The UK's War on Anonymity Has Come to America

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• Hacker News
• For the first time in human history, the cost of surveillance has dropped below the cost of privacy.

  It is more expensive today to maintain your privacy and anonymity than it is to surveil you. The collective surveillance grid makes it possible to track people's movements, whereabouts, their predilections, political views, personal images and more for a few cents every day. It's a bargain.

  And in this new world, the eye watches everyone, all the time, forever. Most people, including people on HN, are still stuck in a human-first world. The new surveillance state isn't going to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.

  And they will be used to watch you. Especially if you're attractive. Or, valuable. Or, blackmail-able. After all, NSA employees routinely abuse multi-billion dollar surveillance assets to stalk women. It's so common that the NSA calls it LOVEINT.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT

  In the world to come, people are going to wish they were being surveilled by the NSA. Because at least the NSA punishes these people. Occasionally.

  When this kind of technology becomes this cheap and this pervasive, then the end of anonymity means unaccountable sheriff deputies stalking their former spouse and family. Or, prospective romantic interests.

  https://www.firstalert4.com/2026/08/03/brentwood-officer-acc...

  https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/cops-using-license-pl...

  https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/rogue-officers-turned...

  https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...

  https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-rea...

  https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/26/us/flock-cameras-surveill...

  With this new oracle, these people will be able to set up alerts for when their spouse is thinking of leaving them. To catch their child accessing support for abuse or something more ephemeral like being an atheist, having different political views or LGBT+.

  Anyone who doesn't see the forest for the trees, or who embraces this because "parental controls are too hard to use" will doom themselves and future generations to a world that's materially worse than our hyper-surveilled present.

  I can't believe I'm saying this, but at this rate I'm going to miss the days when it was just the NSA reading my emails (and they still do! Howdy!). I know the track record. But at least the NSA has some sense of institutional responsibility and control. Most institutions in your life, including your HOA don't.

  https://ktvz.com/cnn-regional/2021/07/22/arnold-residents-ce...

  by areoform
• The question I would really like the "people" pushing so hard for surveillance to ask themselves is:

  How would the Nazi Germany and Hitler gone if they had this system in place, telling them who and where every single Jewish, gay, gypsy, disabled, or just ideologically opposed to them person was, 24/7?

  What about other insane rulers? What do you think they would - or rather, will - do with these systems?

  by Llamamoe
• > And they will be used to watch you.

  The next generation of cellular service, 6G, will include something called Integrated Sensing and Communications. ISAC will be a millimeter radar that uses cellphones to see all sorts of behavioral stuff like, who you are next to, are you/they breathing/walking/running/standing. No opt out at all. Similar to how some researchers are using WiFi signals in your home to see where you are in your house.

  Sample:

  https://www.techradar.com/computing/computing-security/this-...

  by Tangurena2
• It is a great example of how difficult it is to anticipate the N-th order effects of things. 79 years ago the transistor was invented, in less than a century it ended up being the back back of a global surveillance system. Not many people could have foreseen this.

  Cheaper computer technology has been great for the average persons uses but it cuts both ways. It also means much cheaper surveillance. I suspect that governmental/corporate surveillance now costs less than 1% of their spending, something that simple couldn't have been done even a few decades back.

  I do wonder what the world would have been like is say computer technology peaked at 486 level performance/memory. Much of what we have today simply could not have happened in terms of surveillance and social media damages. Alas, this is the world we didn't get.

  by ColdStream
• Here is a 2-minute tutorial video on how to turn on parental controls on an iPhone.

  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tv6vxRBEa2o

  Instead of asking parents to do this, you get these laws where you need to show your id to unlock your own device.

  Clearly.

  by miohtama
• Famously these controls basically don’t work.
  by jackvalentine
• Does it actually work? Does it block porn sites while allowing access to educational sites?
  by inigyou
• This is a garbage UI and it looks like it was designed using "dark patterns" to ensure that nobody uses it. Look how many clicks (18 clicks, I counted) one needs to do in the correct sequence without a single mistake, and how many distracting and misleading options are there. It is a sabotage, it is a rebellion. Technically, yes, Apple can claim that they have "safe mode", but in practice it is unusable. Apple clearly doesn't want parents to enable restrictions, for reasons I do not understand, probably they just hate children or people having a family.

  Your video actually has the opposite effect: it shows that there are no (easy) ways for parents to protect the children and government regulation is necessary.

  The UI should be a single checkbox named "child mode" and small, gray link "configure" that opens the menu from the video. The parent just clicks the checkbox, and sets up a password, a fingerprint or paired device to unlock the mode. That's all. After this only government-approved apps and websites can be opened (parent may edit the white list if they are ok with navigating through a maze of ten thousand menus) and children are perfectly safe. Government may white-list only apps and sites that implement measures for content safety and may not add non-compliant apps.

