Obama was promoting The Age of Surveillance Capitalism over seven years ago now. Industry insiders have known all this since 1999. Yet almost every single person I know carries a cellphone and drives a car with telemetry, things that are entirely optional. Most humans use Meta products regularly; also optional. For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus.<p>PS: Something in this vein that many people are unaware of is that the 6G standard for cell towers is planned to include ISAC (Integrated Sensing and Communication). I haven’t heard a single AFK person talk about this.
Traversing life without a cell phone is a fun experiment. Here and there I forget mine and spend a day without the distraction - glorious way to spend time.
I don't think people want this. I think people want the other benefits that those things bring, and increasingly feel that it's impossible to escape being surveilled anyway so do their best to ignore the whole issue.<p>Being resigned to something is not the same as wanting that thing.
> Most humans use Meta products regularly; also optional. For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus.<p>This is a perfect example of the revealed-preference fallacy. The use of providers like Meta does not reflect a well-informed, freely chosen preference. Meta spends a ton of money to squash competition, remove viable alternatives, and to make their products addictive.
By leveraging mobile network infrastructure – towers, spectrum, antennas, and some hardware – ISAC can detect, locate, and track objects (including passive ones with no electronics). This will enable a wide range of use cases such as UAV airspace monitoring, autonomous vehicle safety, industrial automation, and immersive AR experiences. Commercial deployment is expected alongside 6G rollouts in the 2030 timeframe<p><a href="https://www.ericsson.com/en/6g/isac" rel="nofollow">https://www.ericsson.com/en/6g/isac</a>
People wouldn't want this if they were adequately educated.
No, this is not the way to go. Consumers cannot possibly understand all potential ways in which they can be screwed over, and even if they could, it is entirely likely that there are no good choices because consumers will have to choose between e.g privacy violation or environmental destruction, or privacy violation of some degree vs another degree.<p>This is why governments exist.
the main solution is the same as with many other problems - education on what's wrong + making the right way as easy as possible<p>it's easy to fall into complain hole, as that seems to fulfill the 1st part<p>but 2nd part is as much or even more valuable
It's hard for me to take this perspective seriously when you describe a cellphone as "entirely optional". Our society is structured around the assumption that you'll have not just a cellphone, but a smartphone. Without acknowledging that, how can we have a realistic discussion? Many businesses require you to use a smartphone in some way. Some government services also require one.<p>Before cellphones, there were payphones everywhere for people to use when they needed to get into contact. Now there are hardly any left in most countries, so your ability to communicate would actually be worse than in the pre-cellphone era. Sure you could ask someone to use their phone, but if a stranger asked me that these days I would likely refuse.
The only reason I take my cell phone with me is in the event my truck breaks down. I have lost count of how many times I forgot it at home. I've had business tell me to install some app but I just tell them no or make them do the work for me. If they want money they will fill in the information. Over the years I have been parting ways from businesses that I can not walk in and talk face-to-face with someone and for good reason as it is getting harder and harder to reach a real person in customer support for online businesses. People are getting accounts disabled or deleted with no recourse.
I do not carry a cellphone. I am employed and live in a major city. I never think about not having one. I know multiple other people, also employed, living both rurally and in cities, who do not carry cellphones.<p>It is entirely optional.
> I am employed and live in a major city. ... . I know multiple other people, also employed, living both rurally and in cities, who do not carry cellphones.<p>This doesn't mean much. I know multiple people who fit this description, live in the US, and can't speak or read English. However, speaking English isn't meaningfully optional. You will face constant limitations and problems in every aspect of life. There are people who don't use electricity, so I guess by your definition that's optional too?<p>> I never think about not having one.<p>Sure you don't.
Genuinely. Thinking back on it now, the only times I notice it is in some restaurants that don’t have paper menus out by default. I need to ask for one, which feels very odd and kind of awkward. This is the only instance I can think of.
What happens when you're meeting up with someone? With the folks I know who don't have a phone, this is always a real pain point because they don't have a way to communicate or receive changes of plans, "I'm going to be late", etc...
Less and less though and you need to go through quite a bit of trouble sometimes already. Banking, gov apps, I know more and more companies you cannot enter nor clock in without smartphone etc. Sure, you can just resign, move country, try to find another bank; in the end you will run out of options as they are all moving there.
Counterpoint: I could not do my job without one. Clients expect support over WhatsApp.
so obama was doing what in 2019? are you an LLM trained in 2023?
I have seen enough instances of government authorities abusing their power (or even civilians using the courts against another civilian) to know that the best defense you have in a situation where you are the victim is to have your own recording.<p>Easiest example is having your own dash cam (don’t know why all auto manufacturers don’t have Tesla style camera recordings, especially given that all new cars come with cameras anyway).<p>Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference.
> Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference.<p>Maybe you could use a trusted timestamping service to stamp keyframes or stills from your video while you're recording? If the time of the recording is not in question, it would bound the kind of video editing people could plausibly claim that you could've done.<p>It's not foolproof - if you have enough face data of the person you want to frame and you've been to the room where the conversation takes place, you could have made a fake video beforehand and spliced it into the conversation at the time of the recording. But that would at least take a lot of preparation and quite a bit of luck and timing to find a place in the conversation that's just long enough to copy your edited version in without arousing suspicion. For dashcam videos it would be difficult to merge your edit with existing traffic, etc...
Almost every person installs security cameras hoping that one day they will "catch the criminal" unaware that the footage probably is used in all possible ways all the time, yet in case when the crime against them finally happens the footage might not be admitted as a proof.
> For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus.<p>My sad realization is that the Buddhists were right all along. The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance. What you are describing here is greed. People want to get useful things for free. This is the core of the problem. If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted. Instead, they want stuff for free and they choose to be willfully blind to the spying.