I've been thinking about this a lot with regards to Waymo.
Google already knows just about everything one can know about us on the internet. And if you use Google Maps or Android, they already know a lot about how you move through the real world... where you live, where you work, where you shop, who your friends and family are.
Adding in a network of vehicles that are always "patrolling" the streets of every city, covered with sensors, driving us all around... It's a dataset that's any twentieth-century dictator's dream come true.
”It's a dataset that's any twentieth-century dictator's dream come true.”
That’s what I am thinking too. Together with devices that listen to what’s said in every home, services that track your every move on the internet and the real world, automated facial recognition and the ability to read all your communication the capabilities we have now would make the Nazis, Stalin or the Ingsoc party if “1984” very envious. They could only dream of having this.
Not really. If google has a network of cars all over the public observing and over 75% of smartphone users feeding data to them, avoiding using google services directly doesn’t buy you nearly as much privacy as you think.
Google even buys credit card transaction data so they have info on you even without a google account.
> The Peelian principles summarise the ideas that Sir Robert Peel developed to define an ethical police force. The approach expressed in these principles is commonly known as policing by consent ...
> In this model of policing, police officers are regarded as citizens in uniform. They exercise their powers to police their fellow citizens with the implicit consent of those fellow citizens. "Policing by consent" indicates that the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.
I think that these systems are more-or-less inevitable (they're happening already) and the big problem is making them self-reflexive: if we can police ourselves we can at least have a kinder, gentler tyranny of Mrs. Grundy.
What I'm saying is that, if ubiquitous surveillance is inevitable (as I believe), then it behooves us to address the antagonistic relationship (to the degree that it exists) between our governments and ourselves.
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As for specific ways the idea applies to surveillance, I can only speculate. The essence would be that everyone is equally under the microscope including law enforcement officers and administration.
That's a good point that I hadn't thought of much before.
One issue that I could see is that there would still be asymmetry in the ability to use the information from surveillance. Someone with access to lawyers, the media, PR people, lobbyists, etc. who knows your secrets is much more dangerous than the average person who knows their secrets.
Hmm. It reminds me of how Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan sued Gawker into the ground. The whole thing, from Gawker outing Thiel onwards, was sordid, but I feel that it was made much worse by Thiel acting in secret.
Maybe, if everything the powerful do is just as watched as the little people, that balances things out a bit.
I'm not postulating some utopia: I think what we'll get is what I call the "Tyranny of Mrs. Grundy":
> Mrs Grundy is a figurative name for an extremely conventional or priggish person, a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety. A tendency to be overly fearful of what others might think is sometimes referred to as grundyism.
E.g. the Chinese "social credit" system. If that applies to the powerful communists as well as the masses then it might actually work, if not, it's the genesis of Morlocks and Eloi.
1. A power inequality that would be created if the regular people's secrets are known but powerful people's secrets were not.
2. A lack of privacy would allow people's private actions to be judged and punished by society if they fail to conform.
You are then arguing that giving everyone access to the data/surveillance would solve the first problem but not the second.
If I am correct in my understanding, then I think that's a very reasonable argument. Although I'm concerned that even problem #2 alone could create a dystopia.
[1] I know intention can be difficult to read in text so I want to make clear: I truly mean this as confirming that I am following your argument, not as an indirect way to say that I think you are wrong.
Don't want to presume to answer for the prior poster, but one possible solution to the second problem on your list is to consider the second half of the assertion in the context of radical and ubiquitous observation.
Assume the dystopia: with my smartphone I can tap in to the network of smart dust that blankets the world and can view and hear anything that is happening anywhere. We tend to consider this from the viewpoint of the observed but invert it and consider the constraints upon the observer/judge. Imagine how difficult it would be for people to judge and punish you for this lack of conformity if it is trivial for you to show a similar collection of mistakes and 'bad' behavior on the part of those who would judge you and if you can know who is watching you at any time (because you can watch them watching you.)
It is not quite a complete solution, but it seems to me that people tend to focus on one side of an imagined power relationship without necessarily asking if that power structure could be maintained in the new environment.
(I don't know about giving everyone access, but the folks who do have access should be subject to the system in a way that is self-correcting.)
As for whether the result will be dystopian or otherwise, I have no idea, really. I once wrote:
> The true horror of technological omniscience is that it shall force us for once to live according to our own rules. For the first time in history we shall have to do without hypocrisy and privilege. The new equilibrium will not involve tilting at the windmills of ubiquitous sensors and processing power but rather learning what explicit rules we can actually live by, finding, in effect, the real shape of human society.
