Yes; the contradictions and conflicts of interest are obvious, yet somehow they seem unavoidable. There's no way to control the impact of technology, or the speed of its progression.
In this area, trying to reduce the issue to what we could call "direction", the direction is loss of privacy regardless of laws, regulation and rights.
Here, as in so many other areas, the state is way behind the curve of technology, which has a thousand corporate sponsors in as many jurisdictions. They're motivated by profit, not ethics - even in the case of a "do no evil" mindset, they're prey to the same sort of organizational failings that lead to many disasters. In deregulatory fervor the voices that questioned whether 60 years of prudence should be abandoned in favor of for-profit exchanges? Silenced. Even in the absence of the profit motive, other motivations and failures of organizational behavior may lead to disaster, as NASA and Chernobyl have demonstrated.
Beyond corporate impetus lie more dangers. There are no Luddites on this thread, but even the greatest technophile must admit the ways in which technologies are interacting is beyond control. We see the same spillover in areas as diverse as finance and agriculture: witness the helplessness of farmers opposed to GM crops. Like it or not, their land and crops get "polluted" by natural vectors (wind, bird droppings, etc.) and GM seed they don't want; there's little they can do to stop it. Finance and economics? Leveraged derivatives in the hundreds of trillions in which nobody is sure of the terms or even the current value. HFT? Swaps? Wraps? We have an almighty mortgage mess amounting to trillions, and legislators are assured by the financial sector that everything's been thought of, everything's under control. Well, except for an economic and financial disaster.
We've already seen the standard of care exercised by the financial sector. Their assurances are no more reliable than they were before the crash.
The point? Nobody's in control. Statements to the contrary are pure fantasy.
Jim |
