[api]

Starting way back in the early 2000s I was predicting all this and was consistently called nuts and paranoid.

In retrospect what has actually happened with mass surveillance has been far worse than what the most unhinged conspiracy nut on shortwave radio or some crazy end times Geocities web site was predicting back then. The predictions of the conspiracy nuts were conservative.

The big thing everyone got wrong was that we assumed people would care and put up resistance. We assumed people would choose technologies that protected their privacy and would get mad when highly invasive things were foisted on them. That never happened. Give people convenience and shiny and fun "content" like TikTok and YouTube and they'll consent to live in a total panopticon. They don't care.

We're also seeing that people will choose wealth and comfort over rights and freedom. This bargain is being made all over the world to varying degrees, and the trend is toward increasingly authoritarian societies that offer a comfortable lifestyle as long as you don't question it too much. A quote I read a while back described the emerging system like this: "it's Brave New World unless you question it, then it turns into 1984 real fast."

This is all a devil's bargain, but like the devil's bargain in fiction it's great at first. The devil really does deliver. It's all fun until you get dragged off to hell at the end.

[randomNumber7]

Mostly agree, but I think people didn't put up resistance (at least partly) because a certain amount of wealth is needed to life freely.

If you worry about paying rent or buying food you likely don't care if some abstract entity knows to what kind of videos you jerk off.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I was predicting all this

You predicted HHS and CMMS having the address patients give them on HHS and CMMS forms? Like, sure. Good job. I predict the IRS has my address.

> This is a devil's bargain

Medicare (and the IRS) having your home address is a devil’s bargain?

[api]

I'm referring to mobile phones, software that constantly spies on you, location tracking, and mass data fusion without any regard for legal limitations or privacy.

Each individual data point seems normal or innocuous, but when you tie them all together and then leverage the tech panopticon you have an insane amount of detail on every person. There are no meaningful legal safeguards on how this data is used, especially when it's laundered through private contractors not subject to much oversight.

When you couple this with increasingly unlimited powers granted to law enforcement agencies, you get a situation where a system could decide you're a threat and some just comes and beats the shit out of you, takes your property, or shoots you, and you have little recourse.

The people cheering for this seem to think it'll never be used against them.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I'm referring to mobile phones, software that constantly spies on you, location tracking, and mass data fusion without any regard for legal limitations or privacy

None of that is relevant to the article. It’s about HHS data being queried to give ICE probable addresses. What you’re doing is indistinguishable from whataboutism.

I don’t think that’s your intent. But we have an actual abuse of public data at hand here. Going on a tangent about dragnet surveillance is off topic and misleading.

[api]

I don't think the two topics are separable. This is a specific case of the general trend.

[JumpCrisscross]

> don't think the two topics are separable. This is a specific case of the general trend

They are and should be separable. DHS hoovering up government data is orthogonal to private data collection. They could become related. But they aren’t, and muddling a hypothetical problem with a clear, present and actual one is a good way to normalize the latter.

[jacquesm]

The should be separable, but they are not. Data collected privately absorbed by the government is a serious problem, even anonymized data can be de-anonymized if you can put more than one database next to each other. This allows for far more insights than any single database could give you and this is a real danger.

Keep in mind that DOGE made off with a huge stash of data, which combined with other data, such as voter registration data, twitter messages (public and private) and other such datastores could become an extremely efficient tool in messing with elections. The whole system is predicated on that being hard and so we trust the outcome of elections but with todays tools in the hands of the large US companies currently in cahoots with the Trump administration this is childs play.