Your Privacy Is Over
From https://medium.com/s/story/your-privacy-is-over-ed72d06418f1
(audio at link)
A plausible case for a future with no privacy, and why it should concern you
Tobias Stone
May 1
Three Things Should Frighten You
1. In China, the government is using data to control the country’s population. By building a firewall around China and then replacing the blocked global tech services with locally owned versions it can control, the government is able to create a digital profile of each person’s actions, affiliations, statements, acts, and misdemeanors. On this, people are “scored” within a “social credit” system and rewarded or penalized accordingly.
2. The recent coverage of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook shows just how much corporations in the West know about us without us knowing. The sting on Cambridge Analytica and extensive reporting by Carole Cadwalladr, along with the Facebook Senate hearings, have shown how companies that manipulate public opinion are operating in a way that very few people, and clearly not our lawmakers, can really understand.
3. Quantum computing will soon be able to break modern encryption, laying open everything we so far thought was private and safe, and more powerful computers will be able to search and map this data going back through digital time. Yes, today’s quantum computing is far off from doing this, but think of your current iPhone compared to your first PC, and assume that somewhere in the future, computers will be more powerful and capable than anything we can imagine today.
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More at link.
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Beyond what children can understand is that, as they become adults, they will be the first generation whose entire life will become a searchable digital profile. Everything the young do now is recorded. Not just the things they know are recorded, but information from security cameras to school reports, photos of them in a nightclub, CCTV of them buying alcohol with a fake ID, their internet search history, their likes, and their social graphs.
Not only will the internet log who they know, but it will also map everyone they’ve ever known or interacted with digitally. While all this information isn’t yet searchable and may (for now) be private, it exists, and will do forever in a way that our current society is entirely unprepared to understand. Moreover, a child born in China in 2020 will be born into their social credit system, with its every action and word being mapped and tracked from birth.
Of course, you’d argue, this won’t actually happen, because most of that data is private, is secure. We have checks and balances in our societies to protect us from such Big Brother nightmares. But that is now. Western societies are the main advocates of people having rights, privacy, and control over what government and corporations can know about us and do with our data.
This ideology mainly developed in postwar institutions and societies as a reaction to that era of dictatorships, creating rules and treaties to protect the freedoms for which the war was fought. But these are the societies in which the resurgent populist right are now arguing for less government, less regulation, for more of what they falsely believe is “freedom.”
Aside from this shift within Western democracies, it is likely that the bigger pattern we can’t see from where we stand is that the West is in decline and the future belongs to countries like China.
China’s social credit system can already ban people from foreign travel (or escape, depending how you choose to see it) and has seen up to 7 million people added to a social blacklist. It combines an unregulated, unfettered use of surveillance technology and the world’s largest facial recognition system so that the state can see who its people meet, where they go, and what they are saying, and then use that against them.
Ultimately, everything will be tracked by the state, connected by ever more sophisticated algorithms, run on ever more powerful computers, until dissent becomes impossible and there is no and there is no escape. How do you oppose a system like that?
