The Banality of Surveillance
benn.substack.com
The Banality of Surveillance
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Re: The Banality of Surveillance
#2I'm fully expecting my next employer to grill me on my grocery purchasing habits and inferred medical history in my next job interview. Its all there for purchase and AI can put it all together into a compelling narrative. Suddenly my preference for prunes becomes a lifelong dire struggle with irregular bowel movement that may distract me from my work. Expect pointed questions about bathroom break lengths.
Re: The Banality of Surveillance
#3I was using Grok with speech and discovered their "paralinguistic" information storage. At first it claimed that the storage was temporary, but then admitted that long term data was stored for training.
Some of the dimensions they store are prosody, intensity, timbre, non-verbal vocalizations, pauses, timing and emotional inflection. In other words, another large layer of information on top of just the prompt text. This data doesn't get translated into text, it goes straight into a speech-to-speech model.
It strikes me that from just a few minutes of such data and the associated semantic content, an AI can assemble a detailed and accurate emotional/psychological dossier of any user, on demand. In the hands of a federal agent it would be a powerful tool to impose their department's will, or their own. Also it's an ad targeting mother load. And if that were already in place we would have no way to know.
Talking to a machine seems banal already, but the metadata contains an instruction manual on where your buttons are and how to press them.
Re: The Banality of Surveillance
#4[deleted]
Re: The Banality of Surveillance
#5I'm in my 50s and when I was early 20s I crossed from US to Canada for a business meeting. "Why are you coming to Canada?" "To work." "Where's your work permit?" "Huh, I don't have one." That simple "wrong word" slip STILL gets me flagged and cordoned off into hours-long border diversions whenever I go to Canada.
Just imagine how it'll be now... for decades you'll be fending off some hidden receipts from an IG comment you made.
Re: The Banality of Surveillance
#6Reminder to never accept any cookie requests
Re: The Banality of Surveillance
#7People overestimate the power of digital surveillance enormously. You'd think that's not a problem, but at the same time, most people underestimate more banal sources of repression.
You don't have to buy mouse click data on every John Smith when you've handed the handful of media empires to your buddies, reporters are jailed, dissidents are killed and CEOs willingly bend the knee to make a quick buck.
The most precious we normal people have are our attention and the most value is attached to our wallets. Guess what, we part with both when we willingly watch ads.
You don't need an LLM writing 600 lines of SQL, because Google already has a billion lines of code in production, serving ads. Stealing your attention when you should be meeting friends, or meeting a family member's gaze.
Re: The Banality of Surveillance
#8I'm fully expecting my next employer to grill me on my grocery purchasing habits and inferred medical history in my next job interview. Its all there for purchase and AI can put it all together into a compelling narrative. Suddenly my preference for prunes becomes a lifelong dire struggle with irregular bowel movement that may distract me from my work. Expect pointed questions about bathroom break lengths.
"Ah, now here's the thing about that. I wrote this custom 'surveillance countermeasures' tool a few years ago and have been using it ever since. It constantly emits false data about me to confuse these sorts of data collection services. Funny that it thinks I would like prunes."
Re: The Banality of Surveillance
#9I was using Grok with speech and discovered their "paralinguistic" information storage. At first it claimed that the storage was temporary, but then admitted that long term data was stored for training. Some of the dimensions they store are prosody, intensity, timbre, non-verbal vocalizations, pauses, timing and emotional inflection. In other words, another large layer of information on top of just the prompt text. T…
Another factor is storing everything, forever.
Re: The Banality of Surveillance
#10I'm in my 50s and when I was early 20s I crossed from US to Canada for a business meeting. "Why are you coming to Canada?" "To work." "Where's your work permit?" "Huh, I don't have one." That simple "wrong word" slip STILL gets me flagged and cordoned off into hours-long border diversions whenever I go to Canada. Just imagine how it'll be now... for decades you'll be fending off some hidden receipts from an IG commen…
Had a similar experience: over a decade ago our firm opened an office in Canada and being scrappy and startup-like I had to cross into Canada with some networking equipment to help set up the new office. The amount of scrutiny was insane: thankfully it never stuck and I was eventually let on to do the work and return