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Sometimes, it is the very ordinariness of a scene that makes it terrifying. So it was with a clip from a recent BBC documentary on facial recognition technology. A man tries to avoid the cameras, covering his face by pulling up his jacket. He is stopped by the police and forced to have his photo taken. He is then fined £90 for “disorderly behavior”. “What’s your suspicion?” someone asks the police. “The fact that he’s walked past clearly masking his face from recognition,” replies one of the officers. If you want to protect your privacy, it must be because you have something to hide.
There is considerable concern in the west about Chinese tech firms acting as Trojan horses for Beijing. But perhaps we should worry less about the tech companies than about the social use of technology. Because it’s not just in China that “algorithmic governance” is beginning to take hold. As the tech entrepreneur Maciej Ceglowski pointed out before the US Senate, “Until recently, even people living in a police state could count on the fact that the authorities didn’t have enough equipment or manpower to observe everyone, everywhere, and so enjoyed more freedom from monitoring than we do living in a free society today.”
Surveillance is at the heart, too, of “smart cities”. From Amsterdam to Dubai to Toronto, cities are embracing technology to collect data on citizens, ostensibly to make public services and urban spaces function better. But what smart cities also enable is a new form of policing. As the mayor of Rio de Janeiro said of the “integrated urban command centre” built for the 2016 Olympics, the system “allows us to have people looking into every corner of the city, 24 hours a day, seven days a week”.
Buses that run on time and rubbish that is efficiently cleared are good things (in most smart cities, and in Rio as well, neither actually happens). There is, however, more to the good life than an ordered city. Human flourishing requires the existence of a sphere of life outside public scrutiny; not only within the intimacy of the home but also in semi-private spaces such as the workplace or the church or the pub. It’s that kind of space shielded from scrutiny that increasingly is vanishing. As Ceglowski observed, one of the features of the “new world of ambient surveillance” is that “we cannot opt out of it, any more than we might opt out of automobile culture by refusing to drive”. And that is possibly the most disturbing thought of all.
(Kenan Malik. www.theguardian.com, 19.05.2019. Adaptado.)
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