Privacy no longer exists; it’s now little more than an illusion.
If you use modern technology at all, even your own thoughts aren’t safe. Existing ad tech can intuit what you are thinking before you are even aware of it, and AI will be able to dig even deeper into your mind in the near future. There is no escape.
Fire and brimstone preachers used to scream about how God was always watching, but regardless of whether you believe in that sort thing, one thing is true: technology is always watching, and your identity and innermost thoughts can be reassembled at any time by any number of entities, and you wouldn’t even know.
You would be surprised at the incompetence of the surveillance state. I’ve known people subject to terrorism investigations by world superpowers where the state couldn’t figure out the basic facts about that person’s life, let alone find anything that may be helpful to prosecution. This kind of fearmongering only encourages people to not be cautious. Not that the extent of surveillance isn’t terrifying, but at the other end of the table is just other human beings. All humans are fallible, including the ones who spy on us, and we can both outsmart and outmanoeuvre them if we’re serious about it.
It’s not just government that is the problem. The problem is that the data has been collected. It’s still being collected. It already exists. And think about that incompetence you mentioned… do you think that data is safe from less incompetent actors?
The best time for action on protecting privacy was yesterday. The second best is right now.
Nah, this is just an excuse a bunch use to not care about actually doing something about it.
Source: worked in almost all huge big tech companies, y’all give em too much credit.
I never said something shouldn’t be done about it or that it shouldn’t exist. I consider privacy a natural right that we should fight to protect. I’m just saying that, whether people realize it or not, it no longer exists. It has already been taken away, and the repercussions of that reality are going to echo through time.
