Individuals have far more freedom then ever, but at the same time their actions are increasingly becoming more recorded. The reality where every facet of a persons life becomes known to government is almost completely upon us. It will soon become impossible to commit the smallest of crimes without law enforcement being notified. The data is almost complete, all that's standing in the way is existing privacy laws and the inherent difficulty of compiling the data. Flimsy barriers to dystopia.
This is a pessimistic view of the future that I worry about too, but overall, I still see little sign of it in practice. Surveillance may be ever closer to being ubiquitous but overall, (and it's almost heartening to see it be the case) crime, from the petty to the major, remains rampant worldwide with the vast majority of perpetrators never being caught at all.
This applies to organized crime, street crime of the petty or violent kind and of course to purely digital crime. In some cases, the absence of being caught is because of simple corruption (especially with organized crime) but in many if not most, it's still down to old fashioned police ineptitude, indifference and ironically, more crimes than ever being reported specifically because of wider surveillance and easier means of calling public social media attention to criminal activities.
If anything, these factors in many places just saturate police into inactivity, instead of causing greater punitive measures, and all this, despite widespread surveillance. A simple first world example: San Francisco. No shortage of social, technological and police surveillance resources, but good luck getting an iota of investigative attention even if someone openly steals something from you, unless you're well connected or lucky.
> It will soon become impossible to commit the smallest of crimes without law enforcement being notified.
If it was that simple, I would applaud the new era of surveillance. Unfortunately, some people will be above the law, while others will be subjected to it.
If privacy laws were actually repealed, and everyone saw what everyone else was doing, it might not be so bad. It’s the unfairness of it that really stinks.
> Unfortunately, some people will be above the law, while others will be subjected to it.
This is a big problem, but hardly the only one.
There’s plenty of things illegal in various places right now which I don’t believe should be illegal. And some other things which were illegal and socially unacceptable when I was young and which are now not only perfectly legal but also socially normalised such that having a problem with it marks one as a bigot.
But even for the things which I do wish to remain illegal, almost all of them will need significantly reduced penalties in a world of omniscient surveillance.
To give a specific example of how the status quo would break if we had perfect surveillance but didn’t change anything else: In the UK, the minimum penalty is a £100 fine and 3 points on your license, and if you get 12 points within a 3 year period you can be disqualified from driving. Enforce that perfectly, how fast would everyone in the UK lose their licenses?
Currently, there is tech to see what's inside person's brain. One can think of a word and it will be pronounced by computer. Useful for paralyzed people. Also useful to the government and to people like you. Just think of a politically incorrect word, here $50 fine is automatically subtracted from your bank account.
Depends on how you define it. We all certainly leave much more of a paper trail.
My dad and I spoke about this a few years ago. When we lived in NYC I used to go to work with him for a week or two in the summer. The only evidence recorded of that was my name on the visitor log taken by the receptionist.
That visit today is almost certainly auditable. The subway trip is via payment card, and our entry in and out of stations are almost certainly captured by MTA and NYPD cameras. Street surveillance is pervasive in Manhattan from any number of entities. The NYPD network has facial recognition capability.
Entry into the building is logged by swipe card, every time you go pee in the bathroom in the public area, there’s often a badge swipe.
So are we less free? I don’t know. We’re more watched. But then again talking to my cousins on the phone in California was a major family event. And my dad would have to dodge out of work to take out cash for the weekend. A few weeks ago we took a long weekend in Florida with 4 hours notice and travelled without luggage.
They have more things to keep them entertained, more tv channels, millions if not billions of websites to choose from, so much content on streaming platforms like Youtube, you would need millions of lifetimes to watch everything.
You see, if you know enough about humans or any other animal you can manipulate them, like throwing a dog a stick to fetch, this means they dont have freedom not even freedom of thought.
Newspaper headline writers are wordsmiths, but now science can predict what words and phrases will hook different types of people to get them to read their output. Just look at the Trump relection & Bidens election, using adverts to identify floating voters ie those who have not made up their mind and then targeting them to manipulate them to vote a certain way.
I can usually pick out the next US president from a year before the elections, done this Bush.
Its like right now, people give out data which when datamined can be used to track and identify people across multiple websites, work out your working patterns, holiday preferences and then from there you can be targeted remotely or in the flesh.
Another example although this is more access to property, but its a tool you can find in Locksmiths toolkits and first responders tool kits. In other words this is a deliberate bug in a security system. Link is already cued.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5-qy2tbDG8&t=119s
When you look at the legislation that exists and does not exist, you can identify the area's where state criminality can occur, but the official secrets which released by countries annually will always hold back some stuff as national security. This can include things like techniques still valid for use today, ie stuff thats been used for hundreds of years and stuff that is fairly recent but still in use today.
When you look at the legislation that exists, like people haved said we are a product of google, we are also a product of the state.
