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The Fantasy of Opting Out

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Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#141

Post by shadowgovt »

Cost of ubiquitous surveillance is going down, and at the end of the day, that's the dominant effect. Given the intersection of low cost and demonstrated utility, we're seeing a sea-change in society of significant scale, such that "opting out of surveillance" really does being to equate to "opting out of society." Imagine if you had a moral objection to, say, walking on roads. What percentage of society would you have to avoid to maintain your personal constraint?

Rather than asking how we opt out, it's probably best to ask how we live in. How do we all get along and feel safe and secure given the new existence of multiple cheap-to-maintain panopticons? David Brin's "The Transparent Society" is a bit dated, but I think it provides a decent starting framework to consider the question. Because the genie's out of the bottle, and "being in the community" is going to be synonymous by "being seen by the community." We have some liberty to determine as societies what that means.

(Consider, as a bad example but perhaps a useful framing of thought: nobody in Star Trek worries about the fact that the computer on a ship knows what they're doing, continuously, at all times, and can report that to anyone who asks. Why? And how does that fictional reality differ from what people actually want?)

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#142

Post by shadowgovt »

I think it's reasonable to turn the philosophical question around and look at it from the other direction.

Why should a person interacting within society have the option to opt out of surveillance?

We don't imagine that in pre-industrial-age communities, people believed in a right to not be seen by, say, the butcher or blacksmith when they went in to buy meat or metalwork, or a right to not have their commerce recorded in books of accounting. And people weren't immune to town gossip---the low-speed, high-latency, low-accuracy equivalent of having your disparate data points aggregated. Has society changed or has what it means to be seen changed? Is gossip qualitatively different now because it's fast, low-latency, and high-accuracy?

Framed from this angle, I think the question is less about opting out and more about "How much gossip is it polite to engage in before people should see one as an asshole for being that nosy?"

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#143

Post by kgwxd »

shadowgovt wrote: post #142

I think it's reasonable to turn the philosophical question around and look at it from the other direction. Why should a person interacting within society have the option to opt out of surveillance? We don't imagine that in pre-industrial-age communities, people believed in a right to not be seen by, say, the butcher or blacksmith when they went in to buy meat or metalwork, or a right to not have their commerce record…

To me, it's the lack of personal responsibility. Once it's automated, there's basically no single person to call an asshole.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#144

Post by ohthehugemanate »

mikelyons wrote: post #126
whatshisface wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History has consistently shown that the rights tend to arise after the violations, not the other way around. The Magna Carta was written in response to an awful king, the FDA was established as a response to widespread problems with people getting poisoned, slavery wasn't abolished until millenia after it was invented, and labor organization (leading to such modern niceties as the 40 hour week) did not arise until we…

There will have to be time, but also immense harm and death before something will be done. It wont just take decades of the discomfort of wondering what they're doing with the data. It will take some sort of massive act against the people done with the data before the outcry will happen, as with any technology. People didn't invent and require seatbelts becasue "you could die" people did die. The question is what wil…

The frustrating this is, we HAVE ALREADY SEEN terrible violations of surveillance and profiling power, in Nazi Germany, Stasi East Germany, Soviet Russia, Communist China, etc. Tens or hundreds of millions have disappeared, suffered, and died. I guess we didn't take the "universal surveillance/profiling is dangerous" lesson from any of these experiences hard enough, despite it entering into major western literature through stories like 1984.

I guess the analogy is that Voltaire was writing about abuses decades before they stormed the Bastille. So maybe it takes MORE abuses. It's terrifying to think of how to scale abuse UPWARDS from those examples, though.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#145

Post by carapace »

I've been saying for ages now that the ubiquitous surveillance panopticon is inevitable: technology makes it possible and politics and economics drive it.

(BTW, FWIW, I don't like it. I just don't see any way around it.)

So, given that, the obvious problem becomes making sure it is self-referential: the powerful must be subject to it as well as the "little guys". Otherwise you get Morlocks and Eloi, a split-level society with most people living as de facto slaves. Ask the people of Hong Kong about it, eh? (If they can still speak freely by the time you read this?)

If we and our children and grandchildren and their progeny are going to be irretrievably strapped into this global machine we'd better make sure it's humane, eh?

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#146

Post by danShumway »

shadowgovt wrote: post #142

I think it's reasonable to turn the philosophical question around and look at it from the other direction. Why should a person interacting within society have the option to opt out of surveillance? We don't imagine that in pre-industrial-age communities, people believed in a right to not be seen by, say, the butcher or blacksmith when they went in to buy meat or metalwork, or a right to not have their commerce record…

> Why should a person interacting within society have the option to opt out of surveillance?

A non-exhaustive list of a few specific reasons:

- Private, unregulatable actions are historically large components of social change, particularly for minority groups.

- Historically, powerful groups (both governments and societies as a whole) have used surveillance to harass critics and undesirable parts of the population.

- People have a natural tendency to self-select and avoid honestly engaging with controversial ideas when they know they're being watched.

I tend to sum most of that up into a more general point:

People have the Right to Hide because society can be cruel, vindictive, and arbitrary, and because people have the right to protect themselves from others in the same way that a deer has the right to camouflage itself from wolves.

Opting out of society is not a real choice that anyone here can realistically take, so a just society must balance collective and individual rights. That means respecting individual rights of privacy and self-autonomy.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#147

Post by Jestar342 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #115

I'm very pessimistic about all this. It seems to me that the horse has already bolted: we are all under constant surveilance and there is not much we can do about it at all. Many of us don't even think it's a problem and even many who do think it is don't want to lose the benefits that are attached to the constant automated surveilance. As citizens of democratic countries we have uttely failed to protect our rights a…

> In the UK, Theresa May, who brought the Snooper Charter into law became Prime Minister instead of being kicked out of her political career in disgrace.*

To be fair, it is one horrendously broken electoral system. FPTP combined with this un-offical but totally official party system we have, has provided an illusion of democratic election. Just this week (now that election number 3 to be held within the last 4 years has been announced) we have national news papers publishing articles on how to vote tactically.

Just let that sink in. How utterly disgusting it is that we are in this position.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#149

Post by someguydave »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #144
mikelyons wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will have to be time, but also immense harm and death before something will be done. It wont just take decades of the discomfort of wondering what they're doing with the data. It will take some sort of massive act against the people done with the data before the outcry will happen, as with any technology. People didn't invent and require seatbelts becasue "you could die" people did die. The question is what wil…

The frustrating this is, we HAVE ALREADY SEEN terrible violations of surveillance and profiling power, in Nazi Germany, Stasi East Germany, Soviet Russia, Communist China, etc. Tens or hundreds of millions have disappeared, suffered, and died. I guess we didn't take the "universal surveillance/profiling is dangerous" lesson from any of these experiences hard enough, despite it entering into major western literature t…

1.) those horrendous actions happened more than a generation ago, people forget.

2.) the lack of a terrible regime on the other side of the planet committing these acts removes the shame in proposing them here.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#150

Post by makotech222 »

whatshisface wrote: post #124
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #115

I'm very pessimistic about all this. It seems to me that the horse has already bolted: we are all under constant surveilance and there is not much we can do about it at all. Many of us don't even think it's a problem and even many who do think it is don't want to lose the benefits that are attached to the constant automated surveilance. As citizens of democratic countries we have uttely failed to protect our rights a…

History has consistently shown that the rights tend to arise after the violations, not the other way around. The Magna Carta was written in response to an awful king, the FDA was established as a response to widespread problems with people getting poisoned, slavery wasn't abolished until millenia after it was invented, and labor organization (leading to such modern niceties as the 40 hour week) did not arise until we…

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