Technology is Eroding the Ability To Move Around the Physical World Anonymously 132
Hal Hodson, a correspondent for Economist writes in a Twitter thread: Something really massive is happening, and I feel like society is barely grasping the tendrils of the implications. Technology is eroding one of the great levees of human society -- the ability to move around the physical world anonymously. This is happening because computers are getting better at spotting patterns in data, and the cost of capturing data that contain patterns about human beings is plummeting. Most adult humans have a device in their pocket capable of recognizing the patterns in another human's face. Face recognition is just the most obvious side of this new reality. It's easy to grasp that a computer can remember what your face looks like, because humans can do that too (not that well though). But computers don't care what data is used to tag you, only that the data is unique.
You can measure someone's: heartbeat with a laser; breathing with the RF-waves in wifi; walking gait with a camera; geographical movements through their phone; and voice and emotional state through a microphone. These datasets all hold patterns which uniquely ID a person. Pretty much anyone can "scan" anyone at this point. The hard bit is matching the patterns in that data with a person's legal identity, figuring out to whom a pattern belongs. This means that control of and access to identity systems is more important than it has ever been before.
The issue is that currently the world does not expect to be identified anywhere at any time, by anyone. Society runs on the assumption that people are unknowable in some spaces. I don't know what happens as that disappears, but I am worried. It's easy to imagine bad actors gathering all the data they can on everyone they can get their hands on. Doesn't matter if it isn't linked with an ID right now. Store it, and when someone becomes a threat, do the work to ID them in stored data, find something to get them with. Legal systems need to recreate and/or reinforce some of the levees that cheap compute and sensing are washing away. Maybe folks want to live in a world where anyone can set a drone or autonomous agent to track a person around town and report their movements. I don't think so. Addedum: the direction of travel is crystal clear here. Cheaper sensors, closer to the body and mind, coupled with ever-cheaperbetter computation. You can't rely on nature for "privacy" any more. You have to do it for ourselves, if you want.
You can measure someone's: heartbeat with a laser; breathing with the RF-waves in wifi; walking gait with a camera; geographical movements through their phone; and voice and emotional state through a microphone. These datasets all hold patterns which uniquely ID a person. Pretty much anyone can "scan" anyone at this point. The hard bit is matching the patterns in that data with a person's legal identity, figuring out to whom a pattern belongs. This means that control of and access to identity systems is more important than it has ever been before.
The issue is that currently the world does not expect to be identified anywhere at any time, by anyone. Society runs on the assumption that people are unknowable in some spaces. I don't know what happens as that disappears, but I am worried. It's easy to imagine bad actors gathering all the data they can on everyone they can get their hands on. Doesn't matter if it isn't linked with an ID right now. Store it, and when someone becomes a threat, do the work to ID them in stored data, find something to get them with. Legal systems need to recreate and/or reinforce some of the levees that cheap compute and sensing are washing away. Maybe folks want to live in a world where anyone can set a drone or autonomous agent to track a person around town and report their movements. I don't think so. Addedum: the direction of travel is crystal clear here. Cheaper sensors, closer to the body and mind, coupled with ever-cheaperbetter computation. You can't rely on nature for "privacy" any more. You have to do it for ourselves, if you want.
Accept it, embrace it (Score:1)
What is most important is that nobody gets the advantage. Make spying an equal opportunity thing.
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Yes this. I disagree with the synopsis, and possibly the article, on this point:
"The issue is that currently the world does not expect to be identified anywhere at any time, by anyone."
I learned this lesson the hard way trying to sneak into the girl's locker room in high school, long before facial recognition software. I had assumed everybody else was as face blind as I was.
NOW I want this technology built into a wearable, specifically for autistics like me. It will make encounters in the hallway much le
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What is most important is that nobody gets the advantage. Make spying an equal opportunity thing.
Insightful. I decided years ago that I was fine with the Credit card information and Gas Station camera confirming where I was. My car has a camera that records everything. Since I have no plans to commit any crimes, these things might come in very handy if needed, and can be subpoenaed as needed. People always act like we're having our privacy invaded out in public. There is no privacy in public.
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You break the law every single day.
Sure. For really trivial things. After al. .0000001 miles per hour over the speed limit, and I broke the law. My point is, for anything consequential like needing an alibi for something major like getting accused of say - murder, I'm more than happy to subpoena store or business records as proof.
Which is in keeping with fustakrakich's original statement. Like he wrote, an equal opportunity thing. A camera is as - or more - likley to exhonerate me as convict me.
