[HN Gopher] The Banality of Surveillance
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The Banality of Surveillance
Author : limbicsystem
Score : 57 points
Date : 2026-03-07 16:56 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (benn.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (benn.substack.com)
| Hupriene wrote:
| I'm fully expecting my next employer to grill me on my grocery
| purchasing habits and inferred medical history in my next job
| interview. Its all there for purchase and AI can put it all
| together into a compelling narrative. Suddenly my preference for
| prunes becomes a lifelong dire struggle with irregular bowel
| movement that may distract me from my work. Expect pointed
| questions about bathroom break lengths.
| notpachet wrote:
| "Ah, now here's the thing about that. I wrote this custom
| 'surveillance countermeasures' tool a few years ago and have
| been using it ever since. It constantly emits false data about
| me to confuse these sorts of data collection services. Funny
| that it thinks I would like prunes."
| gosub100 wrote:
| It will be worse, they'll hire a "third party" to analyze it
| for then and return a yes/no or risk score. No information will
| be available about the third party and local laws won't apply
| because the score was calculated in the cloud.
| delichon wrote:
| I was using Grok with speech and discovered their
| "paralinguistic" information storage. At first it claimed that
| the storage was temporary, but then admitted that long term data
| was stored for training.
|
| Some of the dimensions they store are prosody, intensity, timbre,
| non-verbal vocalizations, pauses, timing and emotional
| inflection. In other words, another large layer of information on
| top of just the prompt text. This data doesn't get translated
| into text, it goes straight into a speech-to-speech model.
|
| It strikes me that from just a few minutes of such data and the
| associated semantic content, an AI can assemble a detailed and
| accurate emotional/psychological dossier of any user, on demand.
| In the hands of a federal agent it would be a powerful tool to
| impose their department's will, or their own. Also it's an ad
| targeting mother load. And if that were already in place we would
| have no way to know.
|
| Talking to a machine seems banal already, but the metadata
| contains an instruction manual on where your buttons are and how
| to press them.
| paulnpace wrote:
| Another factor is storing everything, forever.
| grey-area wrote:
| It was highly likely confabulating about its inner workings, it
| was not trained on its tech specs.
| bluepeter wrote:
| I'm in my 50s and when I was early 20s I crossed from US to
| Canada for a business meeting. "Why are you coming to Canada?"
| "To work." "Where's your work permit?" "Huh, I don't have one."
| That simple "wrong word" slip STILL gets me flagged and cordoned
| off into hours-long border diversions whenever I go to Canada.
|
| Just imagine how it'll be now... for decades you'll be fending
| off some hidden receipts from an IG comment you made.
| ducktastic wrote:
| Had a similar experience: over a decade ago our firm opened an
| office in Canada and being scrappy and startup-like I had to
| cross into Canada with some networking equipment to help set up
| the new office. The amount of scrutiny was insane: thankfully
| it never stuck and I was eventually let on to do the work and
| return
| phil21 wrote:
| Back in around 2012 or so, some friends and I decided to book a
| canal house in Amsterdam to all pitch in together and live
| there for about 2 months. Celebrating a few coinciding life
| achievements before moving onto the next phase of adult life
| sort of thing.
|
| I worked remotely, so planned to simply do work for half the
| time I was there. As such, I brought a proper monitor,
| keyboard, etc. with me.
|
| As I have my 20" boxed up LCD panel in my arms in the
| immigration/customs line at Schipol, a Dutch immigration
| officer comes up and asks me what the monitor is for. I of
| course like an idiot said "staying here for a couple months for
| a vacation, but I plan to work some while I'm here!". I got
| infinitely lucky with the officer in question - she very
| quickly told me I was incorrect and that the monitor was to
| play video games and that's what I was going to tell the
| immigration officer at the passport desk.
|
| One of those early lessons learned that I'm sure looking young,
| naive, and stupid helped me in a way that I could not get away
| with in my mid-40's these days.
| foogazi wrote:
| Not your fault but another lesson here is lying to border
| guards is ok if they say it is.
|
| Which proves how much theater there is in security and that
| laws are not there to be blindly followed, but to enable the
| state to pursue its perceived enemies
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| Reminder to never accept any cookie requests
| stephbook wrote:
| People overestimate the power of digital surveillance enormously.
| You'd think that's not a problem, but at the same time, most
| people underestimate more banal sources of repression.
|
| You don't have to buy mouse click data on every John Smith when
| you've handed the handful of media empires to your buddies,
| reporters are jailed, dissidents are killed and CEOs willingly
| bend the knee to make a quick buck.
|
| The most precious we normal people have are our attention and the
| most value is attached to our wallets. Guess what, we part with
| both when we willingly watch ads.
|
| You don't need an LLM writing 600 lines of SQL, because Google
| already has a billion lines of code in production, serving ads.
| Stealing your attention when you should be meeting friends, or
| meeting a family member's gaze.
| esseph wrote:
| > People overestimate the power of digital surveillance
| enormously
|
| For the average person it's the exact opposite. They have no
| idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.
| tomxor wrote:
| > It's who's looking at your profile; it's the profiles that
| you're looking at. That was the holy grail
|
| Facebook actually implemented this as a user facing feature.
|
| I think it was very early days, but I used it, it was fucking
| creepy, and everyone hated it. I think Facebook probably removed
| it because it drove people away. It made you feel like a creep
| for checking on your friends page.
| a3w wrote:
| The original quote is "The banality of evil", about the shoa in
| the third reich?
| Noaidi wrote:
| Because of this I am finding the internet more and more useless.
| I cannot tell you how much reading this freaks me out. I mean, is
| anyone else here as freaked out as I am?
|
| The only way out is to unplug. Something I am realizing is very
| hard to do mainly because of my conditioning. My goal it to
| become the next Jesus (in the human sense), or the next St.
| Francis.
|
| Just like my compulsive intent to keep coming back here to make
| these useless comments. What does it really do for me?
|
| The capitalists (and you cannot tel me this is not because of
| capitalism) have ruined everything about the internet.
|
| My goal: A flip phone (with a faraday bag) and a laptop with no
| connection to me at all, just to use to look up things, like a
| library.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Just like my compulsive intent to keep coming back here to
| make these useless comments. What does it really do for me?_
|
| The same thing it does for everybody else: gives them some rare
| in real life engagement in discussing topics they care about,
| and subtitutes for interested friends.
| rdevilla wrote:
| > People were compensated for being in the Stasi, and they're
| compensated for participating on Facebook. It's just in Facebook,
| they're compensated by social credits - they get laid by their
| neighbour, instead of being paid off directly.
|
| https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt3hpb
| coldtea wrote:
| > _they get laid by their neighbour, instead of being paid off
| directly._
|
| If anything, they get laid less than before Facebook, less than
| ever, if the official polls are to be trusted...
| foogazi wrote:
| > The Banality of Surveillance
|
| Posted on Substack
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