How AI and Surveillance Capitalism Are Undermining Democracy

Noise-drowning only works against profiling that's set up with intent to measure you, rather than punish you.

I'm afraid, in autocracies and dictatorships, it takes one "me" profile (that could be not even mine) that said something out of current goodthink to be persecuted. Just look at what's going on in Russia.

The key point of those "we'll be using AI to monitor everything you publish" announcements is not in even it its directly stated goal. It's in the chilling effects this creates, making people avoid expressing their opinions except for unquestionably safe ones.

1) A number of actors can (and do) make exceptions to the law for anyone and everyone they want. These actors include all member governments and a few others, like ChatControl's Europol, and the EU commission.

2) Individuals do not have standing to sue under these laws. Only executive governments do. If AI is used against you, or your privacy is violated, you get to beg the government to sue (not even any parliament or court, the executive, ie. "the minister"). You can also not get damages or injunctions under these laws.

3) the penalties if you get convicted are absurdly large, right from the first offense. Large enough to destroy most companies in one go. It's "death penalty for wrongly tied shoelaces" approach, very selectively enforced.

This is why you're seeing the behavior in the market in the EU that you're seeing now. A bunch of actors have the protection of the government, and just violate these laws on an incredible scale. On the other hand, these laws are being used as weapons against, for example, the FANG companies. And everyone else is scared.

Governments in the EU (and ...) can and do use mass surveillance for, frankly, stupid purposes (recently I noticed parking tickets in a bunch of regions of Prague work by using mass surveillance to get license plates with many cameras through AI. And while I admire the technical part of it ...)

So AI is regulated in the EU, in the sense that nobody in the EU gets to use it against a state's wish. This has been done incredibly heavy handed. From the perspective of citizens however, it is effectively not regulated. You are being face recognized in all large cities. All license plates are being scanned with overviews of who is where, live reporting on cellphone activities for how people coordinating (as in which phone app they're using for this protest, whatsapp or signal?) available to the police live. Your medical data is being scanned by insurance to deny coverage (because that's an allowed exception), or for example, to direct youth services to your kids if you get psychological treatment. Any psychological treatments are available to the major and judges in cases of either family court or to declare you legally incompetent or ...

Since it's not integrated across countries you can, for the moment, escape this by getting treatment in a neighboring country and paying cash. You see, EU governments don't trust each other so they only share data in specific cases, which have to be approved in most situations (funny how governments don't trust anyone else, not even their closest allies, with this data)

Because if figure out what is done with this data, who has access to it, people would never agree to that. For example, youth services uses data on medical treatments people in families receive to find kids to "protect" (ie. abduct). Medical data is also shared with nationalized insurance and hospitals to deny treatments "if it's your own fault" (e.g. find past drug tests in case of organ transplants)

Btw: if you're in the EU, remember, in almost all cases you can refuse a drug test, or any test, and for the love of god, in all cases you want to refuse this. First: the fact that you had a drug test for any reason will be used against you. Second: if for whatever reason it's positive and you need a new heart 20 years later ... best of luck.

The way you know it's gone pretty far is that mass surveillance + AI is being used for parking tickets. How far down the priority list is that?

Imho, these are things people would never agree to if the choice was clearly presented in parliament. No way. And that's in democracies.