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

[Succubus]

...My philosophy is that you only need privacy if you have something to hide.

From ~500 Ad till ~1700 AD the Catholic church had a pretty good handle on what people were thinking.

That turned out well didn't it?

[bennyboy]

Privacy from malicious people is important. If they have information that could allow them to manipulate you, then you will be manipulated.

Part of this is the privacy asymmetry. Take for example nude images. 20 years ago, leaked nude images of a person, famous or not, would have garnered a tremendous amount of shame and embarrassment. My hunch now it that given the huge preponderance of pornography, so many leaked photos and so on, that body privacy is gradually becoming less important. If pictures of me ever hit the internet, I'd expect a pretty minimal impact, indeed.

Truth be told, Google/God will have layers and levels of information so sublime that it seems very likely to change historical outcomes. I get that, and it's non-trivial.

However, the possible benefits of information connectivity are also non-trivial. If GoogleGod knows what everybody eats at every meal, then there is a built-in data pool for analysis of diet, health consequences, etc. Now, people may not WANT GoogleGod to know that they eat waffles and babies every morning-- it's private, after all. But collectively, nobody gives a shit what everyone else is eating. That's that special snowflake effect at work.

Tracking locations of people would also make it much easier to track epidemic disease spread. This might involve a loss of freedoms as well-- regional quarantines, for example.

Technology seems to have the effect of magnifying and accelerating everything. But overall, I think that given a healthy system of governance, more information connectivity will represent a benefit more than a detriment.

[Angrboda]

But overall, I think that given a healthy system of governance, more information connectivity will represent a benefit more than a detriment.

Pie in the sky optimism isn't a sound basis for social policy.

[Minimalist]

I'm not sure what it is but I get enough shit from my wife without taking any from my appliances.

[AFTT47]

But overall, I think that given a healthy system of governance, more information connectivity will represent a benefit more than a detriment.

Pie in the sky optimism isn't a sound basis for social policy.

Indeed.

I'm not deaf to your vision, BB but I do think it requires careful consideration and regulation. At what point does your desire for safety and convenience get eclipsed by your desire to NOT become a drone in the Borg collective?

[Fireball]

My philosophy is that you only need privacy if you have something to hide.

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

I'm replying to Jörg's response, because she cut to the pith with it. Much of my personal information, and that of my family's, resides in a form that is filed on line at some government office of records. I was required to file that information for a security clearance I once held. That site was hacked by the Chinese. I had plenty "to hide" (like SSNs, addresses, home phone numbers) for my siblings, spouses, parents, friends, etc. Whatever you do in your life, just go ahead and tra-la-la down the road. Some of us have something to lose when our personal private data is obtained by people who are unfriendly to the US (and by extension, to you), and a lot more so than some asswipe credit card thief.

[bennyboy]

But overall, I think that given a healthy system of governance, more information connectivity will represent a benefit more than a detriment.

Pie in the sky optimism isn't a sound basis for social policy.

The internet itself is a good case study.  We are definitely subject to more potential scrutiny and a loss of privacy.  We are probably being manipulated in ways too subtle for us to notice or understand already.  In return, I get free porn, cheap games, a way to learn about almost anything under the sun, and these here forums.

If I'm plugged into this system several hours a day, does it really concern me that my car is, too, or my toaster?  Not too much.

Here's my dream.  I navigate to a highway.  I press autopilot, search Netflix for a new movie, and dim my windows.  My car, communicating with satellite and every other vehicle on the road, finds the optimal path and speed in order to minimize congestion.  Everyone else's car is doing the same thing-- no tailgating, no lane-dodging, no crossing 4 lanes of traffic because Junior has to throw up.  As I approach my destination, my car automatically confirms my hotel reservation, and uses AI and preset info to choose my dinner menu for me.

What am I giving up?  Somewhere, out there, somebody knows what I keep ordering for dinner.  They know what times I travel, what kinds of hotel I frequent, and maybe they can use logistics to infer that girls known to frequent red-light areas also tend to show up after I check in.  There's dirt in that data.

But overall, I'm okay with that.  So far in my life, technology has done nothing but open up more of the world to me; it has given me comfort, entertainment, pleasure, and facilitated my participation in the world. The availability of porn in particular has surprised me. It's not an accident that there's so much of it, and that it is almost never challenged by the government-- they WANT me home and happy and out from underfoot, rather than meeting bearded strangers in dark-lit basements. As far as I'm concerned, it's a deal!

I don't think it's "pie in the sky" to expect things to go more as they have already gone.

[LastPoet]

IoT?

Is that the guy whose wife turned to salt?

He was te holiest man on esrth. A bunch of dudes come down ASKING for some angel arse, he offered his daughters instead. While sex is a natural, IMHO good thing, if they are asking for angel ass, they should have it. it amounts to fucking thin air.

There are days I wished my wife turned into salt. she is incredibly resilient to gods power *runs pff*

[I_am_not_mafia]

I completely agree with the OP. It will get worse when the tech starts to recognise our emotions. There's been a lot of research on affective computing over the years. Amazon recently got in touch about job interviews for Alexa. I haven't responded. I have to say though that Alexa is absolutely not something that I would ever have in the house. It would sit there constantly recording, sending back data to some remote location. Absolutely no way.

I don't even have a mobile phone so I am certainly not going to go for IoT in the house. I use OpenSuse most of the time and dual boot into Windows 7 for specific things. I do have an Android tablet though but I generally try to avoid giving out information. I've had to create a Facebook account and have only ever had one profile picture, of me from behind flying a paraglider in the distance. I ask people not to tag me in photos. But it still makes me uncomfortable knowing that Facebook are building up a profile of me as a person. I deliberately add lots of noise to the data to upset it.

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I don't think "I'm a special snowflake, and my data matters." I think it's none of anybody's fucking business.
I think the things you point out make a person lazy, dependent, unwilling to take personal responsibility, and incompetent in day to day life.
Just remember you like the loss of autonomy for others and they fell the same way about yours.

It's also cultural. For example Germany has seen first hand what mass surveillance looks like when carried out by the state to keep the people in line. So dashcams are semi-legal (owning one is legal, indiscriminate recording is illegal, which is how most dashcams get used), sharing the recording is definitely illegal and it's up to the judge whether the footage is applicable in court.

America doesn't (yet) have such a history so Americans are generally more blasé about mass surveillance.

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My philosophy is that you only need privacy if you have something to hide.

Says the American who isn't aware of how fascism creeps into existence and assumes that legitimate protest will always be legal.