This is why I've created a life so tedious and boring that there's no advantage to spying on me.
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Having nothing to hide doesn’t justify people being allowed to spy on you in general.
Yes, but at least they aren't getting any useful data out of it. Jokes on them....
Define useful.
Useful to you? No.
Useful to make a profile on you, to then sell you to other companies for advertising revenue. Definitely useful.
I agree with your point - they'll hold on to all data bc it'll be useful in some context some day.
But as a ~40 y.o. U.S. citizen, I also share the previous viewpoint. My economic outlook has been downgraded several times due to external political factors and I'm (internally, at least) jaded and cynical as all hell. The best uses of my personal data would be to steal my loose ~$200 or to jail me and profit off my slave labor.
I still use privacy apps to mitigate unpleasant surprises and am against mass surveillance in all forms, but fuck the bottom feeders at the top of the economic food chain. I hope they are supremely bored when sifting through my bland porn tastes, i.e. - "boobies".
It’s not that they want to look at what you do or take YOUR money. This is an entire market created around spying on people and selling them to advertisers. Just because your info is dull doesn’t mean it’s not marketable.
Man in his 40s, USA citizen, porn connoisseur
That’s more than enough to start bids on the ad spaces that you encounter. They also have a lot more information about you than just that.
The data they have now is helping them already. Not on some future date.
Theyre saying AI can summarize. Thats it.
that is pretty huge though. right now the limitation of large datasets is the inability for someone to sift through it.
what application are you trying to achieve? Even the example of spying in this article isnt applicable
If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations.
you wont get a summarized report, you get transcripts, you get full emails, you get audio files, if you've ever followed investigations. It's not an impossibly large stack of communication from someone saying or typing a million words a day. It's very easily filterable and searchable.
This allows something like “computer show me every citizen that has posted negative comments towards the current mayor, order it by the amount of comments theyve posted, cite where they work, who their parents are, what people does there phone gps spend the most time around, and include any cctv and amazon ring footage that detects their face using facial recognition, create a separate folder of footage from any bar and club they’ve been to, search every nsfw website/subreddit/onlyfans for footage of them.”
And now you have a neatly organized collection of all the people that oppose the mayor with potential blackmail and who to send it to one by one until your demands of only praising the great cop mayor is met (as an example)
yeah but again there are human limitations. Each is filtered independently but with ai they can be correlated. Its much like how chatbots are useful as the next stage of search. Search itself went from library and texts to online but when results started giving a brief sumary it greatly enhanced the speed someone can go through the links and now with chatbots its essentially doing the link result search for you. As a human you have to go through it to verify but you can get to results much faster.