"As long as data is not de-aggregated and de-anonymized there is no issue here"
Awfully hopeful there.
"The other political statements and comparisons he makes, well are unrelated and sincerely looks like political propaganda to me."
I would say the same about your assertions of innocence and presumption that the data can not be de-anonymized. If the "propaganda" is supporting user privacy I'd say you're on the wrong side of this discussion.
Some weird narcissism you're selling to convince people they shouldn't care about privacy. Immediately refuted by everyone's real world experience with visible privacy violations.
I'm not selling anything. I don't think my point was refuted. I think it was verified by how many people (including myself) just gave a random website camera access and let it scan our faces.
Your point isn't verified because it can be explained by other reasons (curiosity about its effectiveness seems likely, especially given the nature of this community).
The effect you describe is certainly real, but you only have to look at the present reality to see just how far it extends. In modern society, people are mostly not comfortable sharing their intimate thoughts with random service workers. And that's with individual humans, with faceless machine networks the tolerance might be lower.
"If surveillance helped me meet my customer demands better, then by all means, watch me like a hawk. If it's just there as automated paperwork for the project manager then buzz off."
This is the primary problem. Managers exist because they're supposed to know the business and manage projects. Normalizing surveillance across society in the name of efficiency or profit is already sending us down a dark path.
I guess we'll have to legislate privacy and jail anyone violating it.
And this is how fascism spreads. Thanks EstoniaTechLead for trying to seduce people into giving up their morality.
These are bad actions but for "the greater good"? You don't get to have it both ways. Protecting yourself without torturing people is 100% feasible and your argument should only be heard in a war crimes tribunal from the defendant'a lawyer to ease their sentence.
Morality isn't hard, but the implementation can be.
Simple: disparate group of elites that realized monarchy has too many pitfalls and so they worked to create a better system where no one group could so easily dominate the others.
The war itself went well due to the huge geographic separation and the support from countries that wanted to end British dominance. Local governments were already in place, nothing local was "burnt down" except the British tax assayers office, roughly speaking.
I don't disagree, but that somewhat kicks the ball down the road: why didn't a similar disparate group of elites do something similar in France, or any of the other myriad instances of failed revolution? (As an ignorant layperson, I'm sure there are revolutions in recent history that successfully cloned the separation-of-powers model, but there have still been countless revolutions in the past two centuries that skewed authoritarian rapidly, whether or not they wore democratic costumes.)
And the obvious corollary that motivates the question: if one wanted to maximize the odds of a positive outcome to the next revolution (independently of whether one thinks that's a good thing), what ideas/technologies/institutions/etc would we want to promote or enact now, either from within the revolution itself, or in the surrounding cultural ecosystem?
Or possibly advanced civilizations had the same realization that many scifi authors have had about such probes. Something goes wrong and they cause widespread destruction. Or they work fine but still end up causing widespread destruction simply by replicating.
This argument is tired. We can maintain 1st world living conditions while drastically reducing emissions. Throw away consumerism is literally a toxic force on the planet, but the wealthy do not want to disrupt their income streams and "gamble" their fortunes on reinvestment or environmental rehabilitation. Your argument is akin to "why don't you donate all your money" when someone says the rich should be taxed more heavily.
Of course it is, he is embarassing their biggest competitor and ripping the band-aid off the gaping wound the US likes to call "freedom."
Why mess with the golden goose? They just let Snowden do his thing, he doesn't have any useful intel for them as they are running the same types of programs.
You are correct that if Russia didn't like what he is saying he'd be in detention. They really like how he embarasses US.
Awfully hopeful there.
"The other political statements and comparisons he makes, well are unrelated and sincerely looks like political propaganda to me."
I would say the same about your assertions of innocence and presumption that the data can not be de-anonymized. If the "propaganda" is supporting user privacy I'd say you're on the wrong side of this discussion.