I don’t think your fears are trivial, just slightly misguided. You don’t need to be very afraid of the current surveillance state: It collects a lot of data but can’t connect the dots. That’s how they missed the Boston Marathon bombers.
But they’re keeping the data. With data storage prices continuing to be in free-fall, petabytes of amassed surveillance data are definitely going to be proliferated eventually. Everything that ever happened on Facebook, for example, is eventually going to be public knowledge. And then it is only a question of when, not if, some future agent (AGI or not) connects the dots you left. It is hard to predict how long that’ll take and even harder to predict what that agent’s intent will be, but especially if you’re planning to live a long time, or to have children, it may indeed be prudent to be very careful with the traces you leave.
It is hard to predict how long that’ll take and even harder to predict what that agent’s intent will be
This weakens the case for holding back significantly, since it’s also applicable to the consequences of not posting.
Let me be more concrete. If all of Facebook is public data, are you going to be more suspicious of someone without a Facebook account, or someone whose Facebook activity is limited to pictures of drinking and partying that starts at around age 19 and dies a slow death by age 28?
Any data you leave has both condemning and exculpatory interpretations. If you don’t leave data behind that shows you like to drink socially, you’re also not leaving data behind that shows you don’t like to do cocaine in the bar bathroom. If you don’t know how that information is going to get interpreted in the future, both sides will tend to cancel out.
If your data is going to get targeted anyways in an unfair manner, being careful about what you slip out isn’t going to help that much. They’ll just latch on to the next most damaging piece of information—or if it isn’t much out there, make a meal of the lack of information.
Your intuition is directly at odds with how professionals in PR-focused industries—notably politics—tend to act. If you’re prone to getting smeared, clamming up and giving them no handholds is absolutely the best strategy. “We know nothing about his personal life—what does he have to hide?” is a weak attack(not least because people still respect the idea of privacy), comments about you being “not up to the job” interspersed with pics of you barfing on the carpet is a much stronger attack.
I don’t think your fears are trivial, just slightly misguided. You don’t need to be very afraid of the current surveillance state: It collects a lot of data but can’t connect the dots. That’s how they missed the Boston Marathon bombers.
But they’re keeping the data. With data storage prices continuing to be in free-fall, petabytes of amassed surveillance data are definitely going to be proliferated eventually. Everything that ever happened on Facebook, for example, is eventually going to be public knowledge. And then it is only a question of when, not if, some future agent (AGI or not) connects the dots you left. It is hard to predict how long that’ll take and even harder to predict what that agent’s intent will be, but especially if you’re planning to live a long time, or to have children, it may indeed be prudent to be very careful with the traces you leave.
This weakens the case for holding back significantly, since it’s also applicable to the consequences of not posting.
Let me be more concrete. If all of Facebook is public data, are you going to be more suspicious of someone without a Facebook account, or someone whose Facebook activity is limited to pictures of drinking and partying that starts at around age 19 and dies a slow death by age 28?
Any data you leave has both condemning and exculpatory interpretations. If you don’t leave data behind that shows you like to drink socially, you’re also not leaving data behind that shows you don’t like to do cocaine in the bar bathroom. If you don’t know how that information is going to get interpreted in the future, both sides will tend to cancel out.
If your data is going to get targeted anyways in an unfair manner, being careful about what you slip out isn’t going to help that much. They’ll just latch on to the next most damaging piece of information—or if it isn’t much out there, make a meal of the lack of information.
Your intuition is directly at odds with how professionals in PR-focused industries—notably politics—tend to act. If you’re prone to getting smeared, clamming up and giving them no handholds is absolutely the best strategy. “We know nothing about his personal life—what does he have to hide?” is a weak attack(not least because people still respect the idea of privacy), comments about you being “not up to the job” interspersed with pics of you barfing on the carpet is a much stronger attack.