Now it is true that people who are going
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You've probably missed something in your taxes. Alternatively, you've failed to properly update some government license you were once given with your new address after a move six years ago.
If you surfed a website, you might have violated something in the site's terms of service and thus revoked your own authorization to do it, leading to a possible CFAA charge.
Someone could find something.
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Someone could find something.
And "someone could find something" has existed long before the present era.
Consider this: The paranoid among us should understand that if their concept of everyone is a criminal, and every single one of us is violating laws every day is true, then when is everyone going to prison?
To late now (Score:2)
Just my 2 cents
First reply is "accept it". (Score:1)
Do we have privacy concern fatigue? (Score:1)
I don't really know of a way to have a cell phone and not be tracked. Even if I turn off location tracking and all apps. I need to leave the phone on most times and the device is easily tracked by its cell pulse signals and it SIM cards.
Not to mention I don't really know how to get through life without a bank account, which of course records my transactions, although not specifically if I use cash. It has my real name on it and the locations from which I withdraw cash, and any direct deposits I make.
It's
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Nazis..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just think if the Nazis had had this. There would have been no survivors.
^This. (Score:1)
I have been touting this for years. To the point of it impacting my associations and real life. You can't undo digital data collection. You can only stop it from happening in the first place.
There is little privacy left in America, and given how much of it is away from borders, the people who hide and don't try to escape now will find the circle of Mongol hordes closing in on them, until only their deanonymity or death remains.
If you at all care about privacy, discreetly get out now while you still can. The
Eventually the computers will be able to think (Score:3)
And some people think we will be able to control them. By running into the woods or something.
This is evolution via natural selection.
"In the quest for existence there are three main players. Nature, Man, and Machines. I am firmly on the side of nature, but nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines."
Irrelevent (Score:1)
Those are completely different times. We need data collection because it makes the Internet as we know it possible. Think how much Google costs to run. Think how much it costs Facebook to give free content just so that Jane can share her cat pictures? That stuff isn't free.
We also have security threats. If it were not fur cameras, we would have a crime rate similar to the 1970s-1980s, which is far higher than it is now.
I'm all for Ring and other services watching every square foot of space. Who cares
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Those are completely different times.
Times come and go, but people don't change. Genocide (or attempted genocide) will be here forever. Just think of what group you don't like.
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Indeed. Just needs the entirely wrong people coming into power and they will have death-camps again in less than a decade. Too many people think it is acceptable to kill those they do not like and far, far too many others are willing to go along with that if the case is presented right.
Unfortunately, the people with a real moral compass (not just a fake one copied from some ideology or religion) are a small group. All others can be made to kill, even on mass-scale, for no good reason.
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When was that "tea PArty" thing kicked off in the USA? Oh yes, 2009. What's the date today? 2019. Ten years.
So, before the year is out, some of those people in the concentration camps run by the Border Patrol will start to die in large numbers.
The schedule sounds about right.
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Those are completely different times. We need data collection because it makes the Internet as we know it possible. Think how much Google costs to run. Think how much it costs Facebook to give free content just so that Jane can share her cat pictures? That stuff isn't free.
Yes, it costs money to run. We used to pay for browsers, too. I'd gladly pay for a social media network with the scope of Facebook that didn't do non-contextual (eg, tracking-based) advertising. Unfortunately, network effects themselves make that unreasonable now. That window probably closed in 2008.
Catching crime is what matters, and one criminal caught is worth every privacy violation done.
Mr. Franklin would like to have a word with you.
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Facebook gives away free content? Like ... text and images uploaded by other visitors is actually created by Facebook, not Auntie Flo? The adverts on Facebook are made, copy and video and graphics, by Facebook, free for the advertisers?
Are we talking about the same Facebook - the thing that tries to encourage you to get back into content with the rapists you went to school with? The thing that will remind you
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Just think if the Nazis had had this. There would have been no survivors.
No, Hitler would have been killed in the early 1930s by a drone, as soon as he'd been recognized as a threat by other western powers.
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You are mistaken. Hitler would have been the one to tell his drone operators who to get rid of.
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The current crop of re-emerging Nazis _has_ this...
Yes, we have been warned.. (Score:3)
What to do about it, if possibly anything, is still not clear.
The Economist is either trivially right or wrong (Score:2)
That has been their track record. If they are still keeping it, this time I suspect it's the latter.
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The Economist is either trivially right or wrong. That has been their track record. If they are still keeping it, this time I suspect it's the latter.
