We're going to fight hard so our grandchildren have really secure email in a world where everything they do and every word they say is uploaded to the internet, transcribed and annotated in realtime by swarms of drones controlled by other kids that, only 50 years earlier, would have been at home doxxing people on Twitter.
Privacy will die, not because it's undesirable or a bad idea, it'll die like copyright and DRM - because it's technically and economically easy to defeat, and people will be motivated to do so. What's more, those people will be hard to catch - after all, the drones will be communicating over very strongly encrypted channels.
[Please refute - I genuinely have nightmares about this future]
I disagree - digital surveillance state will be gone within a decade, or twenty years at most. Already we see programs like Telegram becoming very popular (100 million users) where the opportunity for surveillance is massively reduced. Platforms are going to slowly transition towards encrypted content and data that not even service providers can decrypt (SpiderOak is a good example).
The biggest holdout will be operating systems - Google and Microsoft very much do not want to lose their backdoors (or front doors) into everyone's data. But within ten years, we will finally have a "year of Linux on desktops" in which both grandma and the young university student can both buy an Ubuntu computer and have it work how they need it to. And phones will run an OS that can't be maliciously updated remotely, and doesn't leak user data to apps and OS providers.
The final step will be near anonymous internet usage, which we are currently in the infancy of. There will be a shift to a more decentralized availability (but not necessarily storage) of data in most of the applications we use most often. Essentially Freenet, but without all the usability problems. The Facebook of the future will have open source (and encrypted) data where your info is only viewable to you and your friends. There are currently platforms that exist like this, but they are mostly in "testing" stages and are not ready for widespread use.
I'm not talking about the state exclusively, nor am I talking about your online activities. I'm saying you will have a camera and microphone trained on you, always. My personal AI assistant - smart but not nearly sentient - knows to highlight the most titillating segments, which I have just captioned and published for all to see (anonymously, over an encrypted connection).
It's great that one's ISP doesn't know what porn site one is visiting, but 4chan are nevertheless streaming a video of one in the act.
I fail to see how this technology - small, cheap, highly capable and connected drones - will fail to come about in the next 50-100 years. And because of that, I seriously think we need to mentally prepare for living much more publicly than we do now.
I guess I thought the drones were a joke or hyperbole in your post.
There are a lot of things that make me not concerned about your scenario. Firstly, cameras are easily defeated, especially by technology 50 years from now. You're presently a single curtain away from defeating them. In the future it might be some non-human visible light array that blinds a camera (these already exist today but aren't very common). Who knows.
Secondly, most people benefit from security and privacy through obscurity. No one cares about what 99% of people do. The other 1% will have easy means for protecting privacy, whether it be closing their curtains or some futuristic piece of technology.
Thirdly, I think expectations of privacy are going to naturally diminish a lot in the future. Sexuality will probably be a lot less stigmatized, and no one will care whether a state senator is jackin it to gay scat porn.
However advanced drones get, the technology to counter them bothering you will no doubt be a lot more advanced.
> It's great that one's ISP doesn't know what porn site one is visiting,
Well.... that seems to be the way Utah is heading, with the support of anti-porn crusaders (many of whom are radical feminists - that's originally where I found this link)
This is why I strongly oppose the drone strikes. Nobody should be killed by the state (except I guess by soldiers in self defense). I especially so not like the idea of killing someone probably at home in pajamas eating Cheerios at five pm in the evening local time. I don't think there is any justification for that even if the person in question is a flight risk and has been the mastermind behind millions of death.
Such a killing with no attempt to detain runs afoul of my morals. This is worse than capital punishment which I also strongly oppose for any situation.
I think your concern about lack of due process should be more focused on the tens to hundreds of thousands of civilian bystanders the US has killed since 2001. We are killing dozens of women and children overseas every week and chalk them up as collateral damage.
I am honestly not worried about collateral damage. If someone is shooting at you, you shoot right back at them regardless of whether they are standing behind a hundred babies. That is not a problem.
