Yes, the cameras are all around, but no, they aren’t spying on you, why should they?
How can you ever be sure of that, though?
Devices get hacked.
The manufacturers of devices sell out, with or without being transparent about it.
Data hoarders grab more data than they should or they have the device owner's informed consent to take.
These things happen all the time, with everything from photos and videos and audio, to location information, via address books and "private" messages. As a third party who is not the device's maker or owner, you have little if any say about any of it. However, the combination of many devices capable of observing you and associating audio/video data with other information about you and the potential dangers created when this is done at scale in a highly asymmetric situation is enough to all but annihilate privacy, and more importantly, the underlying reasons we have come to value privacy in the past.
I guess we could get rid of all the cameras and have everyone walk around with blind folds so they can respect everyone else’s privacy from being seen, but it seems like a net negative in my book.
There is a vast, qualitative difference between someone casually walking past you in the street where the two of you see each other but pay little attention and move on, or even catching you incidentally in a photo taken for personal reasons and not shared, and the systematic, widespread acquisition of huge data sets drawn from multiple sources with or without the data subject's informed consent or even knowledge to be stored indefinitely in an automatically searchable format and then used for purposes unknown by parties unknown with consequences unknown to the data subject.
How can you ever be sure of that, though?
Devices get hacked.
The manufacturers of devices sell out, with or without being transparent about it.
Data hoarders grab more data than they should or they have the device owner's informed consent to take.
These things happen all the time, with everything from photos and videos and audio, to location information, via address books and "private" messages. As a third party who is not the device's maker or owner, you have little if any say about any of it. However, the combination of many devices capable of observing you and associating audio/video data with other information about you and the potential dangers created when this is done at scale in a highly asymmetric situation is enough to all but annihilate privacy, and more importantly, the underlying reasons we have come to value privacy in the past.
I guess we could get rid of all the cameras and have everyone walk around with blind folds so they can respect everyone else’s privacy from being seen, but it seems like a net negative in my book.
There is a vast, qualitative difference between someone casually walking past you in the street where the two of you see each other but pay little attention and move on, or even catching you incidentally in a photo taken for personal reasons and not shared, and the systematic, widespread acquisition of huge data sets drawn from multiple sources with or without the data subject's informed consent or even knowledge to be stored indefinitely in an automatically searchable format and then used for purposes unknown by parties unknown with consequences unknown to the data subject.