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RE: Google: Beyond Good and "Don't Be Evil"
"Perhaps at some point some clever marketer will decide to sell Q t shirts and then perhaps there would be such ads, because the guy would be making money of the shirts."
Actually already happened, BTW.
"...A political candidate is a product"
As are NGOs, parties, and all manner of institutions.
"What surveillance powers are still denied government at this point?"
Legally - lawfully - anything absent a warrant based on probable cause. Practically? None. Including far more potent weapons than your scent so the dogs can track you, such as your DNA.
While we don't need paranoia, denial is possibly worse. Surveillance potentiates oppression, and I'm agin' it.
I would say your cell phone, license plates and credit cards are way better for tracking you than your DNA, that would be pretty useless for trying to track someone. You could use it to confirm if someone had been somewhere but that is slow. The fugitive trackers love social media too, that tells them who might help you. Of course you could ditch your phone and credit cards and license plates, then you just need to dodge the facial recognition. Once the dogs are on your scent though, you are probably fucked.
There was a show on a couple of years ago where they had a bunch of real federal marshals and other experts using all the available technology to try to track a number of contestants who won the contest if they could evade arrest for a month and then get to a certain spot without getting caught. It's pretty wild to see all the tools they had at their disposal, someone did win the show though, they were pretty smart and lucky.
Obviously nothing good can come of a panopticon and it gets even more sketchy when the have AI to actually make that panopticon effective.
You're refusing to acknowledge that individuals will have panoptic surveillance, facial recognition, and AI to better deploy their use of it.
In fact, why don't you have these things today?
Whether you want it or not, these things are becoming more available to individuals, more advanced, cheaper, and hurt nefarious actors far more than good neighbors in good communities of good people.
Nothing good can come of these technologies as long as they are wielded by oppressors alone. They are existential threats to oppressors when all civilians have them.
This is exactly how tech makes government obsolete. Keep adding more tech to the list of power that will inure to individuals, and no longer only be used against them by institutions, and only denial will prevent you reaching the conclusion that freedom from oppression is inevitable.
I suppose any wealthy individual could employ those technologies today, but to what end? What would I use facial recognition for? I can already recognize all the faces I need to.
I was going to say I agreed with that but I can't really divide the world into "oppressors" and "civilians", I don't consider myself to be either.
Just consider how rapidly the costs of such technologies are dropping, and how much more rapidly they disseminate today than in the recent past, and it will become apparent that quite soon even the desperately poor will have access to them and more, and that the rate of dispersal will continue to accelerate.
While you may not feel that you are in danger of being surveilled, stalked, or otherwise need to recognize faces that may belong to professional thugs, you might grasp that some folks are, do, and soon will. The Stasi were not benign, and the FAANGs, enemedia, and political bureaucracies are more and more resembling them, as they become more desperate to continue to wield power.
I hope you will not tarry long before joining the ranks of we civilian non-combatants successfully gaining our freedom.
I am a citizen of the united states, I don't know what "civilian" really means. I am already free to speak my mind and bear arms, I can consume whatever substances I like, I am protected from illegal searches and seizures and considered innocent unless found guilty in a court of law I am freer than 99% of the people on earth already, and much freer than any people who came before us, what else do you want?