What? The cell phone company already knows where you are to within a 4 mile radius in suburban areas and as little as a 1 mile radius in dense urban areas without even trying. With a tiny bit of trying, using multiple cells, they know where you are to within a few yards. With a high probability of it actually being you. Lending out your phone is vanishingly rare these days.
Meanwhile Google knows where you are to within a couple of feet, correlating wifi signals they mapped with very high precision durin
Wrong assumptions (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wrong assumptions (Score:4, Interesting)
In that not so distant past, if you became irate with the the lack of anonymity in your small tribe/village, you could always move a few villages away, or go on your own.
That option is what we are loosing.
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you could always move a few villages away
Where you still wouldn't be anonymous. You'd be the new guy and everyone would know who you were.
or go on your own
That didn't so much happen. You'd still return to civilization periodically for goods/services you didn't have.
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And for most of that time, life sucked if you weren't part of the majority. That's why gay people kept in the closet and why it sucked to be of a religious or ethnic minority.
Anonymity from whom? (Score:1)
Dystopia in 3, 2, 1... (Score:3)
"Think of the children" is usually the reasoning behind any digital overreach.
Human behavior really has almost no self control when it comes to this sort of thing("we will because we can"), which ironically is leading to people having less and less control over their own lives.
Don't worry though, AI and your friendly neighborhood algorithms will take good care of you.
Just stay calm and don't think.
Or question.
Gait recognition (Score:1)
Related: Gait recognition to track population in China. [apnews.com]
The idea is, you can hide your face, but gait recognition isn't fooled by "putting a stone in your shoe" or "faking a limp", and it can be detected from large distances.
Poppycock! (Score:2)
You can't rely on nature for "privacy" any more.
You have two options:
1) Stay away from humans and humans societies.
2) Own all the systems that are used to invade everyone's privacy and make exceptions for you and your friends.
How do you think vampires have managed to stay anonymous this long? Obviously, they used their massive wealth to buy all the systems for invading privacy.
Q.E.D. The ultra-wealthy 0.01% are vampires. ;)
Fuck the future (Score:5, Interesting)
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"I’ve seen the future and I’ve left it behind"
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And there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it.
MORE WEIGHT.
You just noticing this now, Hal? (Score:2)
Lock and load, people. Fight for your right to anonymity and privacy, or get the hell out of the way.
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Lock and load, people. Fight for your right to anonymity and privacy, or get the hell out of the way.
So Rick, when do we march on Silicon Valley, the headquarters of surveillance capitalism? Or are they still the little harmless private companies that can do what they want?
Do we wait before or after they finish their campaign to censor everyone they disagree with? Or do we keep on punching those right-wing fascists that the nice man from Vox tells us we should?
Who's the enemy here? Genuinely curious.
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You want to help fight for your own privacy? Stop using plastic to pay for everything and use cash instead wherever possible. Hard mode: it's less convenient; do you care enough about it to inconvenience yourself a little? Paying cash takes away one source of surveillance data. You'll also have the small added benefit of needing less time to balance your checkbook every month because you won't have a pile of receipts to enter first, just a few ATM receipts.
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Ah, I see. I need to change my habits, and not the ones of the companies that are abusing my privacy and data, and that also happen to pay into the campaigns of the political tribe I align with.
I'll even go the extra step and censor myself! That'll teach em!
But you're right about that; cash is king. The next level of tyranny is when it's no longer an option.
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Cash isn't much of an option if neither the product you want to buy nor any close substitute is sold in a brick and mortar store near you.
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What "ways around that" do you find practical? Do they involve buying a gift card with cash in a brick and mortar store?
Explain??? (Score:3)
"Society runs on the assumption that people are unknowable in some spaces..."
It does? Where? Not the society I live in.
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Say waht? (Score:3)
No, I can't do that, even if someone else with expensive, highly specialized equipment can do it in a lab. I'd bet you can't, either.
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"You can measure someone's: heartbeat with a laser;
This one doesn't seem hard, but you need a laser vibrometer, which costs around $5000. I don't know about breathing with RF-waves in wifi, I'd like to know how someone does that.
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Do you have one? If not, you can't do that.
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"You can measure someone's: heartbeat with a laser;
This one doesn't seem hard, but you need a laser vibrometer, which costs around $5000. I don't know about breathing with RF-waves in wifi, I'd like to know how someone does that.
Only if you want a Fluke. Other brands can be had new for under 200.
You can measure anything that changes and absorbs 2.4 or 5 ghz waves. Think, very low powered x-ray. Guess what absorbs those frequencies? Water. The stuff we are mostly made of.
