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I think part of the issue, for me anyway, is just how much of my data is out there and how useful it is. And it turns out to be not only nearly impossible to protect your data from leaking with or without a warrant, but absolutely impossible to remove information once it’s in the wild.
If I go into your house, warrent or not, I’m bound to only the things in that location to get Information on your life. I might rifle through the papers on your desk, and maybe find out some things. But it’s limited in scope and it’s not going farther than those bits of data that are available in that house. Give me access to your data and I can know pretty much literally everything about you. I have your location, the websites you visit, the apps you use, your contact list — and that’s just from your internet service provider. Get your credit card information, and I know every purchase you’ve made. The scope is worlds apart.
The other thing is the permanent nature of the databases that the governments can build off the data. Once they have it, storage capacity is the only limit to the size and detail of the profile built. And this presents a problem that really needs addressing— if the cops get a warrent on me today, how far back can they dig and how far forward? How long can they keep this data? What can they do with these dossiers once they have them?
For most people, I think the danger is probably overblown. Most of us aren’t that interesting. But there are people who would absolutely be harmed by public databases being available. Back doors for cops can easily be weaponized by bad actors to track down escaping domestic abuse victims, for example. Governments can use these databases to track dissenters or in extreme cases to enable genocide. If the government decided in 2357 that it wanted to kill Hispanics, your phone and the data it collected and continues to collect would turn you in rather quickly. You had your phone in your pocket when you went to the Hispanic church up the road. You have a Spanish keyboard on your phone. You follow Hispanic topics on social media. It doesn’t take a lot of work to query a database with markers for membership in the wrong demographic group.
These databases already exist and have more than enough information to carry out any kind of genocide you'd like. Society couldn't possibly work without them. This was true 100 years ago and it's true today.
If the government wants to find and kill a group (or even an individual), it's not lack of information that's going to stop them, it hasn't been for a very long time.
I feel like much of the pracrical issues is with how these databases are accessed. People shouldn't have as wide access as the do and analysis should be done more by machines whose algorithms are centrally controlled (rather than having potentially millions of bad actors accessing the information and being security risks), that can then hand risks related to specific individuals to human analysist/administrators who only get access to that relevant information.
There were limits. Real time tracking wouldn’t have been possible in 1924. And given that most of the data available at the time we’re on paper that had to be physically stored, copied and sent to various places, it would have been much harder to pull off a targeted mass killing without missing people who wanted to hide. In fact there was at least one country (I believe it was Holland) that managed to save a substantial number of Jews from the Nazis by burning the census records. In that era, burning the single copy of the records in question makes them no longer exist. In the era of cloud computing, nothing short of destroying all the internet connected computers on earth would guarantee the data being gone.
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