Spying and surveillance are different but related things.
If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did.
Putting someone under surveillance was expensive and time-consuming.
What was manual and individual has become bulk and mass.
Surveillance has become the business model of the internet, and there's no reasonable way for us to opt out of it.
Yes, spyware companies like NSO Group help the government hack into people's phones, but someone still has to sort through all the conversations.
Mass surveillance fundamentally changed the nature of surveillance.
Because all the data is saved, mass surveillance allows people to conduct surveillance backward in time, and without even knowing whom specifically you want to target.
Mass spying will change the nature of spying.
To uncover an organizational structure, look for someone who gives similar instructions to a group of people, then all the people they have relayed those instructions to.
This spying is not limited to conversations on our phones or computers.
Just as cameras everywhere fueled mass surveillance, microphones everywhere will fuel mass spying.
Knowing that they are under constant surveillance changes how people behave.
Surveillance facilitates social control, and spying will only make this worse.
Governments around the world already use mass surveillance; they will engage in mass spying as well.
Mass surveillance ushered in the era of personalized advertisements; mass spying will supercharge that industry.
The tech monopolies that are currently keeping us all under constant surveillance won't be able to resist collecting and using all of that data.
In the early days of Gmail, Google talked about using people's Gmail content to serve them personalized ads.
Maybe Google won't be the first to spy on its users' conversations, but once others start, they won't be able to resist.
We haven't done anything to limit mass surveillance.
This Cyber News was published on www.schneier.com. Publication date: Tue, 05 Dec 2023 12:43:05 +0000