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Comment by joshontheweb | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, I'm very terrified at the prospect of being tracked in my every move and it seems entirely unavoidable. License plate scanners are already in wide deployment. There was an article on HN last week about the FBI's 100 million strong facial recognition database using peoples drivers license photos without their consent or knowledge. Not to mention the wholesale tracking of our online activities by the NSA which is already a done deal. I'm seriously thinking about leaving the US to buy myself some time. I'm not hopeful that anywhere will be safe in the end as other countries catch up with this technology. What can be done if this isn't the world you want to live in?

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"Unavoidable" is the key thing to realize.

Even if you manage to get your government to never do this, it is (or soon will be) easily within reach for private hobbyists.

My window faces a major freeway. I could probably rig up a license plate reader that registers all cars going by fairly cheaply. If not now, then surely in 5 years.

Everyone has a quite nice camera in their pocket. The car I bought last year comes with 3 cameras. And so on. I think it's an unavoidable fact that in the very near future, you have to assume you are being filmed whenever you're in public.

So I think the real question is: How do we adapt to this new world? How can we limit the bad aspects and enjoy the good aspects? Are we really sure what is bad and good?

Two thoughts:

1) It's a lot easier to recognize 100M distinct plates than faces. I don't see anyone having the resources and patience to do the latter any time soon. Even the FBI isn't claiming they can recognize 1 face/100M with low error today. At best, they have such a database of pictures. I'm have big doubts that usefully matching against so many faces is even technically possible.

2) I think you're right, given the rapid advancement of tech, our emphasis shouldn't be whether we should outlaw surveillance practices and methods. Instead we should focus on controlling access to such databases. Who gets to gather or use such data and when should it be authorized? Should we require that each ID match request be explicitly granted (like a warrant) or should we at least require that all such requests be logged, and perhaps publicly reported?

Once access to sensitive data is regulated, it no longer matters how the data is gathered. Abuse of such a law should poison any fruits of the data, at least on the part of lawful agencies.

Regarding 1, there are systems @ Facebook and inside Google that can do this reasonably well and I know the technology intimately. I would consider this a nearly solved problem, I give it 1 to 2 years at most to be more generally available.

If it truly is entirely unavoidable, then I suppose one way to adapt is to democratize access to these tools and data. The power to abuse is too great if it is concentrated in a small number of hands. Still this seems scary to me. The one solace I take in this is that the gov't has the most dirty laundry to hide and this loss of privacy should help to expose a lot of the corruption going on.

> "Not to mention the wholesale tracking of our online activities by the NSA which is already a done deal. I'm seriously thinking about leaving the US to buy myself some time"

Leaving the USA will actually ensure the NSA collects a lot more about you. Staying will actually ensure they collect very little, mainly as a byproduct of the methods they use and not because of any nefarious plot.

I was more meaning to buy myself some time from the physical real-world tracking. We have no way of knowing what the NSA is actually storing on citizens. I have to assume it is everything and that doesn't seem outlandish in light of the Snowden leaks.

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