For a safer world, it seems that we have to give up some personal privacy. Sometimes we willingly do so, but often we don’t even know the extent to which our privacy has been compromised.
Through social media such as Facebook, we willingly, although usually unwittingly, share a lot of information about ourselves. Any single Facebook post does not seem to compromise our privacy very much, but now there are AI bots / algorithms that skim off so much info that an eerily accurate profile can be constructed about each of us. Twenty years ago in the UK, which was one of the first countries to extensively use CCTV cameras, there were very passionate debates about loss of privacy over the use of CCTV. Cries of 1984, here we come, and many other alarmist scenarios dominated the news. But over time, the public learned that there were good safeguards in place so the CCTV footage was not abused and that the presence of CCTV cameras actually decreased crime where they were deployed. Today UK citizens are the most CCTV tracked people in the world. And yet, the British are petitioning their local and regional governments to install even more CCTV cameras in an effort the reduce crime further. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US, we unknowingly lost a lot of our privacy when much more of our personal communications were monitored by the NSA and similar government organizations around the world. We did not learn about the extent of this until Snowden leaked shocking details about the NSA. There will never be a zero risk scenario, but there must be ways of substantially reducing crime and terrorism to create a safer world. Well, there is. In an open and public process, we could agree upon safeguards and track everything everyone does - phone, email, social media, location, CCTV, banking, etc. The technology exists today to do much if not all of this automatically such that humans would never see the encrypted information unless flagged by AI bots / algorithms. Of course, this will not happen, for cries and protests of outrage will overwhelm any government trying to implement such a plan. To be sure, it is only a matter of time before terrorists will escalate their attacks to kill thousands, maybe even millions. When that happens (and it is when, not if it happens), you can bet we will lose a lot more privacy and very likely will not even be aware of it. We will not participate in setting up safeguards. We will not know how this information will be used. We seem to be stuck between these two unsatisfactory realities. But perhaps there is a way avoid these two extremes. There could be a way to ease into greater surveillance and avoid clandestine loss of privacy. The result could be a much safer world in the future. What if anyone convicted of a crime is automatically subjected to tracking as described above? It automatically becomes part of the punishment of any crime. There are several benefits to this approach:
Controversial, for sure, but perhaps better than unknowingly losing our privacy in knee jerk spasms with every gruesome crime or terrorist attack.
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