| 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. |