Consent of the Surveiled

In Technologies of Consent section author makes interesting point. Modern surveillance is enabled by technology, we've never dealt with something like that before[1]. Technology is not going away, our digital fingerprints will only get larger. Essentially that means that we would need to restructure[2] social/political system in order to address that problem.

[1] - Interesting side thought about that - technology allows you to survey people who are doing the surveillance and maintaining the system with relatively low overhead. In theory this could allow for 1984 like totalitarian state, although I believe probability of such severe scenario happening is pretty low.

[2] - issue with just ending government surveillance is that private companies already have gigantic amount of data on individual people too. Consider this - how much money would it be worth to Google to subtly run A/B tests on individual users in order to present them with ad layout/content they are most likely to click on?

Now that was an interesting read. The article does not discuss the implications of surveillance from a potential of abuse. In the article there is a comparison of food ration consent (india), car driving consent (america), land owning consent (most places). Do people care about the government knowing where you live? Apparently most don't despite how invasive that would seem if that wasn't the case to begin with. The real question is, how much would a government with this new order of consent, really need to know about you? Would they need an online ID assigned to a GPS location, or everything that Google has on you to perform their function?

Reading, then skimming, then skipping the article I note that the difference of views on the subject comes largely down to the willingness of supporters (to whatever degree) to expend a great deal of verbiage, time, resources, and readership on the prospects of establishing such governance, vs the opposing view of "leave me alone".