I agree that some of the possibilities of such tech are scary.
However, putting on my optimist hat, they are only possibilities. Of course it will be possible to do such things. The question then becomes: why would anyone do them, and (somewhat linked) what are the chances that anyone will do them to you?
> I tell your boss when you lie about being sick, I tell your insurance how often you do risky things when not driving, I tell your ex where she can find you at the club.
All of these things were possible 50 years ago. They are possible now. They will be possible in 50 years.
Increasingly advanced technology reduces the amount of effort, and to some extent, the prior knowledge about you required to do these things - but that doesn't automatically make them more likely to happen. For the vast majority of people the motivation to do such things remains extremely low relative to the motivation to do other more interesting things.
> I mean, I'd know everything about you -- where you lived, where you shopped, where you worked, where you ate out, where your friends lived, what you did with your friends, when you did it, etc.
Again, this is not far off being trivial with today's technology. Yet you can't imagine (at least I can't) what benefit or pleasure anybody would get out of knowing such information about a person today. Therefore it's extremely unlikely anyone will care enough to do it - evidenced by the fact that practically nobody does. Why will this change in the future?
Taken to the extreme, ask yourself even if you could retrieve this information about any given person instantly, for zero cost or effort, would you even care enough to do it? Are the things you could do with that information more exciting or interesting than what you were otherwise going to do today? For how many people is that answer going to be yes?
> The question then becomes: why would anyone do them, and (somewhat linked) what are the chances that anyone will do them to you?
Let me rephrase the items from the GP comment:
1. A company that your boss hires will tell him when you lie about being sick.
2. Your insurance company pays to find out how often you do risky things when not driving
3. where-is-she.com charges 29.99 per month to report on someone's location at any time, using open drone surveillance data.
The point is, all of this can be turned into businesses and government services. In my opinion it's damned scary. I like Snowden's remarks on the topic:
> Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
It's completely true that these things can (and, to be honest, probably will) be turned into services by companies, that's just one more way in which access to such information will become easier.
It doesn't change the point about motivation and the underlying reasons such information would be used not changing as a result of it being easier.
Let's further deconstruct those three examples:
1. If your boss pays for such a service, it probably points to a wider issue with them, or you. Either your boss is happy with you and your performance, or they aren't. If the former, what incentive do they have to catch you red-handed lying about sick days? Do they even care, ultimately, if you're getting the job done? If not, why would they pay for and/or use such a service? However, if in their opinion you're not getting the job done, and they're actively looking for evidence presumably to support firing you, and you're actually guilty of lying about sick days - well... that sounds like an extremely unhealthy situation that would probably come to a bad end anyway, with or without them using such a service.
2. (Disclaimer, this may be wildly wrong or pure fantasy, IANAEconomist) How do they feed this data into their risk models exactly? This won't increase everyones' premiums - rather it would result in some premiums going up, others down. If, due to poor models, it results in some premiums going up unfairly, then presumably some other insurance company will figure this out so those actually-not-that-risky clients will switch to them for lower premiums. There will be disruption, and temporarily some people will be treated unfairly, but the market will adjust and actually may become fairer all round eventually. Transparency in this case should actually be a good thing, right? Or are we saying that people who are actually riskier should be subsidised by the less risky?
3. The type of person to use such a service would not just do so because it's easy. This is a fundamental matter of morals. The type of person to use this service would be incredibly likely to do bad things anyway, regardless of the tools available to them to do bad - technology will not take otherwise moral people and suddenly make them immoral just because it's easier now than it was yesterday. In rather simplistic terms, don't blame the weapon for violence, blame the person making the decision to use the weapon.
> Yet you can't imagine (at least I can't) what benefit or pleasure anybody would get out of knowing such information about a person today. Therefore it's extremely unlikely anyone will care enough to do it - evidenced by the fact that practically nobody does. Why will this change in the future?
I'm paid to profile people and discover facts about their lives from their habits and the stream of data their phones collect.
Quite literally, there's hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to get that information about you, because it allows people like me to teach computers to manipulate you in to doing what other people want (statistically).
> Taken to the extreme, ask yourself even if you could retrieve this information about any given person instantly, for zero cost or effort, would you even care enough to do it?
The data about people stalking their exes on Facebook strongly suggests that people would peep on each other all the time, given an easy way to do so. However, it doesn't suggest that such habits are healthy.
> Are the things you could do with that information more exciting or interesting than what you were otherwise going to do today? For how many people is that answer going to be yes?
I'm not worried about most people; I'm worried about the people for whom that information is useful, because it can be used against me in effective and highly problematic ways.
> All of these things were possible 50 years ago. They are possible now. They will be possible in 50 years.
But 50 years ago, these things were not trivial to accomplish. You couldn't just rewind a public feed, and find this information out about any given person - you had to dedicate manpower to tracking any one given individual.
That's very true - it's the point I address on the next line :-)
> Increasingly advanced technology reduces the amount of effort, and to some extent, the prior knowledge about you required to do these things - but that doesn't automatically make them more likely to happen.
Reading this back, I didn't phrase this in the right way to get across my meaning.
I'm totally not taking the extreme and naively idealistic position that ease of access won't make bad things more likely to happen. It will in almost all cases by some margin - I guess my real argument is that margin might be small enough that it's not really a big deal in practice.
And this is definitely my 'optimist' argument. It's what I want to believe is true, and I think there's some rational justification for it, as I've discussed. However, sadly I can definitely see the opposite case as well, and totally accept that it's not only possible, it could be the more likely outcome.
I want to believe that, too, but when Amazon is spending serious money on a one-press-to-order button - thus betting that ease of access will increase use - I'm pretty sure I don't want to argue the other direction :p
However, putting on my optimist hat, they are only possibilities. Of course it will be possible to do such things. The question then becomes: why would anyone do them, and (somewhat linked) what are the chances that anyone will do them to you?
> I tell your boss when you lie about being sick, I tell your insurance how often you do risky things when not driving, I tell your ex where she can find you at the club.
All of these things were possible 50 years ago. They are possible now. They will be possible in 50 years.
Increasingly advanced technology reduces the amount of effort, and to some extent, the prior knowledge about you required to do these things - but that doesn't automatically make them more likely to happen. For the vast majority of people the motivation to do such things remains extremely low relative to the motivation to do other more interesting things.
> I mean, I'd know everything about you -- where you lived, where you shopped, where you worked, where you ate out, where your friends lived, what you did with your friends, when you did it, etc.
Again, this is not far off being trivial with today's technology. Yet you can't imagine (at least I can't) what benefit or pleasure anybody would get out of knowing such information about a person today. Therefore it's extremely unlikely anyone will care enough to do it - evidenced by the fact that practically nobody does. Why will this change in the future?
Taken to the extreme, ask yourself even if you could retrieve this information about any given person instantly, for zero cost or effort, would you even care enough to do it? Are the things you could do with that information more exciting or interesting than what you were otherwise going to do today? For how many people is that answer going to be yes?