Your Data or Your Life - The Future of Freedom Foundation
▻http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/your-data-or-your-life
The effect of constant #surveillance is fear and control. It’s a biological response. Many animals, mammals especially, don’t like being watched. “We consider it a physical threat, because animals in the natural world are surveilled by predators,” Schneier writes, summarizing the work of biologist Peter Watts. “Surveillance makes us feel like prey, just as it makes the surveillors act like predators.”
Outside the state of nature, mass, perpetual surveillance is an agent of social control. Its point is to impose the status quo and breed conformity. When there’s an ever-present watcher, or at least the threat of one as in philosopher Jeremy Betham’s panopticon, people will steer clear of unorthodox ideas or countercultural behaviors. Without privacy, freedom is constrained to the point of atrophy. Like a muscle, it needs to be flexed regularly, often in seclusion.
In fact, as Schneier convincingly argues, privacy combined with the government’s limited capabilities to identify lawbreakers is a social good that aids progress. “Think about it this way,” he writes. “Across the US, states are on the verge of reversing decades-old laws about homosexual relationships and marijuana use. If the old laws could have been perfectly enforced through surveillance, society would never have reached the point where the majority of citizens thought those things were okay.”