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Current State of Electronic Surveillance and Influence


Altherion

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We've discussed a few aspects of this in other threads (e.g. the data mining of Facebook in US Politics or the privacy implications of having an internet connected microphone in the smart speaker thread), but there hasn't been a dedicated thread for what I think is a fairly interesting and fast-moving topic. As electronics improves, it becomes easier and easier to keep track of everyone and perhaps even influence them -- for the former, one need not even be a government or giant corporation anymore. Here are a trio of articles with examples.

First, if you understand how your cell phone works, you know that the towers which provide it service can also locate it with a precision of order half a kilometer or so in urban areas. This is an inevitable consequence of how the network works and not nefarious in and of itself... but it does raise the question of who can access this location information. It turns out that in the US, almost anyone:

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LocationSmart, as the service is known, identifies the locations of phones connected to AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, or Verizon, often to an accuracy of a few hundred yards, reporter Brian Krebs said. While the firm claims it provides the location lookup service only for legitimate and authorized purposes, Krebs reported that a demo tool on the LocationSmart website could be used by just about anyone to surreptitiously track the real-time whereabouts of just about anyone else.

Lest you think ubiquitous surveillance is limited to the US, here's a Guardian article about workplace monitoring in the UK. Right now, different corporations are trying out different things depending on the role of the employee, but the most useful of these will eventually become commonplace.

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There are tech companies selling products that can take regular screenshots of employees’ work, monitor keystrokes and web usage, and even photograph them at their desks using their computers’ webcams. Working from home offers no protection, as all this can be done remotely. Software can monitor social media usage, analyse language or be installed on employees’ phones to monitor encrypted apps such as WhatsApp. Employees can be fitted with badges that not only track their location, but also monitor their tone of voice, how often they speak in meetings and who they speak to and for how long.

The last (and in my opinion the most interesting of the lot) is the logical extension of all of this surveillance. This requires one to already have a great deal of information as well as cutting edge hardware and software so it is not surprising that it comes from our benevolent search overlords. Having mastered data collection, Google is now trying to think of a good way to put this data to use:

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“User-centered design principles have dominated the world of computing for many decades, but what if we looked at things a little differently? What if the ledger could be given a volition or purpose rather than simply acting as a historical reference? What if we focused on creating a richer ledger by introducing more sources of information? What if we thought of ourselves not as the owners of this information, but as custodians, transient carriers, or caretakers?”

...

Foster envisions a future where “the notion of a goal-driven ledger becomes more palatable” and “suggestions may be converted not by the user but by the ledger itself.” This is where the Black Mirror undertones come to the fore, with the ledger actively seeking to fill gaps in its knowledge and even selecting data-harvesting products to buy that it thinks may appeal to the user. The example given in the video is a bathroom scale because the ledger doesn’t yet know how much its user weighs. The video then takes a further turn toward anxiety-inducing sci-fi, imagining that the ledger may become so astute as to propose and 3D-print its own designs.

Of course, most of this is speculative at the moment and the article includes a disclaimer by Google which claims this is a thought experiment unrelated to any current or future product, but a lot of social media tools try to get the user to disclose as much information as possible and so do large corporations like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. We're not at the point where products can autonomously fill in the gaps or manipulate us; there still has to be a human somewhere in the background... but we're getting there.

Does anyone have other examples or opinions on these?

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