Well, the example given here is Transport for London, which is almost impossible to travel without using an Oyster smart card. So yes, pushing for legislation along the lines proposed in the article would make sense.
Would a government that has a CCTV on every street enact legislation to limit its surveillance abilities?
I agree that it's a good ideal, it's just incredibly naive to think that it will be achieved. Even if legislation were passed, it would very likely make things worse, in that the government wouldn't stop surveilling - they would just do it even more covertly.
they basically work, and on issues like this, the main issue is apathy
People are apathetic because their democracies don't basically work. Elections and occasional referendums are very crude kinds of representation and are easily manipulated by those who have a lot of cash. Legislation is great but the reality is that you're on camera almost all the time in a large city like Londonand no politician is going to lay themselves open to easy attacks by proposing to dismantle that infrastructure.
Bentham's panopticon was a design for a prison, a mill "for grinding rogues honest." Now the whole society is constructed around that idea; you have legal rights but the implicit premise is that people are rogues. You're not free.
Is it? Or is it the notion that if you scream about something you don't like enough, someone else will fix it, through legislation, so you can stop worrying about it? And, of course, that legislation will work perfectly and never be abused or radically reinterpreted a generation down the line.
I'm for the belief that if you don't like something then don't partake in it - short of it being something being physically forced on you.
> is it the notion that if you scream about something you don't like enough, someone else will fix it, through legislation, so you can stop worrying about it?
This notion is often called collective action, and it’s how most of the social change of the last couple hundred years was achieved in the US (and elsewhere), from black people and women attaining the right to vote, to the end of child labor, to gay marriage, to the existence of weekends.
This 'screaming' is the basis of representative democracies; the system of government that we live under.
> if you don't like something then don't partake in it - short of it being something being physically forced on you.
In every country I'm aware of, surveillance of at least some physical space is non-optional, and could be called 'forced'. The dichotomy of "physically forced" and (by implication) 'voluntary' doesn't seem useful. Very few of the current and hypothetical problems with surveillance are because it's physically-forced on people; it's that a cost-benefit equation is engineered to make it practically irresistible.
Let’s say you’re a poor high-school student. To participate in classes you need to use the school issued Chromebook and an associated Google account. You could resist and not participate in class, but even given a full understanding of the privacy cost, this would be irrational and self-destructive. If you'd like to join your residents' association that may require a Facebook account, if you'd like to travel on an airplane that likely entails video-surveillance which will be used for facial recognition, if you take a job at a company with significant-IP (or not much cash), you're very likely to be working on a machine containing a surveillance-rootkit etc. etc. ad nauseam.
This article is about solutions to the societal problem of mass-surveillance (both from the state and industry). Retreating from society for your own protection (while things get worse for everyone else) is never going to be helpful for addressing the societal problem.
Perhaps you think the status quo is fantastic and shouldn't be changed. Perhaps you have the resources to live a puritanical life avoiding surveillance; I'm impressed! But the fact that you have the freedom to do so is a direct result of the collective action of others.
The Washington DC Metro switched over to their equivalent a few years back, the "Smartrip Card", retiring their previous paper with mag-stripe cards in the process.
My 'solution' to not being tracked is that the Smartrip Card I was forced to then buy was bought with cash, and has only ever been refilled with cash.
So their systems know that card # 828272823 (made up number) has traveled here or there (I don't use it much, so there's not many trips on it anyway) but they don't know 'who' is using that card.
If they ever drop the ability to use cash to top up the card, then the card will go in the garbage bin and I'll not ride the system again.
Your (attempted) solution illustrates the potential dangers of data collection.
There are many companies with some timestamped location data about you: cell phone company, email or social media, credit card company, etc.
Just a bit of that data combined with Smartrip data would de-identify you as the owner of that card, and all of your anonymity about your metro trips is lost. For example, three or four trips where you used a cell phone at either end of the trip; credit card purchases in different locations; maps directions on your phone; or so on.
This is not far from plausible. I could see the DC Metro naively choosing to sell "de-identified" data to third parties, who can also purchase e.g. credit card data.
You could just charge it up with a visa gift card or something, but (as others have pointed out) I'm betting that it's not nearly as anonymous as you think. If I'm a prosecutor trying to hang a charge on you and your Smartrip card is a key piece of evidence, all I need to do is correlate it a sufficiently tiny probability of being anyone but you and the jury will accept that.
They've now introduced the ability to pay by any contactless card, not just Oyster. I think long term they will phase out Oyster. One of the benefits to them of doing so would be the fact that it's not as easy to have multiple contactless credit/debit cards as it is to have multiple Oyster cards.
To be frank, though, I'm struggling to see what the fuss is about when it comes to TfL. It's their system and they can do what the heck they want with it. As their customer I am OK with them tracking me around their property.
