Great read, thanks! That’s what many people of the „I’ve got nothing to hide“ crowd don’t understand. Now they think it may be relatively irrelevant if this data is collected, but what if we get a new right wing government in the future and you’re - for whatever reason - the target of the oppression? The data doesn’t go away.
Any government having this amount of data is bad, no doubt, but it may be scarier to me that any individual could use it for their own reasons. Imagine the devastation this could enable in the hands of a violent white supremacist, for example. Even a super-stupid one. I mean, any building with an address where communities gather is a nexus for identifying whole groups of people. Follow the dots home from a mosque or synagogue, and we’ve got ourselves a problem that I don’t know how we solve right now. I hope the widespread hate isn’t as bad as it feels.
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https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048811/the-secret-life-of-data/
The book is due out April 2024 if you didn’t catch that part. Just added it to my list.
GoodReads link for those that use it to remind/track: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/191729887-the-secret-life-of-data
This is the best summary I could come up with:
One of the great unsung heroes of American history was a formerly enslaved woman named Mary Bowser, a spy who infiltrated the family of Jefferson Davis as a domestic servant, and eventually landed a full-time job in the Southern White House, the political seat of his Confederacy.
Armed with a photographic memory and an all-access pass to the inner workings of the Davis administration, she fed details daily to the Union army, which Ulysses S. Grant called the “most valuable information” he received from the Southern capital during the war.
While researching our new book, The Secret Life of Data, we gathered some sensitive information from Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach club, which he used as a base for political operations both during and after his presidency.
Within a few minutes, we had a report profiling thousands of visitors to Trump’s club over the course of an entire year, including details like where they likely live and work, their ages, incomes, ethnicities, education levels, where they were immediately before visiting, and where they spent their time on the property once they got there.
Even though the data is technically “anonymized” (we can’t see the age, income, or ethnicity of a specific visitor, let alone their name), the pinpoint locations of where they spend their days and nights makes educated guesswork pretty easy.
Even though most of it has no practical value today, brokers keep it anyway, because hard drives are cheap, and there’s no telling what may become valuable in the future — say, if a private real estate developer suddenly gets elected to national office.
The original article contains 1,498 words, the summary contains 266 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The famously secure mar-a-lago. I’m stunned.
It shouldn’t matter how secure it is. Most people’s home shouldn’t need to be “secured” against constant external surveillance.
And people are going to focus on the Trump aspect of this while ignoring the actual issue at hand. What happened at Mar-A-Lago is just a larger version of what’s been happening in a smaller scale in every neighborhood. Ask yourself why ring cameras, which are ostensibly just to have a video feed of the front door, can get clear images of the yard, the sidewalk, the street, neighbors yards, their doors, etc.
Why? Well the reason “why” is because it’s just a camera pointed towards the front lawn from the doorbell, an easy power hookup.
It’s may be silly to hear, but my privacy is better protected because I’m a nobody.
In the grand scheme of everything, nobody cares about my opinions, my daily habits, my decisions… I’m not in charge of anything, I don’t own anything more than a house and car, I just live my life going to work and trying to mind my own business.
Mar-a-lago and Trump have a lot of influence, there’s a lot to be gained by exploiting his privacy, and many many people have a stake in his life. He matters, so people care.
Nobody cares about me or you, the Joe-middleclass, in any capacity more than trying to sell you things.
Doesn’t justify privacy invasions, but it’s less malicious targeting than at Trump and mar-a-lago.
It’s not really protected though; companies you interact with are using it to target ads.
He literally said “to sell you things.”
The book doesn’t come out for several months.
It’s not that it’s better protected, it’s that NO ONE CARES ABOUT WHO YOU ARE. Trump is a high value target for tracking, you’re a part time stock boy at Kinko’s. Do the math.
Your boss cares the moment somebody starts to unionize the shop.
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The difference is that with modern surveillance technology you can do it with everyone all the time. And that’s a big difference.
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For one thing, this doesn’t cost a dime.
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Okay, it does say “commercial software.” How much do you think that could possibly cost? Anywhere near as much as a private investigator would?
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Is that relevant? Tracking people coming in and out of a building doesn’t require the same amount of storage as a 250-person company or anywhere near it. You could probably store it all on a 1 TB drive. It’s not like these are 8k images.
