[whackedspinach]

Laws may help some, but I worry that as devices get smaller and computers are integrated into everything, they won't be able to protect us for long. Ubiquitous computing may (in the next decade or two) actually obsolete any expectation of privacy. We need to start acting as if every digital device nearby is reporting information about us, because most of those devices will soon have that capability.

In that case, I hope (1) is the outcome.

[dredmorbius]

Universal surveillance capability with strong and effective laws protecting privacy should help restore the balance of power.

If there's a presumption of surveillance, and an effective means to compel production of any electronic records, the you end up with an effect similar to that which some people have noted concerning reviewing social networking pages as part of hiring practices (either public-facing content or by the reprehensible practice of requesting passwords).

As several people have noted: sure, if you want to go there, you'll discover that I'm a member of X, Y, and Z lawfully protected groups in terms of discrimination. In which case the onus is then put on the employer (preponderance of evidence) to show that a discriminatory hiring decision wasn't made, to say nothing of legal costs in defending against same.

I'm not entirely sanguine that this be the case -- there's a lot that can go wrong with legal procedure and protections. But laws do matter and can help.

Simply because something is technically possible doesn't mean it must happen.

[username223]

You're hoping against both human nature and statistics. Even if 99% of people are decent, that 1% will still eventually screw you over for their own profit.

Maybe it will come to active countermeasures. For example, you could set your browser (fingerprint and all) to trawl through an invented web history to poison tracking databases. Running such a program would both screw with the trackers and give you plausible deniability. Tag other people's selfies with your name on "social" sites, and tag your own with several names.

[alexeisadeski3]

No, he's hoping that there are fewer opportunities for you to be screwed over for profit.

[giantrobothead]

Unfortunately, those opportunities appear to be as boundless as human stupidity.

[Silhouette]

Laws may help some, but I worry that as devices get smaller and computers are integrated into everything, they won't be able to protect us for long.

Sure they will. Laws help to protect us from all kinds of unwelcome behaviour despite there not being any direct physical intervention to prevent someone who is willing to accept the consequences from acting in that way. This is actually a particularly easy problem to solve.

For one thing, even if miniaturisation of the technology does make it hard to detect, someone still had to create it. That will require sophisticated and expensive manufacturing facilities for the foreseeable future.

Then in most cases it's going to be sold. That means money changing hands, and some form of advertising so vendors can be found by interested buyers.

Arguably the big new risk to privacy from modern technologies is the scale they can reach, uploading, correlating and redistributing vast quantities of data. That means someone has to store the database and provide access to it and probably charge money for that access.

Any of these aspects can be identified, challenged or restricted in law as a preventive mechanism. Moreover, doing so will typically be much easier than identifying someone walking down the street with covert surveillance equipment, which frankly is already widely available without trying very hard to find it, it's just not widely used.

The idea that mass surveillance and the demise of privacy are inevitable conflicts with reality. These things don't happen in isolation, and the people doing them have motivations for their behaviour, and you fight socially unacceptable behaviour that happens to invade privacy the same way you fight any other kind.