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Comment by ahmeneeroe-v2 | Hacker News Reader

Once again I am struck by how tech makes the world smaller. We're back to a small village or tribal camp where everyone knows your business all the time. It appears the last 50-100 years were a golden age of privacy and an aberration, not the norm.

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"everyone knows your business all the time"

Not everyone. Only the people with access to the surveillance data. This asymmetry is a big problem.

I'd have to think about this. It doesn't seem true.

If you knew the location of every police car or city councilman's car, what would that change?

I’d be willing to bet they would take privacy protections a bit more seriously.

Or at the very least they'd think twice before grandstanding against the construction of a strip club or whatever when anyone can look back and see their patronage of such.

It would change how much surveillance there was in the first place.

Oh no no no, those are private for security reasons!

1 - you don't actually have access to that information.

2 - you're lowballing the problem. It's not just current location, it's your full movement history.

The asymmetry bothers the heck out of me. I've been personally involved in investigations of law enforcement officers abusing access to privileged information. I don't get the sense that it's at all rare.

I sort of wish we could go full ADS-B[0] with cars and have public decentralized tracking (like [1]). Level the playing field for everybody.

Since I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle I'd love to see what kind of useful applications could be created if everybody had access to the same surveillance data that government and large corporations have.

The "what about stalkers" argument always comes next. I suspect being a stalker would be more difficult if the victim (or their agents) had the ability to react to surveillance data about the stalker.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...

[1] https://www.adsbexchange.com/

> We're back to a small village or tribal camp where everyone knows your business all the time.

I would be much less concerned about the issue if it were limited to the equivalent of a small village. The problem is that it's not.

I think if you were in that small village you wouldn't appreciate the distinction ("meet the new boss same as the old boss").

Having lived in such a small village for a long while, I absolutely appreciate the distinction.

I'm having trouble parsing your position. Are you saying you're okay with this tech being used by law enforcement of small villages, but not so much big cities?

> Are you saying you're okay with this tech being used by law enforcement of small villages, but not so much big cities?

No. These systems aren't just local, even if the institutions installing them are.

I'm saying that if my privacy is compromised to the people in my immediate community, that's many orders of magnitude better than my privacy being compromised in a widespread, industrial way. At least I know the people in my community.

More importantly, the privacy invasion isn't going to be as all-encompassing as what happens with systems like flock, where everything gets put into databases and combined with the data in other databases. And the potential for me suffering unintended consequences are far lower with the small village.

Makes a ton of sense. Thanks for the response.

At least you could always leave the small village. Can't really do that anymore.

I don't know that this was true.

I was recently reading "A Hangman's Diary", which included a Forward for the modern reader. It would appear that outsiders were viewed with extreme suspicion in those times. Obvi that's just a single snapshot of a single region, but it makes sense.

"what did this person do that they left all their family and friends to come to our town"

There's archeological evidence that early humans mixed with outsiders quite a but so it's probably something that comes and goes depending on what's happening at the time.

You couldn't always just leave your village. Family, friends, livelihood was all tied there. And it's still just as difficult to up and leave.

You couldn't in practical terms. The vast majority of premodern people were peasant farmers who owned no capital other than (possibly!) the land & livestock they farmed and the tools used to farm them. All this having almost no liquid value in the market such as it existed at the time. It was essentially impossible to pick up and start over somewhere else. That's aside from if you even had the right to do that; depending on time and place peasants were sometimes legally bound to their landlord.

I will argue that it was heavily decentralized, but there was never a golden era when the village didn't know what you were up to. Even if someone was well known in the mafia and street goons weren't talking, there were detectives writing down who you were talking to, and putting it all together, and saving it in a filing cabinet.

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