Becoming (more) Afraid To Post Online

Endnotes

• The term "Artificial Intelligence" (or "AI") is misleading. There's no intelligence involved. "Machine Learning" suffers a similar fault. There is no consciousness that "learns".

  AI and Machine Learning tools are programs that run on computers. Just like any other software. They mainly differ in the size and scale at which they operate. Something that gives them the capability of producing results that feel like intelligence or learning is behind them even though there's not.

  There's more to be said about that, but it's the topic for another post.

• I'm mentioning AI/Machine Learning in this post specifically. It's important to point out that the U.S. Governement (among others) is already doing mass survailance. Check out the Wikipedia page on global surveillance disclosures and the Five Eyes contries for more about that.

  AI/Machine Learning systems are almost certinally being used along with simpiler algorithms for threat detection. What I'm pointing to is the possibility of a single loyalty or patriotism score. Something akin to a credit score, but used to decided what rights and freedoms you have.

• This post talks about online monitoring. The stuff you post on social media, etc... There's a lot of other sources being used to monitor us. For example:

  • Every web page you visit

    See: Web Analytics, Device Fingerprinting, and Web Beacons for examples. Tracking technologies are also built directly into browsers themselves (e.g. Google has the power to update Chrome to keep track of and report every page you visit)

  • Every email you read or write

    Whoever provides your email address has access to all your email. There's no way around this. Your email has to exist somewhere and the system is set up like having a box at post office where everything gets delivered. When you want to read your email, your device visits this virtual post office box and shows you what's there.

    A key difference is that sending email is more like sending a postcard than sending a letter. That is, anyone who helps deliver it or anyone at the post office can read it at any time. (Unlike a letter which wraps the contents in an envelope.)

    There are ways to wrap emails (via encryption) that make them more like letters in envelopes, but they virtually never get used.

  • Every app you open and what you do on them

    Browsing the web provides some limits around what data can be collected. It's a lot, but it's not quite everything because browser software only allows certain things to work. That's not the case with apps. They can track anything and everything you do in them. And, if you give them permission they can do things like track your location at all times.

    See Top Mobile App Analytics Tools (2024) for some details.

  • Everything that appears on your TV

    One of the grossest technologies I know of is Automatic content recognition. It's embedded in Smart TVs and monitors and reports on everything that shows up on the screen or is heard by a microphone.

  • Everything you do on a computer

    Microsoft recently introduced a feature called "Recall" that give you the ability "to quickly find and jump back into what you have seen before on your PC". It does this by recording your screen every few seconds and analysing what it sees with AI algorithms.

    Computers have always had the power to spy on what you do with them but not Microsoft is actively announcing that they are recording you. There's some benefits to this and right now it's optional, but over time the ability to it to make money by selling the data are inevitable.

  • Every place your phone goes

    Both Google and Apple offer "Find My Phone" type services. This is to say nothing of the other ways your phone can be tracked. See: Electronic Frontier Foundation - Mobile Phone Location Tracking for more info.

  • And more

    See the Electronic Frontier Foundation Atlas of Surveillance for more details. It's "a database of surveillance technologies deployed by law enforcement in communities across the United States" and covers drones, body-worn cameras, automated license plate readers, facial recognition, and more.

  Some of these sources started out mostly being used by the advertising industry to try to better target us with ads. Increasingly, there are "data brokers" that are collecting and packaging them up to sell not only to advertisters, but to government agencies.

• If I could coin a word for all this surveillance it would be:

  digopticon

  A portmanteau for a digital panopticon.