Civilization gives the luxury of willing vulnerability. Surveillance can either protect or erode this, depending on consent, transparency, and the protection of private spaces.
The important baseline of surveillance is whether it's intrusive or obtrusive. Obtrusive is the general chilling effect of a panopticon and cannot be ethically justified. Intrusion is targeted surveillance for specific reasons which can be validated against various ethical standards.
Surveillance in a world of inequality is always oppressive to those with less and protects those with more. There can be no general understanding of it, much less as a good, in extreme inequality.
I was waiting for the section that would thoroughly go into the trade-offs of surveillance vs crime control, along with people who value autonomy versus security, perhaps you can cover that later.
Can you say more about your desire? I discuss various qualitative costs and benefits (i.e. loss of privacy, paranoia, crime reduction, more relevant advertising), but I find it hard to be quantitative on this subject, since there are a lot of associated intangibles. My aim was more to lay out a principled stance that can be adjusted away from by local governments (to fit particular cultures) and operated within by law enforcement (depending on the local cost-benefit ratio for a district and a particular technology). If there's a way to better analyze the tradeoffs, I'm certainly interested.
I was thinking more about the first section, before Utopia. For example, it would be interesting to cite research on what kind of benefits there might be from surveillance such as closed circuit TV to reducing crime, and consider the trade-offs.
Thanks for clarifying. After reflecting on it, I expanded the first paragraph of the Consensual Surveillance section, but probably won't add much more beyond that.
The important baseline of surveillance is whether it's intrusive or obtrusive. Obtrusive is the general chilling effect of a panopticon and cannot be ethically justified. Intrusion is targeted surveillance for specific reasons which can be validated against various ethical standards.
Surveillance in a world of inequality is always oppressive to those with less and protects those with more. There can be no general understanding of it, much less as a good, in extreme inequality.
I was waiting for the section that would thoroughly go into the trade-offs of surveillance vs crime control, along with people who value autonomy versus security, perhaps you can cover that later.
Can you say more about your desire? I discuss various qualitative costs and benefits (i.e. loss of privacy, paranoia, crime reduction, more relevant advertising), but I find it hard to be quantitative on this subject, since there are a lot of associated intangibles. My aim was more to lay out a principled stance that can be adjusted away from by local governments (to fit particular cultures) and operated within by law enforcement (depending on the local cost-benefit ratio for a district and a particular technology). If there's a way to better analyze the tradeoffs, I'm certainly interested.
I was thinking more about the first section, before Utopia. For example, it would be interesting to cite research on what kind of benefits there might be from surveillance such as closed circuit TV to reducing crime, and consider the trade-offs.
Thanks for clarifying. After reflecting on it, I expanded the first paragraph of the Consensual Surveillance section, but probably won't add much more beyond that.