Everyone talks about how powerful surveillance is, but is it actually easier to surveil people than it is for people to maintain their privacy? Or does privacy have some inherent advantages that make it more resilient than we think?
From what I understand, you are asking what advantages privacy has, which surveillance doesn’t have. They are kinda opposites, the more surveillance you have, the less privacy you get. Definition of privacy.
Why Privacy is Important
So what you get from privacy, that you can not get from surveillance, is a safer environment for whistleblowers, journalists, minorities, and political activists. If employers could keep an eye on all employees all the time, even out of work, malpractices and other lawbreaking activities. Journalist and/or political activists are always in the crossfire of political violence, think about all journalists imprisoned in Belarus for example. Belarus Lukashenko Crackdown Journalists. Surveillance can be used to discriminate against minorities.
Why Surveillance is a Dangerous Tool
What you get from surveillance, is a stronger state. The problem is that, while whomever hold the power now might be benevolent, the next person might not be. Giving such a powerful tool, to a select few, never ends well. Power attracts evil, and power corrupts good. The reason surveillance should be locked behind court orders, is that we need checks and balances to this tool. If one person abuses it, others will take notice and correct the wrongdoing. Surveillance is still good for crime fighting and public safety. But. There is a stark contrast between surveilling a plaza, shopping mall, or museum, than it is to surveil a home, surveilling of distinct groups, or voting ballots. One thing is for the benefit of society, and one is not. One makes a place safer, one does not.
Surveillance is a tool, and like all tools, it can be used for good and evil. The way it has been used in recent times, is a misuse of it. Which is why we need privacy laws, protecting us from this misuse, so those who do misuse it, are punished for it.
I hope this answer satisfies you. I suggest you rephrase your post, as it is kinda hard to understand anything from it.
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What I’m really talking about is how the two are enforced, but yeah. That’s what I thought
You’re asking what is easier to realize, attack (surveillance) or defense (privacy), am I right?
Um, kinda?
Sorry for my awkward English
I think you’re wondering about the actual difficulty of implementing mass surveillance vs maintaining privacy in practice, not just the philosophical merits of each.
How is this rephrasing?
“Everyone talks about how powerful surveillance is, but is it actually easier to surveil people than it is for people to maintain their privacy? Or does privacy have some inherent advantages that make it more resilient than we think?”
Like in practice, implementing comprehensive surveillance is technically difficult and expensive, but it’s incredibly effective because most people don’t resist it. Meanwhile, achieving strong privacy is technically easier than breaking it, but requires active effort that most people won’t make.
Is that the right track?
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This discussion is wired. It starts with the the basic terms, “privacy” and “surveillance”. Those are extremely open to interpretation.
Privacy in the broadest sense is the ability to control how much information about you can be accessed by whom. But that’s very abstract and practical privacy is always very situational.
Surveillance is also very vague. There is the directionless mass surveillance / data collection done by the tech industry and government agencies, which is just building potential for abuse. That abuse could be getting rich with scams on a massive scale, … hem … I mean scalable modern data driven business models. It could also be modeling the political landscape to undermine democracy or harming any group of people.
There is also very targeted surveillance, like it’s done during a police investigation. That can be the good kind of surveillance, which mostly depends on who the target and what the purpose is. A corrupt politician surveying members of the press is bad. Police surveying a known drug dealer to get to the sources is actually a very good kind of surveillance that helps society.
So working with such broad terms (surveillance and privacy) is really going nowhere. For productive discussion you have to work with more specifics. What is harder to implement also depends heavily on who you are and what you actually want to achieve.
Regarding surveillance it’s also important who your target is and what information you want.
Privacy can’t be implemented, it an be protected. You implement strategies to protect it and more often than not to not unwittingly loose it to ever present mass surveillance systems build into the modern tech infrastructure.
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Yes, that’s what I meant! Thank you
I’ll edit it to make it clearer