| ▲ | oblio 4 hours ago |
| And, I guess, even more advanced surveillance. |
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| ▲ | zemvpferreira 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think we’re well past the point where mass surveillance was a technical challenge. Mass oppression through autonomous violence however… |
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| ▲ | ben_w 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Even back when Snowden was current news, we'd reached the point where laser microphones could cover every window in London for a bill of materials* less than the annual budget of London's police force. * I have no way to estimate installation costs, but smartphones show that manufacturing at this scale doesn't need to increase total cost 10x more than the B.o.M. | |
| ▲ | lonelyasacloud 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_(robot) |
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| ▲ | pu_pe 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| LIDAR would be preferrable to cameras when it comes to privacy actually |
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| ▲ | numpad0 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | People saying LIDARs can't recognize colors or LIDARs can't take pictures don't know what they are talking about. They're just fancy cameras with synced flashes. Not Star Trek material-informational converting transporters. Sometimes they rotate, sometimes not. Often monochrome, but that's where Bayer color filters come in. There's nothing fundamentally privacy preserving or anything about LIDARs. | |
| ▲ | KaiserPro 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't think it makes a difference. Dense lidar goes you more information than 2d colour imagery. There are SLAM cameras that only select "interesting" points, which are privacy preserving. They are also very low power. | |
| ▲ | clayhacks 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’d definitely feel much better if most cameras in the world were replaced by LIDAR. I feel like it would be much tougher to have a flawless facial recognition program with LIDAR alone | | |
| ▲ | adrianN 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Who needs facial recognition if you can identify people based on gait? | | |
| ▲ | 0x3f 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Gait recognition is almost entirely hype. Sure it works to tell the difference between n = 10 people but so what, you can tell the difference between a group of 10 people by what kind of shoes they are wearing. | |
| ▲ | vntok 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Judicial systems where a 6% error rate is deemed way too high to lead to a conviction. | | |
| ▲ | adrianN 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Then you combine it with some other technique, eg tracking daily routes of individuals, to lower the error rate. You only need a handful of bits to distinguish all inhabitants of the average city. But imho that error rate would likely be low enough for some judge to authorize more invasive surveillance of suspects thus identified. |
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| ▲ | echelon 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The minute internet became widespread it was game over. Pros and cons. :/ It'll never happen, but we need a bill of rights for privacy. The laypeople aren't well-versed or pained enough to ask for this, and big interest donors oppose it. Maybe the EU and states like California will pioneer something here, though? Edit: in general, I'm far more excited by cheap lidar tech than I am afraid of the downsides. We just need to be vigilant. |
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| ▲ | chha 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The EU already has. GDPR and the AI Act puts a lot of limits on what you can do in the open space, although it doesn't always go far enough. | | |
| ▲ | jonplackett 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | And barely gets enforced | | |
| ▲ | StopDisinfo910 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDPR_fines_and_notices Top 5 fines: 1 - Meta - Ireland - €1.2 billion 2 - Amazon Europe - Luxembourg - €746 millions 3 - WhatsApp - Ireland - €225 millions 4 - British Airway - UK - £183 millions 5 - Google - France - €60 millions I wish every law barely got enforced this way. | | |
| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | Zanfa 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'd say the numbers listed here prove the GPs point of poor enforcement. The largest fine is roughly 0.97% of Meta's 2023 revenue, the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year. It's a tiny-tiny cost of doing business at best, definitely not a deterrent, given Meta's blatant disregard for GDPR since then. | | |
| ▲ | Mordisquitos 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year I don't know about you, but on that income I would certainly not brush off such a fine as a "cost of doing business". Would it cause me financial trouble, or would it force me to sacrifice other expenses? Absolutely not. But would I feel frustrated at having to pay it, feel stupid for my mistake, and do my best to avoid it in the future? Absolutely yes. | | |
| ▲ | Zanfa an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | My bad, a better analogy would be a dealer making 60k / year selling drugs, gets caught by police and is fined $600. I wouldn’t expect them to change much. | | | |
| ▲ | SkiFire13 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Would you still do your best to avoid it if that involved taking a pay cut of more than $600/year? |
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| ▲ | StopDisinfo910 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 1% of Meta's global revenue is a tiny-tiny cost of doing business? At that point, I think I can stop even trying to argue here. It's a massive fine any way you put it. Especially when you consider the ceiling hasn't been reached and non compliance is more and more costly by design. | | |
| ▲ | KoolKat23 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Their net profit was $60billion in 2024. This is peanuts. It can fluctuate by multiples of this fine in a month, depending on whether or not they've had a bad or good month, nevermind year. This pretty much is just a cost of doing business. | |
| ▲ | Zanfa 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not even 1% of their annual revenue, let alone the entire multi year period they've been in breach before and since. It's nothing to them. | | |
| ▲ | StopDisinfo910 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The interesting part is that it keeps going up. You seem to believe we have somehow reached a cap where Meta can just expense it as a cost of doing business. That's not how European law works. The fine maximum is far higher and repeated non compliance keeps making the fines higher and higher. It's a ladder not a sizing precedent. |
