Rachel Thomas with an excellent essay on 8 Things You Need to Know About Surveillance:
I frequently talk with people who are not that concerned about surveillance, or who feel that the positives outweigh the risks. Here, I want to share some important truths about surveillance:
1. Surveillance can facilitate human rights abuses and even genocide
2. Data is often used for different purposes than why it was collected
3. Data often contains errors
4. Surveillance typically operates with no accountability
5. Surveillance changes our behavior
6. Surveillance disproportionately impacts the marginalized
7. Data privacy is a public good
8. We don’t have to accept invasive surveillance
The issues are of course more complex than anyone can summarize in a brief essay, but Thomas’ points on data often containing errors (3) and the frequent lack of processes to remedy those errors (4) deserve special emphasis. We tend to assume that automated systems are accurate and work well as long as they do so in our experience. But for many people they do not, and this has a dramatic impact on their lives.