> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race."<p>I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, the pervasiveness of ad-blocking technology has never been higher, it seems like every item from the ad company's lately is highlighting that viewership and engagement is plummeting at a record pace.<p>I'm not saying this isn't a fight we need to win, but it seems we're winning it pretty well. We still need to work on the privacy end of things (I think that will be coming in a big way fairly soon) but in terms of advertisements controlling people? With such a high amount of said people blocking and ignoring, I find it very hard to believe. Even if their targeting is better, the fact that people can so effectively ignore ads that are targeted to their exact behaviors makes it seem unlikely.
This unfortunately doesn't seem realistic:<p>> Moglen proposed deploying "freedom boxes" at every street corner—cheap hardware running free software, deployed everywhere, that encrypt everything, anonymise everything, and blind the service providers to our activity.<p>b/c the last mile is the priciest part of a telco's network. Unless the telcos are forced to do it, it has zero odds of happening.<p>Also, let's not forget privacy as we know it is a distinctly modern idea. The "right to privacy" was coined with the advent of cameras in the 1890s:<p><a href="https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-of-privacy-3-000-years-of-history-in-50-images-614c26059e" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-o...</a><p>The main new thing today is the ubiquity of the public sphere owing to IT. Inadvertently ending up on a picture in the late 19th century was a rather trivial intrusion of privacy; the same picture posted on FB today instantly makes it available to anyone with an internet connection. Not saying privacy has little to no merit, but nothing short of a full-blown societal rethink is going to make taking and sharing those pictures stop - a piece of hardware just won't help.
I'm not so sure things are as dire as he thinks.<p>Most of the people I know are growing more and more irritated by Facebook and other social media. Many have stopped using it and deleted their profiles. And these are not "tech" people but ordinary adults and teens.<p>I think people are quite perceptive when a service changes from being truly useful, as Facebook was in its early days, to being an intrusive pain in the ass as it is now. They may not all jump ship right away because people have different tolerances for this stuff. But from what I see, people are more aware of what's going on than Mr. Moglen is giving them credit for.
He's totally right, and it's scary.<p>The hive creature(s) will be cool, though. Little gods.<p>Maybe, behind his proposed barricades, little enclaves of individuals will survive, for a while.
More and more people will adopt ad blocking, script controls, and of course, use a proxy, VPN, or otherwise anonymize their traffic. More and more people are (and are going to be) encrypting their traffic.<p>This is not a one-way street.