OTOH maybe we shouldn't make it too easy for them by giving in without any resistance whatsoever. Fight this to delay or derail the next thing which will be even more.
It’s not like we chose. Cameras and transistors are just absurdly cheap and have millions of other purposes. So we’d have to shut down tons of other useful functions to change it.
Just like dna sampling will one day be so cheap that air conditioners test for every person and every germ they see. It will be so cheap as hard to stop. I guess we can resist digital stuff making dna cheaper. But we’ll have to stop all the other benefits (real time, targeted anti-virals, etc).
> So we’d have to shut down tons of other useful functions to change it.
What? No. The problem with this stuff is the privacy-invasion aspect.
For example, ubiquitous camera installations in public spaces and businesses are 100% fine if they're truly closed-circuit systems that have no storage capability. If all these cameras offer is tele-vision, then there's no privacy problem.
So, if this sort of stuff was guaranteed to be used for a purpose that's beneficial to individual clients and the public at large (rather than scraping up pennies by selling the recordings to data brokers and data analysis firms), there'd be no problem at all.
The solution becomes clear: make video, audio, still image, biometric, and behavioral data toxic waste.
* If a company ever uses such data in any way that's not clearly and conspicuously disclosed in plain English to their clients, fire every executive member of that company and permanently bar each of them from holding any executive or management position ever again.
* If a company ever sends any payment (whether monetary, or in goods and/or services rendered) to a company that is (or owns) a data broker, customer/consumer data analysis firm, or similar, then that company is considered to have engaged the services of said company and presumed to be sending the data of their clients to said company. Fire every executive member of that company and permanently bar each of them from holding any executive or management position ever again.
> The solution becomes clear: make video, audio, still image, biometric, and behavioral data toxic waste.
This doesn’t seem realistic to me because those data are useful for so many valid purposes and the tech is ubiquitous. So we’d have to regulate and it would be expensive and futile.
Your solutions are difficult to enforce (eg, “fire every executive” doesn’t work even in things like Enron or mine disasters).
Seriously, regulations and laws are how you get companies to act against their own best interests.
> (eg, “fire every executive” doesn’t work even in things like Enron or mine disasters).
You seem to have forgotten the second part of the punishment. I'll quote the punishment again:
> [F]ire every executive member of that company and permanently bar each of them from holding any executive or management position ever again.
I don't remember any Enron executive being barred from holding any executive or management position ever again. Do you?
> Your solutions are difficult to enforce...
Oh? Someone comes to the relevant regulator, or Federal law enforcement with evidence of this crime happening. By law, FedGov will be obligated to investigate. Either they corroborate the evidence and deliver the punishment, or they do not and they do nothing.
This punishment is so extreme that you will only have to catch a few companies to prevent nearly everyone else from breaking this law. (After all, what executive team would risk decades of each of them getting a seven-to-eight-figure salary just so that a couple of them can get a one-off bonus one or two orders of magnitude smaller?)
There are all sorts of things that are cheap and easy, but society considers so dangerous that they are restricted by law. That doesn't stop all ne'er-do-wells, of course, but it stops most.