When we talk about collateral damage in case of unprovoked attacks, we are minimizing the issue. If we are not willing to risk our soldiers to capture people who are not firing at us, then we should not try to capture or kill those people. I think it is pretty simple. If they are worth killing with a drone, they are worth sacrificing the lives of our soldiers in an attempt to catch them dead or alive. Whether there is any collateral damage is not the issue.
I am not a very smart person so I looked up the definition of sociopath.
> Hare also provides his own definitions: he describes psychopathy as not having a sense of empathy or morality, but sociopathy as only differing in sense of right and wrong from the average person.
Well, I might be a sociopath. Don't get me wrong. I think babies are very cute and would go out of my way to save an infant's life. However, I cannot command others to imperil their own lives to maybe not kill an infant.
Not to derail the topic too much but it bothers me that people think the collateral deaths of "innocent women and children" in an extrajudicial drone strike are worse than the death of the target. The collateral damage would not have happened if we didn't shoot in the first place. I am not saying we should be isolationist or even that we should not exercise restraint in use of force (even in self defense), far from it. I am just asking that we approach the topic as rationally as we can.
Now, we should be clear as to why we try to save infants and small children first in an emergency. Here is the article that made me think about this http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/01/children-ar... but it makes sense what I read a while back. It is not because they are more important (far from it, society has much more invested in growing up a working adult) but because the infants and children are more vulnerable. It made a world of sense when I thought about it this way. When it comes to a fire, I can see how a healthy adult can survive longer suffocating in a smokey room as opposed to an infant. I think a trained fireman or a nurse can do triage pretty will without someone screaming in their face "why won't you attend to my baby first?"
In most situations, we would probably care for infants and young children before anyone else. However, like with everything in life, we should think about why and not just what. A person who has killed millions of people has the same right life as a newly born infant and we shouldn't try to sidestep difficult questions and scream "why won't you think of the children" just looking for an emotional response.
>Privacy will die, not because it's undesirable or a bad idea, it'll die like copyright and DRM - because it's technically and economically easy to defeat, and people will be motivated to do so.
>[Please refute - I genuinely have nightmares about this future]
Um, this is pretty easy to refute: we've been complaining about copyright and DRM for ages now, and not only are they not waning, they're at least as strong now as they've ever been. There's no indication whatsoever that copyright law is going anywhere or being relaxed in any way, in fact it's the opposite. Sure, it's generally easy to copy digital stuff (absent DRM), but that doesn't make it legal, nor has the internet become a free-for-all (quite the opposite in fact; it's more dangerous to commit copyright violations now than ever I think). Same goes for DRM: despite all the complaints, DRM is still present in many places, and you still need to use it for things like watching Netflix. It is possible to defeat it (I'm not going to say technically easy though, because a lot of it is unbroken), but what the DRM-users have proven to us is that it's non-trivial now, and more importantly it only has to be "good enough": as long as it prevents most users from doing something the copyright holder doesn't want, that's all they really care about.
I don't really recognise any of what you're describing here - it's trivial to download almost any copyrighted work in seconds, for free, and basically nobody suffers any consequences for doing so.
Even so, it was just an analogy. There's very little stopping people just following you round recording you on their smartphone as it is. When it's semi-autonomous flying robots the size of a grain of rice, I don't believe you are going to have much legal recourse.
You're not talking about downloading copyright works, you were talking about "the death of copyright". Copyright isn't dead, it's alive and well, regardless of how easy it is to download stuff.
Not only that, while it may be easy to download stuff, it's also easy to be sued for it, and this has happened countless times. There's been a whole industry of suing downloaders and getting them to settle for $3k. So your assertion that "nobody suffers any consequences for doing so" is quite false. Ask Jammie Thomas.
Yes, you can largely avoid this by using a VPN, but not that many people do.
Privacy will die, not because it's undesirable or a bad idea, it'll die like copyright and DRM - because it's technically and economically easy to defeat, and people will be motivated to do so. What's more, those people will be hard to catch - after all, the drones will be communicating over very strongly encrypted channels.
[Please refute - I genuinely have nightmares about this future]