It's hard to imagine how a government set to police the minutiae of everyday life of pretty much a whole continent's worth of humans, can not be antagonistic with the majority of it. Even in such a uniform cultural environment as the US, local differences will "always" be too important to make such relations with a state-wide governing entity consensual. High-level principles and policies, sure, but low level policing and surveillance applied uniformly at such a scale can't be consensual.
> It's hard to imagine how a government set to police the minutiae of everyday life of pretty much a whole continent's worth of humans, can not be antagonistic with the majority of it.
Indeed! But I think it's important to try.
FWIW, I don't postulate that the ubiquitous surveillance is consensual at all, just inevitable. For a lot of people the amount and degree of casual surveillance is already becoming an issue.
I'm saying, if we have to have it, how do we want to manage it?
You're still taking the stance of "us against them" in a context where "they" have much greater resources than "us". I think that's already a "failure mode" and we have to integrate society and government somehow (or fall into some techno-dystopia.)
Is there a way that you can see that we might achieve that?
I ask because it seems to me that would require dramatic changes in government and society that are extraordinarily unlikely. I'm not even sure if such a system could be maintained without changes to basic human nature.
I can vouch from personal experience that it works and is pretty profound. I suspect that it could be adapted to work with pairs and groups.
> I ask because it seems to me that would require dramatic changes in government and society that are extraordinarily unlikely. I'm not even sure if such a system could be maintained without changes to basic human nature.
Ultimately, I think it all boils down to human nature. Technology is just an accelerator or amplifier. Then again, maybe this is the moment where our evolution transcends our baser human nature, eh?
Why don't you think that we have police by consent in America? The police are generally accountable to elected people. What's more, they are generally fairly popular. When asked:
"Do you approve or disapprove of the way the police in the United States are doing their job?"
Curiously, that page has a poll that seems relevant:
"How concerned would you be about your own privacy if U.S. law enforcement starts using unmanned drones with high tech cameras and recording equipment? Would you be very concerned, somewhat concerned, only a little concerned, or not at all concerned?"
Very concerned Somewhat concerned Only a little concerned Not at all concerned Unsure
7/25-30/13 49% 20% 15% 14% 2%
While I don't think that "police by consent" would require everyone to consent, if one in four people don't then I think that at least calls it into question.
It would be interesting to see the numbers broken down by jurisdiction and demographic. This is just speculation, but I would guess that some jurisdictions and demographics are policed by consent but that many are not.
Policing in America is a mostly modern invention, and the first public full-time police force is less than 200 years old: before the police, towns would typically have a night watch made up of citizens who volunteered for certain nights and certain times, and industry would pay other citizens to protect property and commodities. These paotection jobs typically didn't pay well, and mainly employed a segment of the population who might otherwise be criminal.
The rise of the police was a consequence of economics peculiar to 19th century capitalism, the first public police force was created in Boston only when merchants convinced the public that the expense should be born by all for the common good, and in the South the public police force evolved from slave patrols as a necessity of maintaining the slavery system.
The public police force continued to spread throughout America, particularly in the West, in 19th century only as businessmen began to fear labour activism and required a militant police force to end strikes.
The public police force before the 1930s was not only a new idea, but it was entirely a weapon of political power and terror: police forces were chosen by the leader of the ward's winning political party, and would ignore that political leader's own street gangs as they intimidated rival voters. It wasn't until 1929, after the Wickersham Commission, which noted such gems as "the inflicting of pain, physical or mental, to extract confessions or statements... is widespread throughout the country", that a push for professionalism and the independence of the police force began in America.
The consent the average citizen has given to be policed and the satisfaction she should have with the current system is very debatable.
Would the night watch have enforced the war on drugs to such a violent end?
Do we really need to have squad cars looking for speeders, or can citizens just report dangerous drivers to the DMV?
Was it not easier to pay off erstwhile thieves a wage to 'guard the property'?
Perhaps our consent to the police is just a manufactured consent, as our economic system was only able to survive by creating a force capable of quelling our collective dissent?
Google already knows just about everything one can know about us on the internet. And if you use Google Maps or Android, they already know a lot about how you move through the real world... where you live, where you work, where you shop, who your friends and family are.
Adding in a network of vehicles that are always "patrolling" the streets of every city, covered with sensors, driving us all around... It's a dataset that's any twentieth-century dictator's dream come true.