I think there are qualitative differences that arise from incremental, quantitative changes in privacy.<p>Sure, in the 1970s the cops could follow you around any time you were out in public. But they needed 6+ cops to provide round-the-clock surveillance, with an annual cost in the high six figures.<p>So the average citizen's privacy was protected not by law or high-minded ideals about privacy, but by simple numbers. There weren't enough cops to follow even 0.1% of the population.<p>But in the modern age of smartphones and license plate recognition and credit reference agencies? I think there's a strong argument to be made that we need new laws and new rights to reflect the new reality, where tracking people around the clock is several orders of magnitude cheaper.
A partner showed me their CRM tool, it had an AI component that created a profile of each of their contacts. It was pretty complete and clearly had info from LinkedIn and other sources.<p>The personality summary was concerning as it was both deeply accurate in some respects and deeply inaccurate in others. Most concerning, it said I was "risk adverse" and "struggles to make decisions with incomplete data".<p>With 35 years at startups and independent contracting, risk tolerance and ability to make decisions with incomplete data are kind of in my wheelhouse.<p>Worse, if this profile was being shown to potential employers, it could (would?) be a deal breaker. It's kind of like being judged by your MBTI results.
IMHO an opt-out system is never going to work for this.<p>Story time: while I still worked at Facebook, there was a company wide project for data attribution to comply with opting out of personalization (I believe to comply with an EU directive but don't quote me on that). The idea was to identify the source of any data by esentially tagging it on a granular level. This affected all the offline data procesing and ML processes but also code (online and offline) where various tools and systems were being built to analyze sites of data usage to detect use of personalized data and respect opt outs where applicable.<p>I made two predictions at the early stages of this:<p>1. The tools and systems would tell us "all data is used for everything" and<p>2. Creating new non-personalized data pipelines and add things to them would be far easier and faster than trying to remove personalzied data from existing pieplines. Then, things like ad performance become an optimizatino problem with a clear benchmark (eg new unpersonalized ad serving pipeline vs the old personalized pipeline).<p>A lot of work did, I believe, basically confirm (1). Untangling that seems, at least to me, to be a Sisyphean task. I don't know where this project ended up since I left while it's ongoing but I stand by (2).<p>My point is that (IMHO) opt-out just doesn't work for this kind of thing. If we really care about data privacy and authorized use of data at some point we will need to take the oposite approach and enumerate what data we're allowed to use.
I don't love this. Informed consent is a lie and a loophole you can drive a container ship through. Anything less than right to refuse where services aren't allowed to deny you service until you accept is worthless. Also AI isn't special, I don't want to be profiled by humans or non-AI based systems based on my public data either. And for that matter public data isn't special either -- I don't want to be profiled via my private data sold though backroom deals between companies <i>more</i> than I care about my public data. At least I can can curate the latter.<p>The problem is that if you don't narrowly target AI you bump into "well this is what adtech does" and getting legislation that hurts the profits of one of the US's golden calfs is a nonstarter.
I wish there were a way to verify, when I encounter a camera that is pointed at a public place, that it's not feeding into some kind if nation wide person tracking system maintained by whatever security company, but is instead going to local storage with a retention period of < 1wk.<p>I have a camera that can see the street which meets these requirements, and would definitely go through extra steps to inform passers-by that I've taken steps to keep data about them out of the cloud. I just don't know what those steps ought to be.
This is focusing on the wrong side. Better than the right, which is pretty unenforceable at individual scale, why not focus on prohibiting companies/institutions/goverment from AI profiling?
I hope this right gets applied to credit scoring agencies as well, which don't publish the methodology in the calculation of credit scores. God knows what the exact mechanics of these calculations are (beyond the well-known but very hand-wavy broad strokes), and they impact people in serious ways.
Ubiquitous surveillance is becoming cheap and easy.<p>We can pass all the laws we want trying to put this genie back in the bottle. It may work, some, it might keep the law-abiding government agencies at bay (are there any)?<p>But anybody wanting to make a buck off of us, they won't hesitate to use it. There's money in it. You refuse to do it, well, you lose in the marketplace. Social Darwinism. Or, economic.<p>We have to come up with some social rules to control how we feel about it, how we are subjected to it. That could help. Like, you don't mention what you saw on a streaming microcam that drifted through your neighbor's bedroom window, because that is gauche. Some fiction of privacy. Like not mentioning what you hear through a bathroom door. It's just not polite.<p>That's the best scenario we can hope for, I imagine.
I agree that this sucks, but it's going to happen no matter whether we call it a right or not. We need to quickly accept that we've made a world where you can't stop anyone from using AI for things you don't like, and that there are infinite incentives for them to do it, and start focusing on ways to mitigate the risk. My position is that calling it a right—even enshrining that recognition into international law—will not, by itself, do anything. It's step 0, we need to be on like step 12, pronto.
Rich people erecting barricades against the poor. The intelligence services, malign actors, and anyone who's already gotten in (aka, large tech companies) will ignore this to the maximum extent possible. Other rich people (aka, large companies that don't depend on this stuff, like railroads, construction, etc) will also ignore this to the maximum extent possible in order to avoid awkward moments at dinner parties with their rich tech friends.
Does XKCD take suggestions?<p>A. We don't fully understand this and our responses are incorrect. Let's build an AI system to help us.<p>B. We'll give it data from online which is limited, temporal, and to the same degree as humans; incorrect.<p>C. Then we'll build an algorithm based on the generalized structure of the human brain, which, is regularly wrong.<p>D. We don't fully understand this and our responses are incorrect.
The only "rights" anyone has anymore are the right to be used, abused, and eventually killed by the tiny percentage of humanity that own all the money, weapons, and resources. If you think you have "rights", you're living in a fantasy world.
This is an absolutely stupid notion IMHO because if somebody has the data there’s NOTHING you can do to stop profiling. The right to the deletion and security of your own personal data is what needs to be protected. This sort of right is closing the barn door after the horse leaves.
Varying degrees of individual crony capitalism and authoritarian countries like Russia, China, and the US will refuse to grant their citizens ownership of their data, will find new ways to surveil and charge people with crimes, and permit companies to create stealth credit and behavioral tracking companies to discriminate against people in new and subtle ways.
> But when they were on the open road, they spewed lethal quantities of toxic gas, killing people by the thousands.<p>I point this out because I was liking the argument until this point: He's off by a couple orders of magnitude, according to Wikipedia. Not enough for me to read it as absurd hyperbole, like calling Adam Smith a communist, but enough for me to stop reading the essay, look up his claim, and then feel like he's either misinformed or lying.