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That’s where the comparison to environmental protection is so powerful. For the longest time, if you would say “We lose something by exploiting natural resources”, people would have just pointed out that there’s a seemingly infinite supply of unexploited nature left.

We’ve always been monitored in some situations, but never before around the clock, in the bedroom and the bathroom, at the doctor, etc. There’s no way to know what we lose, when we don’t even know how the information will be used. It is a passive blackmail situation. These companies have compromising information about all of us, and we really don’t have any idea who can or will be able to see it.



Perhaps ironically, environmental protection often requires sophisticated monitoring of nature. If nobody is watching, you don't know what's lost.


Part of it is of course that moral panics and societal attitudes make every human blackmailable. Maybe it would be nice if we could learn to just not care.




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