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by maximente 1913 days ago
there are also eg privacy advocates who may now be able to wear masks without too much hassle for the foreseeable future to defeat mass surveillance.

for example, pre pandemic, police in Berlin would absolutely stop and harass anyone wearing a mask in a U station/train; that'd be extremely awkward going forward, at least for a little bit.
1 comments
Mediterraneo10 1913 days ago
Masks don’t help for privacy, and already privacy advocates are becoming aware of this. The extensive networks of surveillance cameras in e.g. Russia and China are now able to identify people wearing masks – this was recently used in Moscow to go to the homes of masked demonstrators a couple of days after the protests and arrest them there, for example.

Modern surveillance software can draw on things like gait analysis, the person’s mobile phone’s IMEI, and tracing people’s movements around the city in order to identify people even if they are masked.

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maximente 1913 days ago
> Masks don’t help for privacy

alrighty then. glad that's cleared up.

seriously, what's up with this binary thinking where there's just no room for nuance whatsoever? "no, patching systems isn't effective, because unknown 0 days exist, so it doesn't help."

how about - bear with me - wearing a mask is merely /one/ component of not being mass surveilled, and is part of several layers, each one of which is clearly helpful although each one independently may not solve the problem entirely?

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Mediterraneo10 1913 days ago
The problem is that modern surveillance tech has imposed so many layers that observing them all isn’t realistic for even the most privacy-conscious people: you not only have to wear a mask, you have to change your gait, you can’t carry around a mobile phone, you have to somehow elude cameras being able to track you from wherever you started off that morning (i.e. likely your home) etc. So what is the point of being happy that you can now wear a mask in public?

Public surveillance isn’t like, say, private communications where a person still has the option to install Signal and keep their conversations relatively private. Preventing the authorities from recognizing you in public is already a lost battle.

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