Pretty much all of the current discussion I see around surveillance and the pandemic is framed like this: "to what extent can we balance new state surveillance with privacy", often citing post-9/11 spying powers as a cautionary example, and it's driving me a little bit bonkers.
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The barrier between state and private surveillance is an entirely notional one, as we've seen play out in countless ways. They use the same technology, same infrastructure, and the oligopoly tech companies behave in many ways like state actors themselves.
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In the United States, an especially odd situation exists where the only entities subject to data privacy regulation are hospitals, government, and the financial system. So any sleazeball data broker can collect and sell any bit of data they want about you, whatsoever.
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If a government wants any of that unregulated, permanently stored information, it has a lot of options. It can just hack in and take it (like China has often done) or it can ask nicely (like the U.S. government has done) and the private sector just hands it over.
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I would like to see this surveillance *architecture* partially dismantled and then closely regulated, as I believe it poses a mortal threat to democracy in the long term, particularly since most of it is run by a tech oligopoly already deeply embedded in our political system.
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The fixation on state surveillance in particular, the only part of this system that is subject to any legal controls and oversight, is a dangerous failure of imagination by Big Privacy that is likely to lead us away from the effective laws and trade-offs they purport to seek.
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End of conversation
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