I’m ambivalent about starting this thread, since so much telemetry already is collected about each of us that it is hard to know what truly is a meaningful change in surveillance. Nonetheless, I thought one of the new features from the latest Microsoft Edge update (v137) was noteworthy:
Introducing Copilot Vision
Browse alongside your Al companion. Copilot will see what you see and give you real-time, personalized responses.
You need to be signed into Copilot for Copilot Vision to be activated, but I wonder how many people end up being signed into Copilot without fully realizing what that means.
Indeed. Not too long ago, tools like Copilot Vision would have been considered outrageous spyware by many of us. Now they’re features included by default to feed the AIs’ appetites. How long before we can no longer turn them off except by turning off every computer, smartwatch, smartphone, smart tv, and digital device in our homes?
At least we can still turn them off.* Max Headroom in 1987 featured a world where TV networks ruled the world and physical TVs could not be turned off. The protagonist, Edison Carter, would throw a blanket over his.
The question is, what is the percentage of that “many”? AI tools become radically more capable when they have more context to work from, so we end up in the same spot as with social media.
Social media, particularly platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, and TikTok, are major players in the world of surveillance capitalism, and despite many of us eschewing them, they are clearly not going away. Most people seem to believe that the potential for privacy abuse is either minimal or outweighed by the benefits they receive from these services. AI may provide similar or greater benefits.
Apple emphasizes that Apple Intelligence stores all this personal context on-device, but since Apple Intelligence isn’t particularly useful, we haven’t been able to gauge whether people perceive it as a significant benefit or if, like with social media, they basically don’t care.
Or, that the cat is so far out of the bag that it’s pointless to worry about it anymore. All your information has already been gobbled up by ’surveillance capitalism.’
When we deal with social media and other digital services, we have to decide whether or not we can trust them to provide the services we want without charging more than we are willing to pay or otherwise cheating us. If an online seller does not deliver the products they claim to offer, most buyers won’t go back. Most of us will try new services from time to time, but if they don’t deliver what they promised or harass us in some way – e.g. robocalls or excessive sales spam – we will stop dealing with them. Amazon gave me a good deal as a third-party seller of books in its early days, but after they slashed the commissions and added restrictions that cost and money, I abandoned third-party sales. People will stop watching video services that give them more advertising than they can tolerate. If AI doesn’t do what you need and you have to pay for it, you will stop using it and go elsewhere.
My bet is that most people today don’t care or notice enough to contemplate the balance between the costs/abuses and the benefits. I think there still is a small chance that we’ll see some degree of popular resistance to AI intrusiveness, but I also see how quickly the tech world is pushing the idea of putting “AI natives” in charge of, well, everything. It makes my earlier brooding about the text messaging (and social media) seem downright quaint.
This, although I would also have said that most people have given up trying to tell who the abusers are (or never cared). I think this is a rephrasing of @jaclay’s comment, “the cat is so far out of the bag that it’s pointless to worry about it anymore.”
Much as I support the idea of digital privacy, it does seem like, as @jaclay says, the cat is out of the bag, the horse has left the barn, the genie is out of the bottle, that ship has sailed, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, and that bell can’t be unrung.
That doesn’t mean we should give up on the concept, but perhaps it would be more effective to focus on the scenarios—like location tracking—where it’s all abuse with no upside.
In Dia, I selected your question and asked in the sidebar, “Where does this come from?” and got this:
The phrase “cat out of the bag” likely comes from old market scams in England involving pigs and sacks.
The expression “let the cat out of the bag” is believed to have originated in English marketplaces during the 18th century. The most widely accepted theory is that it refers to a type of fraud known as the “pig in a poke” scam. In this con, a dishonest seller would offer a customer a piglet in a sack (a “poke”), but instead of a pig, the sack would contain a cat. If the buyer opened the bag before leaving, the cat would be revealed, exposing the deception. Thus, “letting the cat out of the bag” came to mean revealing a secret or exposing a hidden truth.
The phrase appears in print as early as the mid-1700s, and while some debate exists about whether this is the true origin, the connection to market trickery is the most commonly cited explanation among etymologists and language historians.
When I tried the same thing in Microsoft Edge’s Copilot sidebar, I had to ask the full question, since it couldn’t tell what I had selected.
I’ve been meaning to pull my copy of science fiction author David Brin’s 1998 non-fiction book, The Transparent Society, from my bookshelf and reread it. My recollection of its arguments is that the death of privacy was inevitable and that we should get used to that being the case. At the time, I thought that his predictions were deeply uncomfortable but likely correct. An unusually prescient work, it seems.
Thanks! It’s interesting how the idioms here are a mix of stuff that makes intrinsic sense to us (toothpaste comes in tubes) and stuff that doesn’t (cats in bags).
Yeah, I was surprised, honestly. I thought it might have to do with the Puss in Boots story or something like that, but didn’t expect market fraudery involving piglets. (A cat and a piglet would seem very different to me, even inside a bag, and you would assume anyone buying a piglet back then would be even more familiar.)
Some idioms must fade away, though the fact that all of these are still understandable shows their staying power. How long will something repetitive be a broken record, for instance?
I was very surprised to hear my neighbor’s teenager talk about “dropping a dime” on someone recently. The kid had no idea where the expression came from.
I’d also say that until the last few years, it seemed like private companies were the biggest threat to privacy but now partnerships between public and private sector organizations (see: NSO Group) are what’s driving both targeted and widespread surveillance.
Just to troll a little bit, I am not shocked at the “death of privacy” but that we had any in the first place. I can’t imagine our distant ancestors who lived in tribes/villages had any real privacy at all. Everybody knew everybody else’s business. What you ate, what you did with your wealth, who you talked to, where you went, your state of health. If you were a stranger, everyone knew it and tracked you. If we employ the same communication methods today that they did (private paid curriers, meet in person in our homes, live as a hermit, etc.) we still can have that level of privacy. Only when cities became big enough that we didn’t know everyone that some level of anonymity existed. Even then, I am sure people talked in their circles about the people and issues that they encountered. Our use of intermediary technologies for convenience is sort of putting us back (at scale) to where we were before. Perhaps we trusted those we knew more with our info than the stranger but that trust didn’t always work out.
True, but I think the difference between then and now is reciprocity and proximity of consequences.
It’s one thing when the person in the next hut knows everything about you, you know everything about them, and both of you are bound by shared local culture and roughly equal consequences for transgressions. (That’s not at all meant to suggest the existence of a universally just or utopian tribal community, of course.)
It’s a different thing entireley when the entity you are up against is a government or a corporation with orders of magnitude greater knowledge, resources, and power than you have.
In other words, while privacy itself may or may not be a fundamental value worthy of protection, the likelihood and consequences of the abuse of privacy are matters of serious concern.
“Digital privacy” in the context of bots gobbling up the entire web to train LLM models that is likely true. But in the context of which company gets to sell my personal information to what other entity and what say I have in the matter, I would beg to differ. While we in the US have very few legal protections to that effect, (granted, some states do offer somewhat better protection), there are other countries that take an entirely different stance and actually dare to regulate what kind of use and value can be extracted from personal data of a customer, patient, or consumer. Maybe we here have given up on that, but plenty of other places seem to be willing to die on that hill. I’d wish we’d at least consider every once in a while glancing up from our valley toward their hill.
I agree 100%—the US could use much more regulation when it comes to collecting and selling personal information without consent or recompense. I don’t see that happening anytime soon, though, unless the availability of their private information starts to cause problems for those in power. Not that I’m suggesting anything, of course.
