which is the abuse. There may be countless legitimate technical reasons you need to collect data, but there can not possibly be a technical justification for selling it.