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Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

theguardian.com

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Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#21

Post by neilsense »

melomal wrote: post #15
thejackgoode wrote: post #10

Fun fact: London has ~700k cameras and is top 3 in the world by cameras per capita, top 20 being almost exclusively Chinese cities https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...

Exactly, literally every time I see these articles I just think of the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite... I remember being questioned on terrorism charges outside St. Pauls Cathedral, alongside my friends by about 20 police with 4 vans. They told us that we need to leave London (lived outside of it) and they will watch us to ensure that we leave, if we do not then there will be furthe…

What did you do to elicit that response?

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#22

Post by tommit »

re-al wrote: post #17

"Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time." They were designed to be surveillance devices! Remember when you could replace your phone battery? They corrected that 'design flaw'. Smart phones, smart meters, smart cities, 5g... th…

This seems a bit over the top to me. I don't think I agree with your overall sentiment, even though I share some of the fear.

Our phones were certainly not designed to be surveillance devices, that's just a side effect of having one central device that includes pretty much all of your life's data. As convenient as it is to have everything that matters to you on one device, it simply makes spying that much easier.

I'm not going to go into the smart home debate. I personally don't think that most smart devices are actually spying on you, though a lot of them are security nightmares and could be easily configured to do so by a malicious third party.

I don't share your sentiment towards the guardian at all. I think it's important they are writing articles like this -- thereby doing more to put an end to it than most. You not using a cell phone and telling your friends not to either is likely not having as much an impact on the public as such an article does.

That last sentence of yours pretty much makes any debate pointless, however.

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#23

Post by IndySun »

thejackgoode wrote: post #10

Fun fact: London has ~700k cameras and is top 3 in the world by cameras per capita, top 20 being almost exclusively Chinese cities https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...

>London has ~700k cameras

A fact that often scurries across my mind when I read about some crime caught in 4k (especially home security cams) for which the police are unable to find the culprits. Are all those cameras actually on?

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#24

Post by djbebs »

IndySun wrote: post #23
thejackgoode wrote: post #10

Fun fact: London has ~700k cameras and is top 3 in the world by cameras per capita, top 20 being almost exclusively Chinese cities https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...

>London has ~700k cameras A fact that often scurries across my mind when I read about some crime caught in 4k (especially home security cams) for which the police are unable to find the culprits. Are all those cameras actually on?

They are but if they use them all the time people won't be able to put them out of their mind and ignore them. So they only use them when it's politically convenient

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#25

Post by RandomLensman »

pattusk wrote: post #3

I don't think the problem is with the "lie" that the innocent need not fear surveillance. Most people will agree that mass-surveillance will negatively affect some people that are indispensable to healthily functioning liberal society: journalists, activists, academics, public figures... The problem is that even if most people don't subscribe to the "nothing to hide" argument in general, they do not care about themse…

For me the issue is again the conflation of risks from state actors vs from private companies.

In the case here it is state actors doing the surveillance. The biggest con was that people are concerned about privacy vs private companies when the focus should be on state actors. The ability to get people worked up about privacy and data sharing in a messenger app when at the same time governments are trying to remove anonymity in the web is nothing but astonishing.

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#26

Post by theelous3 »

melomal wrote: post #15
thejackgoode wrote: post #10

Fun fact: London has ~700k cameras and is top 3 in the world by cameras per capita, top 20 being almost exclusively Chinese cities https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...

Exactly, literally every time I see these articles I just think of the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite... I remember being questioned on terrorism charges outside St. Pauls Cathedral, alongside my friends by about 20 police with 4 vans. They told us that we need to leave London (lived outside of it) and they will watch us to ensure that we leave, if we do not then there will be furthe…

1. How can you say this without giving more context?

2. Presuming you aren't a terrorist or doing something so almost terroristish you were violating a public order statute - why wouldn't you just refuse?

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#28

Post by raxxorrax »

IndySun wrote: post #23
thejackgoode wrote: post #10

Fun fact: London has ~700k cameras and is top 3 in the world by cameras per capita, top 20 being almost exclusively Chinese cities https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...

>London has ~700k cameras A fact that often scurries across my mind when I read about some crime caught in 4k (especially home security cams) for which the police are unable to find the culprits. Are all those cameras actually on?

You think all these cameras would have a positive effect on the crime index. London is just average compared to other European cities, so you might just want to skip spending billions on surveillance in the first place.

https://www.numbeo.com/crime/region_rankings_current.jsp?reg...

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#30

Post by trompetenaccoun »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #12

It's a fight we are only ever gonna lose. I.e. in Germany, I have seen wave after wave of surveillance passed. People try to fight back each time. Often the supreme court cancels the unconstitutional laws. But they always try again. And it only takes a football euro cup or Worldcup, or Olympic games or a natural catastrophy to provide the distraction for the public to pass another law. Our governments want to surveil…

>The figth will only start after enough innocent surveillance victims are harmed in the real world (i.e. their data is leaked or worse)

Sadly I doubt even this will happen. I lived in China and watched the CCP built their digital surveillance state. Like others say most people don't care because they have comfortable lives and/or are concerned with other issues they find more pressing. And so what if the government looks at my holiday pictures, they think. What they don't realize is that it may not make a noticeable difference to them personally at first. But slowly the effects ripple through society. Independent journalism becomes risky, political activism gets pushed into the underground. It affects the people keeping our societies sound and healthy first. Once they're gone, it only gets worse and worse, because there's no one to keep the government in check anymore. By the time the ordinary citizen wakes up and realizes they're living in a dystopian nightmare it's way too late. In China there is 0 resistance anymore. Among the last ones were the Uyghur seperatists and you may know how that ended.

Now is the time to fight back! Do not wait until the damage is irreparable. And in an ever more globalized world, we the people also need to unite globally and support each other.

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