Some ways to help think about this:

1. Privacy is not secrecy. Your neighbours know what you are doing, they just politely don’t mention it, or try to sell you something on the back of it.

2. Almost everything we do we do in public, with our face uncovered for the world to see.

3. The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous - epidemiology is gonna rock in 20 years. New medical insights as well as simple stuff like “how many passengers take the train regularly” (not how many passenger journeys but how many individual people will get inconvenienced if we shut this line down.

4. The problem is not you thought your life was secret, it never has been, the problem is what will we as society allow people to do with this new information. At some basic level treat it like HIPPA or medical data - keep it well managed and use in the best interests of the individual. (I disagree with the Chinese justification of “best interests of society - that can be warped so easily)

In short society is like your grandfathers financial advice - look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves

1. There is a huge difference between my neighbors accidentally seeing me leaving my place, vs an anonymous person 7 months later, being able to statistically analyze when I leave my place in the morning, and when I return in the evening, even getting a list of the places I stayed over night on the days where I did not return in the evening.

2. see above

3. The downsides are enormous as well - Want to know who went to that protest last night? Query your local palantir console. Who met with your former wive within the last 2 weeks? Flock will give you answers.

4. The problem is scale (in the number of people who can observe me, the time frame I can be observed over and the length of time over which that information is available)

> 3. The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous

And the downsides are disastrous. If you live in a free, open, inclusive and tolerant state, the surveillance might matter little to you. When that starts slipping, you need the privacy, and the secrecy to fight what comes next.

We can't have this safely. It's been proven time and time again that they people with access to these systems are not all to be trusted. The systems will be abused and people will be hurt. I'm all for cameras and so on in isolated areas of high likelihood of crime, but not as a means to tracking everyone, just in case.

Profoundly patronizing tone here, telling folks that they need help thinking about why something as personal as the human right to privacy ought to be written off.

No, my neighbors do not know everything I’m doing. We have doors and windows and we quite like it that way. We choose what to share. Same in public, same in any reasonable situation.

Losing the ability to choose what we share with the world is a deeply frightening development and makes for a world that many of us, justifiably, do not want to live in.

You can choose to expose your private life if you want, but don’t pat my head and tell me it’s good for me.

1. Ok, so why not keep it that way?

2. But not permanently recorded and stored, searchable and logged for anyone to go back in time. Also, not potentially incorrectly stored and mislabeled as you instead of someone else doing something bad. This is happening.

3. I like the benefits of our current world. I guess those aren't real or considered?

4. I never thought "my life was secret". Cops are using this to stalk ex-partners, harass citizens that raise complaints, and arrest people on false information. No one has shown these cameras directly cause a decrease in crime, and the scant few anecdotal pieces of evidence where they do individual good versus "social good" (wild way to spin this given Flock wants this for the good of all society), do not outweigh the harms, costs, abuses, and loss of privacy.

I have no idea how imposing a permanent surveillance society on everyone-everywhere-all the time at all relates to the proverb raised.

The only way I could come up with a connection is what you wanted to say, but politely, is "shut up, worry about your own damn small little problems in life. The bigger problems? Us VCs have billions to make on".

Which, yea. That makes sense. It is why VCs don't want us talking about it. They stand to make billions, while the rest of us need to count our pennies, because they aren't giving us anything else.

Did I misread that?

(Flock isn't the only one doing this. So is Axon, of Taser fame. They are arguably worse. They come into towns where Flock was removed and just install Axon cameras. Their history is nasty).

> At some basic level treat it like HIPPA or medical data

HIPPA is an extremely very poor model for this sort of thing. It's just this side of worthless in terms of maintaining medical privacy. It's actually very difficult to maintain the privacy of your medical data in the US.

>The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous

Incredible.

There are a lot of stupid things being said on hackernews these days. This one wins today.

I agree this is double plus good fellow citizen. Only bad persons who want to do bad things and Eastasia supporters would not want to have their activities tracked at all times, why would anyone want to allow bad things to happen when we could all be under the watchful care of big brother at all times. After all these measures are necessary to defeat Eurasia!

Stay strong big brother is watching!

"Think" is a strong word for all that cope.

> The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous - epidemiology is gonna rock in 20 years.

If you suggest mass surveillance as a "solution" to the next pandemic (I might be wrong on this and maybe I've misread your comment) I'm afraid that the world won't just stand still and face it. The recent pandemic has proven it, we're not all Australia/China.

I don’t understand how people are reading this comment and saying “yeah, but…”

The benefits of a mass surveilled world are absolutely not enormous. Like, what the actual fuck?