When the government keeps track of your dreams
Consider, to begin with, some recent news reports.
Apple’s recently-updated mobile operating system claims to give you control over your data, even as the company stores details of Chinese customers on servers run by a state-owned firm. Amazon’s Ring, a “video doorbell”, has partnerships with US law enforcement agencies enabling them to ask for recorded content without a warrant. And many people the world over have flagged privacy concerns with Covid-19 vaccination apps.
Not a day seems to pass without a headline dealing with intrusions into privacy and the ways in which governments can use it for their own ends. In her magisterial The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Sushanna Zoboff writes that “it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.” In an interview, she pointed out the implications: this is “a direct intervention into free will, an assault on human autonomy.”