Surveillance and sphere of privacy
Contents
Means of surveillance
Atomically precise Manufacturing will further increase the possibility for surveillance due to the emergence of omnipresent sensors. Unlike with other aspects of APM developments current technology might go quite a bit of the way to an somewhat stable "end result" whatever it might be.
General observations
absolute transparency:
- rob of diversity and freedom - no wildcards characters
- group pressure => suppression of grey zone deviations
- to cite a famous line of star track: >>We Are the Borg. You Will be Assimilated. Resistance is Futile.<<
absolute anonymity:
- perfectly concealable crimes
Obviously neither of the two extremes are desirable a golden middle should be sought to be found.
Develompment till now
Till now in some respect we where moving strongly into the direction of more anonymity. Especially in regards to consumption of information of critical nature. From big communities in rural areas to smaller groups in big cities to individuals in the giant internet. Other areas have seen a decline in anonymity like big companies becoming increasingly troubled keeping secrets. (justifiably troubled employees, wikileaks, sousveillance wikipedia) (not including pressure from open source reasons - that's not surveillance induced)
Counterforces
What matters is who is in control of the surveillance devices. Before things start to report us we might want to make sure that sure they're our things not their things.
Barriers
The broadband connections between the different parts of a persons brain are many orders of magnitude bigger than the tiny natural communication channels between individual people. Those channels have always imposed a massive barrier. New technology is and will further widen that bottleneck by some orders of magnitude. Beside the quasi eternal quasi infinite memory of the net this is probably the main reason pocket computers (aka smartphones) are eagerly accepted as symbiotic crutch.
In view of falling privacy between individual people an approach too keep some (albeit rather limited) privacy can be to split one owns activities that one wants to keep separate up in several pseudonyms thereby raising finer grained but also weaker artificial barriers. One should note that many third parties that gain from your information like to identify corresponding pseudonyms with or without consent of the "owner". Unwanted and often irreversible pseudonym-pseudonym or preudonym-realname association can happen by accidentally given information or even by statistical analyses.
