Privacy, Government, Surveillance, and You.

Technology has everything to do with it, in the same way that nuclear bombs threaten world peace. Technology is the enabler of all these security and privacy concerns. In the early 21st century, if anyone is going to try to manipulate large masses of people for their own gain, they will be using the latest technology to do it. And if some of us wish to protect our security and privacy, then limiting the use of that technology (often through the use of other technology) is going to be the means by which that happens.

Ethics concerns are important, of course, and we should be encouraging people to act as ethically as possible. But we also have to legislate to the lowest common denominator.

Nuclear weaponry is probably the single greatest protector and cause of world peace.

If it wasn't for MAD we'd probably be fighting the Russians all across Ukraine and Syria right now.

edited 5th Apr '17 10:46:32 AM by LeGarcon

Exactly my point.

You just said it threatened it. It does the opposite.

My point was that technology isnt irrelevent. It both threatens privacy and secures it.

I guess what's crossing the line here is that it's implanted? Even if someone's tracking your location through your phone, or has access to your browsing history, you can leave your phone at your desk, or turn it off, you can just not browse the Internet. A bit harder to ditch the chip implanted under your skin, though. It's very much inescapable and omnipresent, in a way that phones and computers are not.

In a few decades, assuming Trump doesn't throw us back to the Stone Age, implanted ID devices will probably be the norm that everyone accepts. Twenty years ago, the idea that parents would track their kids through cell phones was unheard of. Technology works like that. Since you cannot turn back the clock, the only way to deal with such change and remain sane is to work on the ethical side, however difficult that may seem.

edited 5th Apr '17 1:14:07 PM by Fighteer

They will implant me over my cold, dead body.

See, here's the thing. A cell can be turned off, ignored, or left behind. It's in the control of the wielder, who may choose to stop wielding it at any time. An implant is beyond the user's control. It really is an infringement on one's freedom.

Maybe, but Proudhon remarked as far back as the nineteenth century that to be a citizen is to be catalogued, checked off, labeled, sorted, etc. I'd worry about mind-controlling chips straight out of sci-fi. I'd object to chips at all, because pain, risk of infection, and plain ick.
However, the ship has sailed for Proudhon's original complaints. One technically doesn't have to use the internet—just like one technically does not have to have a dwelling—but all that information is online anyway and quite an effective way to track people. (The US State Department got details on the dispersion, size, number, and objectives of the early Syrian rebels by looking at their facebook posts and their tweets).

So, on the one hand, combining this with places like Amazon Go stores, one can expect to just walk in an out of places with no effort put into paying and for things like medical info to automatically register when one walks into a doctors office and be automatically registered to vote at 18/21/16/etc. OTOH, one is screwed if she ends up an enemy of whoever has this information. (And no, voting out the people who misuse information is not an effective remedy).

You don't have to even use real info for social media. I've got a junk account where I keep my junk stuff. They can get a bunch of numbers and maybe some statistics farming your phone, but they don't necessarily have to link that to you. An implant though? That's you all the way. The physical you, and forever hold your peace.

I wouldn't imagine the chips would ever be required, just as today, a smartphone is not required. You can still conduct most of your business using a plain old flip-phone that only stores numbers and can't even surf the web. To upgrade should be a rational person's choice.

edited 6th Apr '17 7:00:08 AM by blkwhtrbbt

Even the chips can be spoofed once someone with outside the manufacturer gets their hands on one. Of course, that's just a start.

And this is a comparatively "dumb" chip, whose technology I recall to have been in existence for a while now.

See, I don't believe in a "right to privacy" from all data collection. We live in a society where you have to be identified in order to participate. "I use an alternate identity for social media"... I mean, knock yourself out, but that's both stupid and pointless. Someone who really cares can identify you if they want, and for everyone else it's just an inconvenience.

You don't need to be identified to participate in anything.

This isn't exactly the most noble example, but take Tatsuya Ishida, the webcomic artist for Sinfest. Nobody knows what he even looks like, except for one distant yearbook photo that's rumored to be him. His detractors even speculate on this very wiki in the forums that his comic has been hijacked by other writers/artists given the extreme differences in tone and art style compared to his early work. We can probably ping his website's IP address, but for all we know he could be renting a server far from where he actually lives.

And you can't honestly tell me you've never made smurf accounts for anything.

And the most beautiful thing about the current state of social media? When you get tired of it, when you're sick of the public following your every move, when you don't feel like being traced, you can turn it all off. You can log out of SM. You can turn location services off on your devices. You can reduce your phone to its nominal purpose.

You can fly under the radar for months at a time. An implant wouldn't give you that option, not unless you could remove it somehow. The whole issue is choice. You can choose to remove the intrusion of a phone, if you so wish. You can't remove an implant so cheaply.

We've already had this discussion, but it's only "stupid and pointless" in (most) Western countries (it's not pointless when you're a journalist doing very high-risk work within the higher levels of economic, military or political power). In countries where there's less freedom of expression (and where a wrong decision, even if not malicious, can signify the difference between life and death), alternate identities, fake accounts, circumventing walls (especially because 'the walls have ears'^note  this is a Portuguese expression that used to be said during the dictatorship whenever a discussion got too political, because there were a fair amount of undercover PIDE agents) and other methods are a great necessity.

It's easy to say that when your country never went through a dictatorship or a highly authoritarian regime (it's really quite useful when one doesn't think 'in an Occidental way' [and more importantly, when one doesn't think from an US perspective] when facing certain issues).

I don't believe in it either, but only because it's not realistically achievable. But citizens (both digital and non-digital) should have a say and fight to ensure as many rights to privacy as possible.

edited 6th Apr '17 3:08:24 PM by Quag15

We're getting there.

We're fucking doomed.

We've had it too good for the last decades. We'll start declining soon.

What did we say about making blanket statements like "We're fucking doomed"? Should I get the mods over here?

edited 6th Apr '17 3:07:14 PM by Bat178

I thought that was in the General US Politics Thread. Is this just a universal policy now

The Democrats introduced a bill to restore internet privacy: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/327652-senate-dems-want-to-reinstate-privacy-rules

edited 6th Apr '17 3:35:23 PM by Bat178

What a noble effort. Everybody write your senators.

Pointless nihilism is in fact banned site wide and I belive always has been, the policy has just become more obvious due form ecent events.

I'm sorry, I had just broken up with my girlfriend and had a brief moment of despair projection.

It's just that, until Trump, world news were frighteningly good. The world has been getting slightly better every year, overall.

But now, with Trump, and Brexit, and Chinese expansionism, and Russian interventionism, well, it could all end up in the shitter.

I think the tropes are irony and It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
US government 'hacked global bank system'

edited 15th Apr '17 3:00:48 PM by CenturyEye

I guess the NSA is going to need some better hacks...