Government Surveillance - TED Talk

[vivster]

Dr.Grass said:

vivster said:

I watched the whole video and tried to hold back my vomit the whole time.

People are overestimating the importance of their data. No one gives a shit about you or the data garbage you produce. In fact they actually hate to sift through all the garbage to get the good stuff. Only if you start to get suspicious and hit the right triggers for the filters of the bots that are going through the raw data the data gets collected and not immediately deleted.

It's simply unfeasible for the government or other "criminals" to scan and keep all the data they collect. So while they might catch your data they don't care for it. Much less than you.

I don't know about you but I don't feel particularly spied on when a soulless program looks for keywords in my collected data and after that discards it.

fair points I suppose.

But vomiting? Come on man.

I'm just sick of people spreading fear by distributing false information about how technology works.

The core might be true but the reality often looks different. Pretty much everything is possible with PCs but those are ideal cases with additional aid of the user itself. The chance of an actual human looking at video footage of an innocent citizen that actually shows any important stuff is lower than winning in the lottery.

Nobody really cares about 99.99999% of the data they collect. But it's a lot easier and less risky to first collect all data and look through it than do actual physical detective work to find the criminals. That's why fishermen use echo-location and nets and not just fishing rods.