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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

No. It's not.

"The average UK adult is now registered on more than 700 databases and is caught many times each day by nearly five million CCTV cameras."

Is designed to scare people. Even though it's BS. Most of those cameras are firstly in massive cities. Secondly, most of them are simply connected to some dumb VHS recorder that only gets checked if there is some crime.

Personally, I think it's more important for him to support his wife and kids rather than running off and pretending to be a spy.

Also, first rule of hiding, don't have a pregnant wife or dependents, because hiding will be pretty hard.

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This is exactly correct.

You only have to look at the criticism of Mi5 not having the resources to track people they knew were potential terrorists when they crossed paths with people they were actively tracking to know that the chances that anything I do all day even being looked at by a human are almost nothing.

Also my experience dealing with HMRC shows me even people in the civil service who are paid to know what I'm doing suffer from such data disorganisation and unconnection that I have no fears at all about it's use.

I'm far more worried about how it is stored and secured, and also how commercial entities that have power over my status in society (read credit agencies) gather and do not verify data that may, through no fault of my own, affect my life. One of my friends from way back had someone elses credit black list applied to her purely based on them having the same name even though they live in completely different areas of the country.

I too had my identity stolen and had the hassle of cleaning my credit history. But that's a separate problem.

The problem wasn't my privacy, the problem was that I moved out of an address, some junk mail came for me after I'd left, and so the new resident used my name to run up some bills.

You can steal identities by simply knowing a name and an address such is the broken credit check system.

That's not proving that things need to be stored and secured better. It's showing that credit agencies need to actually use some common sense. (In my case the fraudulent entries didn't even match my date of birth).

He's a filmmaker. This is how he supports his wife and kids.

idk. All the article shows me is that this is an unhinged man in need of help.

She presumably knew he was a creative artist when she married him, that's probably even why she found him attractive.

"creative artist" my arse.

As Bond became more obsessed, Katie became increasingly annoyed. They argued over filling in a form for Ivy’s nursery. “They can use this data for God knows what!” Bond yelled. “I thought, for God’s sake, no one else worries about this,” Katie remembers. “Why do we have to?” She tried to reassure him: “It’s fine. They’re not going to do anything weird with our data. If some kind of weird government comes in, we’ll opt out.” He wasn’t convinced.

Creative types are a bit temperamental, everyone knows that.

And that's very naive thing for her to say... Weird governments don't let you just "opt out".

Is designed to scare people. Even though it's BS. Most of those cameras are firstly in massive cities.

Well, lots of people live in those massive cities...and by cities, I mean anywhere with a population of >100k or so. It's easy to be blase about it from a viewer's perspective. I lived in London from 88-96 and was surprised to see how much surveillance increased during that time. On the rare occasions when I go back I find it quite unpleasant and intrusive to see so many cameras.

Certainly one can argue the old 'if you're not doing anything wrong...' position. But what's 'wrong' is not guaranteed to be fair or consistent, but can change quite quickly if the political climate shifts - and it's comforting but mistaken to assume all our mistakes are behind us and things can only improve. Sometimes they decline, and under those circumstances ubiquitous surveillance paired with ample state funding for technological improvements presents a serious danger. Consider that by the time the Berlin wall fell, the East German secret police operated a network of informers estimated to comprise ~2% of the whole population - some claim it was much higher. that's not a healthy use of resources or authority.

Didn't downvote you BTW - I disagree but I don't consider a variance in opinion justifies all the negatives.

My main issue though is that articles hand wave about these cameras, implying that they are a state owned program of surveillance. They're not.

Companies, shops, town councils, decide independently to install cameras.

I accept your point about the cameras. The movie in question also covers other kinds of privacy leaks.

Another way to research a documentary about privacy, or lack thereof, would be to go do a bunch of interviews with detectives, police, and DB admins at Tesco. Yawn. This guy chose to live the experience of trying to hide - he's not pretending to be a spy, he's pretending to be spied on. As another commenter said, this is his job, it's how he supports him family.

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