Slate article summary:
- Mass surveillance fundamentally changed the nature of surveillance. Because all the data is saved, mass surveillance allows people to conduct surveillance backward in time, and without even knowing whom specifically you want to target.
- Surveillance has become the business model of the internet, and there’s "no reasonable way for us to opt out of it".
- This spying is not limited to conversations on our phones or computers. Just as cameras everywhere fueled mass surveillance, microphones everywhere will fuel mass spying. Siri, Alexa and Google are already always listening; the conversations just aren’t being saved yet.
- In the early days of Gmail, Google talked about using people’s Gmail content to serve them personalized ads. The company stopped doing it, almost certainly because the keyword data it collected was so poor...That will soon change.
- Knowing that they are under constant surveillance changes how people behave. They conform.
- We could prohibit mass spying. We could pass strong data-privacy rules. But we haven’t done anything to limit mass surveillance. Why would spying be any different?
Opinion - Articles like this may sound defeatist but are sometimes motivating for me to learn more and post more tools about new privacy tech and tools being created to limit this somber scenario. I hope it's the same for others. I'm sure many of us will become the intolerant minority, principled and meticulous.