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| ▲ | throawayonthe 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | pretty pathetic, but people keep insisting you can regulate capital |
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| ▲ | rfv6723 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Humanity has never known a world without surveillance. Responsibility cannot exist without being watched. Primitive tribes lived under the constant eye of the group, and agricultural eras relied on the strict oversight of the clan. Modern states simply adopted new tools for an ancient necessity. A society without monitoring is a society without accountability, which only leads to the Hobbesian trap of endless conflict. |
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| ▲ | donkey_brains 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Mass surveillance is a relatively recent development. Dense urban civilizations are not. And yet their denizens have not historically devolved into a “nasty, brutish, and short” existence. In fact, cities have been centers of culture and learning throughout history. How does this square with your theory? | | |
| ▲ | rfv6723 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | The 19th century was the true cradle of mass surveillance. Civil registration, property tracking, and institutionalized police forces provided the systemic oversight required to manage dense urban life. These administrative tools served as the analogue version of digital monitoring to ensure every citizen remained known and categorized. Cities thrived as centers of culture only because these new forms of visibility prevented the Hobbesian collapse that anonymity would have otherwise triggered. | | |
| ▲ | squigz an hour ago | parent [-] | | None of those things are remotely comparable to the surveillance we're talking about. There's a world of difference between, "My city knows who owns what properties and also we have a police force", and "Western intelligence agencies scoop up every bit of data they can grab about anyone on the planet and store it forever" |
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| ▲ | expedition32 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | In my country it wasn't until the late 19th century that someone had the balls to stop going to church on Sunday. It was a huge scandal at the time but it all worked out in the end. Humans have always done mass surveillance on eachother. You don't need technology for that. |
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| ▲ | zorked 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's an incredibly bullshit argument to defend the indefensible. | | |
| ▲ | rfv6723 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Your reaction actually proves the point. Aggression thrives in anonymous spaces because the lack of oversight removes the weight of accountability. When people feel unobserved, they quickly abandon the social friction that once held tribes and clans together. You are essentially providing a live demonstration of why a society without any form of monitoring inevitably slides into the Hobbesian trap. | | |
| ▲ | squigz 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't think a random internet comment proves anything about society at large. People don't hesitate to be aggressive even when they're not anonymous and there's a threat of accountability - see, all crime, or people just acting shitty toward others. Mass surveillance does not cause everyone to magically get along. | | |
| ▲ | rfv6723 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | History shows that whenever surveillance gaps appear, chaos follows. The explosion of crime during early urbanization was the specific catalyst for the creation of modern police forces because traditional social bonds had failed to provide oversight in growing cities. Japan maintains its safety through a deep-rooted culture of mutual neighborhood monitoring that leaves little room for anonymity. Even China successfully quelled the violent crime waves of its early economic boom by implementing a sophisticated surveillance network. | | |
| ▲ | squigz an hour ago | parent [-] | | Police forces nor "neighborhood monitoring" are equivalent to mass surveillance though. Anyway I'm curious why - despite having less anonymity than at any point in history, at least from the perspective of law enforcement - we still see high crime rates, from fraud to murders? |
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| ▲ | cucumber3732842 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is a reduction to absurdity. Those old societies you cite didn't actively surveil with the goal of micromanaging people's daily lives the way that modern ones do. | | |
| ▲ | rfv6723 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Rural surveillance was far more suffocating because every single action was subject to the community gaze. This is exactly why classic literature frames the journey to the city as a liberation from the crushing weight of the village eye. The idea of the peaceful countryside is a modern utopian fantasy that ignores how ancient clans dictated every aspect of life including marriage and death. Modern Homeowners Associations prove that localized oversight is often the most intrusive form of management. Ancient society did not just monitor people; it owned their entire existence through inescapable social visibility. | | |
| ▲ | cucumber3732842 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | | "It was always shit everywhere" is revisionist history born out of the fantasy of statists looking to justify the modern (administrative) enforcement state. While the lack of anonymity in small towns certainly puts a damper on one's ability to deviate too far from social norms, the list of things and subject that could get you subjected to government violence without creating a victimized party was infinity shorter. Things that get state or state deputized enforcers on your case today were matters of "yeah that's distasteful, he'll have to settle that with god" or it would come back to bite you when something happened 150+yr ago because society did not have the surplus to justify paying nearly as manny people to go around looking for deviance that could be leveraged to extract money. > Modern Homeowners Associations prove that localized oversight is often the most intrusive form of management And they almost exclusively deal in things that historical societies didn't even bother to regulate. You're beyond delusional if you think running afoul of HOA is worse than running afoul of the local, state or federal government. Yeah they can screech and send you scary letter with scary numbers but they don't get the buddy treatment from courts that "real" governments do (to the great injustice of their victims) and their procedural avenues for screwing their victims on multiple axis are way more limited. Seriously, go do something without a permit required by the municipality and get back to me. An HOA is a paper tiger for the most part. |
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