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Tanoc 4 hours ago

One of the dangers is in the ability to cross-nationally attack someone. As digital infrastructure continues to encompass more and more facets of necessary interactions with the government and governments force more and more points of interaction someone from a foreign nation could destroy the life of someone who is interfering with their aims. Say someone has published an article that reveals the terrible behaviour of a given company. Someone hired by the company can use a variety of data points to not only track down who that person is, but where they live and even which room in their house they spend the most time in. With that kind of information it would be easy to financially, reputationally, or mortally wound someone. With the worryingly swift growth rate of corruption this could apply at any level for any reason. And unlike for example the difficulty of getting into a car crash or robbing a cash register, digital infrastructure makes all of this remarkably easy and for some parts even free. With modern LLM agents it could be entirely automated so that no human is ever involved, and because there's so few current guardrails and such a vehement protestation against any being implemented the agent could wipe it's connection to it's handler so that nobody ever faces any consequences.

The thing is, this kind of stuff already happens all the time. The number of spam calls people suffer through are a direct result of companies digging through the contacts list after being granted that permission (though often without being granted that permission), then selling that data to brokers. Data breaches that wipe people's credit or force a credit freeze because they bought something ten years ago are another common one. Or think about package stalking, where people get access to someone's purchase history and the tracking number to a purchase so that they can steal it in transit or once it arrives. There's a number of beatings and murders that have happened because of police officers being able to access surveillance tools to track former romantic partners or spouses. All of these are different parts of the lack of privacy, and they're all getting worse because the tools that are used to surveil are becoming more widespread and more accessible.

Privacy is a protection against the intelligent attacks of other humans. It is not a frill that can be taken away without ridiculous and trailing harm.