Google already knows just about everything one can know about us on the internet. And if you use Google Maps or Android, they already know a lot about how you move through the real world... where you live, where you work, where you shop, who your friends and family are.
Adding in a network of vehicles that are always "patrolling" the streets of every city, covered with sensors, driving us all around... It's a dataset that's any twentieth-century dictator's dream come true.
That’s what I am thinking too. Together with devices that listen to what’s said in every home, services that track your every move on the internet and the real world, automated facial recognition and the ability to read all your communication the capabilities we have now would make the Nazis, Stalin or the Ingsoc party if “1984” very envious. They could only dream of having this.
Google even buys credit card transaction data so they have info on you even without a google account.
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> The idea of the captured city requires an adversarial view of a city’s inhabitants
Maybe by definition, but consider the Peelian Principles : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles
> The Peelian principles summarise the ideas that Sir Robert Peel developed to define an ethical police force. The approach expressed in these principles is commonly known as policing by consent ...
> In this model of policing, police officers are regarded as citizens in uniform. They exercise their powers to police their fellow citizens with the implicit consent of those fellow citizens. "Policing by consent" indicates that the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.
I think that these systems are more-or-less inevitable (they're happening already) and the big problem is making them self-reflexive: if we can police ourselves we can at least have a kinder, gentler tyranny of Mrs. Grundy.
I don't think we have police by consent in America and I don't see how the idea applies to surveillance.
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As for specific ways the idea applies to surveillance, I can only speculate. The essence would be that everyone is equally under the microscope including law enforcement officers and administration.
"Do you approve or disapprove of the way the police in the United States are doing their job?"
65% say yes, vs 26% no. https://www.pollingreport.com/crime.htm
