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unethical_ban12/10/20241 replyview on HN

>If others in public are equipped to collect that information in whatever form it takes, why is that suddenly wrong?

Legally, it may not be. But it's creepy and invasive. Doxxing is a net negative to society. And more than individuals catching me in photos or videos incidentally, is the problem of surveillance and tracking, something I have mentioned repeatedly and you have failed to acknowledge. First came CCTV, then comes ubiquitous cheap video storage, now comes AI that can analyze that video in real time for identification and behavioral analysis.

I'll flip your question on its head: why is it the default that people should consent to ubiquitous machine-based activity monitoring by all their peers and their government, just because the technology exists? What's the benefit?

If society has lived without ubiquitous surveillance and automated behavioral analytics and tracking for all history, why is it suddenly right?


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try_the_bass12/11/2024

> Legally, it may not be. But it's creepy and invasive.

Creepy to you, maybe. It's creepy to me that some people want to live their lives as faceless, nameless ghosts in a modern society!

> Doxxing is a net negative to society.

Is it? You're making a very bold claim here and stating it as fact, as if it's somehow self-evident. It isn't, though.

> And more than individuals catching me in photos or videos incidentally, is the problem of surveillance and tracking, something I have mentioned repeatedly and you have failed to acknowledge. First came CCTV, then comes ubiquitous cheap video storage, now comes AI that can analyze that video in real time for identification and behavioral analysis.

I haven't failed to acknowledge them at all! One of my first replies in this thread explicitly acknowledged such things.

I just fail to differentiate ubiquitous surveillance from incidental surveillance. To me, the latter is simply an extension of the former. Yes, scale can make things markedly different, but it's not inherently negative. The scale of our ability to communicate has increased drastically over the past few decades, and while it has come with some bad effects, increasing the scale of our ability to communicate is not inherently bad. In fact, I think a lot of the negatives that have come with mass communication come from the relative anonymity of the mediums.

You know, the good ol' "people feel perfectly fine saying things they wouldn't say to someone's face, when they're hiding behind a keyboard, screen, and pseudonym" problem. It's not always a problem, yes, but I see far more assholes taking advantage of it to escape societal consequences than I see afflicted minorities escaping unfair judgement.

> I'll flip your question on its head: why is it the default that people should consent to ubiquitous machine-based activity monitoring by all their peers and their government, just because the technology exists? What's the benefit?

I can think of all sorts of benefits!

Better security, more accountability for anti-social behaviors, better health management, discoveries of all sorts of social phenomena that can be empirically documented, etc etc. There are vast, untapped reserves of information that can and should be used to better society as a whole, rather than discarding it all as some kind of detritus.

The vast majority of any individual's "information footprint" is utterly wasted, and you're arguing for even more wastage. I'd love for there to be preventative diagnostics for health conditions, that can do things like tell me I have early stage cancer, because it can detect information I'm emitting in some form that would otherwise go undetected. Compared to the alternative, where I only go see the doctor when I notice some ill effects, which could potentially be too late for treatment? Yeah, that seems like a net positive to me, and a far better utilization of my information footprint than simply discarding all of it.

I'd also love for it to be harder to behave anti-socially in all contexts, and to feel confident that the person I'm transacting with isn't scamming me, etc.

> If society has lived without ubiquitous surveillance and automated behavioral analytics and tracking for all history, why is it suddenly right?

Let me flip this question on it's head: if we've been living in ignorance of something for all history, when we discover that ignorance, why should we endeavor to continue in it, when there are better alternatives?

I'm not arguing that such things like "anti-social behavior" are cut and dry things, nor that my definitions of such things should be accepted by all. These are things we can and should debate, and come to agreement on in democratic ways.

But to simply be against it because "it's too hard", "I don't like it", and "we've always done it that way" strike me as a terribly ignorant approach.

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