As far as msauve's pedantry, it wasn't so long ago that carrying a tiny camera and supercomputer with multiple two-way radio communication antennas in your pocket would have been science fiction or cost extreme amounts of money. Now it's expected. He lacks a percept
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Only if you want a Fluke. Other brands can be had new for under 200.
Where can I get that??
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No, I can't do that, even if someone else with expensive, highly specialized equipment can do it in a lab. I'd bet you can't, either.
No, but what could be done with expensive, specialized equipment five years ago can be done with a smartphone app now, so in about five years, your smart phone will be able to identify anyone in a crowd using any of several means: face recognition, heartbeat, gait, etc.
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Examples, please.
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"what could be done with expensive, specialized equipment five years ago can be done with a smartphone app now" Examples, please.
One example would be apps which do medical diagnoses based on heartbeat, etc. It used to be that very expensive equipment was required.
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. not news . (Score:2)
Let me take a wild guess that most readers here have been using credit cards for what; 40 years? Using them at movie theaters, gas stations, grocery stores, beauty parlors, whorehouses, etc. And you get reward points for airline miles or future purchases. And you have 'loyalty cards' for many shopping venues. You paid taxes, got a driver's license, went to college, worked at various jobs, had various kinds of insurance, married, had kids, bought a home; all these things required extensive documentation avai
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Only half the problem (Score:3)
These things are bad if they are 100% reliable.
Now consider the implications of false positives.
Not really (Score:2)
Not if you are an undocumented immigrant.
Person of Interest (Score:1)
We humans have explored these issues in fiction for ages. From 1984 (humans watching humans) to television's Person of Interest that did it best more recently (One of the reasons I really enjoyed PoI was the exploration of the automation of observation.)
Legislation might help in places. But it's pretty inevitable that anonymity is fading fast and will likely continue to do so.
How long can you afford auto insurance without installing your insurance company's app to track your driving habits? How long can
We need innovation (Score:1)
it'll be better later (Score:2)
Right now, we have laws that, if fully enforced, could make nearly everyone in America a felon. Especially when you take the laws that elevate crimes after multiple strikes into account. The only reasons everyone has not already been convicted of something is that it takes effort to catch them and prosecute them and the exercise of extensive prosecutorial discretion. Due to the limitations, the application of the law focuses on easy catches, often the poor and repressed.
The removal of anonymity in what we d
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What will actually happen is that whenever somebody says something publicly those in power do not like, a nice little search will be conducted on them and then they will vanish behind bars forever. In authoritarian states, that is already done, although the implementation is sometimes a bit lacking. As the usual scum desperately wants this for the "free" west as well, all this surveillance will be used to implement that in a "lawful" fashion.
Protip: The law is for keeping citizens under control, not to prot
Privacy will vanish - maybe (Score:2)
Complete loss of privacy seems inevitable. People don't care enough to take the sort of mass political action that is required to protect privacy in the face of technology.
One possible saving grace, of a sort, is that ever more sophisticated deep fakes may cause the recorded data to not have any real value since it will be indistinguishable from fabricated data. Depends on where the arms race ends up
from "The Origins of Totalitarianism": (Score:2)
What ability? (Score:1)
On the large scale, we've never had the ability to move around the world anonymously; for that we've needed passports. On a smaller scale, in history, if you wanted to enter the city you needed the password, or to be known to the gatekeeper. On an even smaller scale, if you lived in my part of rural England if you wanted to change village you needed to be either a master craftsman, or have a job in the new village, or if you were destitute you needed to have been born in the new village. You couldn't jus
guideadda (Score:1)
Gulp. (Score:2)
Caltrops and ball bearings won't affect gelatinous cubes, and the corridor is a dead end. The future will swallow us all.
Oh come on. (Score:2)
Gimme a break. "Anyone can scan anyone" with available tools? Nope.
This sums it up: "You have to do it for ourselves, if you want." Huh?
I don't know if the author is really a Economist correspondent (does that mean he's a crackpot who writes letters to the Economist?), but his twitter post is complete nonsense.
coat lined with aluminum foil (Score:2)
Back To The Middle Ages (Score:2)
This isn't that new of a thing. For most of human history people primarily lived in very small enclaves where they were recognized wherever they went. Traveling was a big deal and often the people who did it were readily identifiable (coat of arms, a recognizable merchant etc..).
So we can adapt back to such a world we just need to accept the changes that will be necessary, e.g., we need to make sure that this same tech is used to ensure equal enforcement of rules rather than as an excuse for a few big act
Thailand: ur tracked, watched and fingerprinted! (Score:2)