IoT: Your thought and views

[Angrboda]

Yeah, I can't possibly imagine anything wrong with that philosophy.

I know it sounds strange.  But what's the Google overlord going to do with knowledge of what I eat for breakfast every day, or the name of my favorite movie?

I see humanity as in a transitional stage right now, between ape-men and AI cyborgs.  I'm not saying I fancy that future, but it's pretty apparent that technology will provide us with sufficient rewards in exchange for our liberties.  When we're a 20-billion-strong parallel processor, is it going to matter what our pee-pees look like, or what we jerked off to at age 13?

As noted, in addition to prohibiting unauthorized access to victim computers by outside hackers, the CFAA also covers the conduct of insiders who have a right to access a system but who abuse that right and access sensitive or valuable information for their own purposes. This part of the CFAA is, for example, the tool that department prosecutors have used to charge police officers who took advantage of their access to confidential criminal records databases in order to look up sensitive information about a paramour, sell access to those records to others, or even provide confidential law enforcement information to a charged drug trafficker. We’ve also used this statute to prosecute an employee of a health insurer who used his access to the company’s sensitive databases to improperly obtain the names and Social Security numbers of thousands of current and former employees (as well as information about how much his colleagues were being paid).

Prosecuting Privacy Abuses by Corporate and Government Insiders

Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest – or just blackmail – with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies – whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

The Eternal Value of Privacy