Digital Privacy vs Covert Data Collection and Surveillance
Digital Privacy vs Covert Data Collection and Surveillance
Freedom from covert data collection and surveillance is one of the fundamental prerequisites in protecting privacy in the age of AI.
Free flow of information and a right for the secrecy of one's messages and communication are part of the individual freedoms. Everyone has a right to expect privacy in their communications in a state governed by the rule of law. This includes liberty to share messages containing information about his thoughts, beliefs, opinions, intentions, private life, descriptions of events etc, only with those he himself chooses to do so. Messages, and the convictions they contain, must be protected both while the message is transmitted and when it is stored after being received.
Technological advancement has vastly increased the possibilities for messaging as well as for covert data collection and monitoring. Abuses of power are easy to come by, both by state authorities and corporate powers. Technology companies possess an increasing ability to record private communications as well as to covertly collect data and profile individuals, which can be even more successfully be carried out with the help of the developing artificial intelligence.
Freedom from covert data collection and surveillance is fundamental to maintaining individual freedoms in the 21st century, but global players are increasingly threatening these freedoms.
Communist China has invested aggressively in developing artificial intelligence in order to establish control mechanisms and applies large-scale monitoring technologies over its citizens. The red surveillance state is making a particular effort to follow everyone, together with a blacklist consisting of those who require particular attention, namely the dissidents. China's control mechanisms and technologies are increasingly spreading elsewhere as well, including the Western countries. For example, facial recognition technologies that are used in China to put in place comprehensive surveillance and behavioral engineering on a massive scale. China is a major driver of AI surveillance in the world, providing the technology to at least 63 countries and its company Huawei alone is responsible for providing AI surveillance technology to at least fifty countries worldwide. Already 64 countries worldwide are actively using facial recognition systems for surveillance purposes and democracies are not taking adequate steps to monitor and control the spread of sophisticated technologies linked to a range of violations.
In the West, disclosures of the last decades have exposed a wide-range of surveillance carried out by various authorities. Serious breaches of individual freedom have occurred, carried out by intelligence and security agencies that have covertly collected private data from millions of users. Big Tech corporations, in collaboration with intelligence agencies, have carried out covert data retrievals on private individuals that have been detected ex post just by chance or thanks to whistleblowers.
Such tendencies are accelerating hand-in-hand with the advancements of technology and specifically in view of possibilities offered by AI. Big Tech companies are trying to surround our lives more-and-more with technological gadgets which are promoted as making our lives more comfortable, easy and safe, while having the capacity to survey and of systematically collect data. Thousands of Low Earth Orbit satellites are launched into space to provide internet services to remote places on our planet and to cover the planet with a network of real-time digital connectivity, which can be used for different ends.
Recent history has shown that most of our privacy protection tools have been implemented too late, at a time when the breaches have already occured. To acknowledge such threats and worrisome tendencies first-hand and to disseminate such information is already a step towards protecting our private lives and our freedom of privacy better.