  Also I hate watching vertical videos on a laptop.

  by codedokode
• UK government (and the rest of Europe) has had a very easy time implementing strict administrative regulations due to public acceptance. And the children argument is like the easiest angle to attack, you can use it for almost any cause and win.
  by cuoder
• 1984 was based in London and the UK.
  by slopinthebag
• I love such cases... because "almost" all of them have hidden political agendas... so, as usual, I let my investigative agent run over this and prepare me detailed connections graph between prominent personnel, orgs, funding, and political connections...

  https://5rights.stupidlabs.lol/

  Disclaimer: this project of mine is still in development, and not quote 100% accurate.. so, take it with a bit of salt.. do your own research...

  Also, this is running on a cheap server... please don't hammer it..

  by freakynit
• That's super cool!
  by mike_hearn
• We need this for everything.
  by throwitaway222
• Sorry, I feed stupid to ask, but what does the graph tell us in that particular case?
  by commanderj
• Yo this is an excellent use of LLMs...

  Is there any connection with the 5rights foundation?

  by gfrecvh
• If you're going to take an aspect of UK law it would be better to take some aspects of the police training: how long they are trained, how to do de escalation, the idea of policing by consent.

  (I realise UK police are far from perfect).

  by stuaxo
• don't think so, mate
  by akimbostrawman
• Where "policing by consent" means "only policing people who won't react violently when we try and prosecute them for breaking the law".
  by gadders
• > I realise UK police are far from perfect

  I think most people can see that there are levels to everything and UK police are better than a lot of places whilst still needing to improve.

  by happymellon
• On this topic, have people noticed the sudden coordinated media push for Flock Is Your Friend? The Free Press, The Atlantic, and Axios have all churned out pro-Flock articles in the last week. Clearly someone (I assume A16Z, but it could be multiple groups) is panicking about the mounting bipartisan backlash to Flock cameras and is starting to write checks to try and head it off.
  by Analemma_
• Follow the money. That also shows which media sources you should never trust
  by ekianjo
• Noticed the same with some media publishing anti-work-from-home articles recently.

  "We need the plebs to want to mock people who work from home, to reduce the reticence in coming back to work in the office"

  "We need our commercial property values to go back up"

  Edited to add:

  "Our managers need to _feel_ as if they're actually managing people"

  by BLKNSLVR
• Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan, and Aaron Schaffer from the Washington Post also wrote a shameful article on this topic on August 4th (the title changed, along with an image of a woman who was harassed to something else). No counterpoint. Total submarine article.
  by pilingual
• Pro-Flock bots come out in droves in the replies to any Xitter post that’s even mildly negative towards them too. It’s not the least bit subtle.
  by cosmic_cheese
• My theory is that the establishment sees the oncoming economic crisis and is desperately trying to plan for managing the fallout. They don’t like Flock or its backers, but they feel they have no choice. Same as why Palantir is gradually being rehabilitated in the mainstream press.

  You’ll also notice that Anduril is quickly being accepted now that we’re expending munitions faster than our replacement rate.

  by iamnothere
• Like it or not, there is a large constituency who wants to “protect the children”.

  By demonizing them and failing to engage with the worries over social media and pornography We have brought it on ourselves.

  Is it to be wondered at that many people are angry when tech companies have polluted the commons with their effluvium?

  by drivebyhooting
• Fair play. This should 100% be viewed as a logical extension of that same effluvium. This is not a bug but a feature for them, many of these laws allow companies like Meta to offshore the responsibility of not harming children onto individuals while continuing to melt the brains of anyone unfortunate enough to still have a Facebook or Instagram account.

  edit: sp

  by sicktriple
• The only constituency who matters is their parents and guardians. If parenting and guardianship is failing, then help them be better.
  by chr15m
• Why yes, I too want to "protect the children". But that shouldn't require me to upload my ID to a vague 3rd party to prove my age so I can browse reddit or steam.

  I believe most online services should have safeguards to protect children because they will actively seek out harmful content and contacts (don't ask me how I know). But these safeguards should not allow for abuse of their users, or accidental info leaks, or sharing of PII to 1st or 3rd parties. There's plenty of ways to do e.g. age or identity verification anonymously and securely, for example.

  by Cthulhu_
• > By demonizing them and failing to engage with the worries over social media and pornography We have brought it on ourselves.

  There is a really good way to do this that solves most concerns: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

  The only real downside to this is that a 0kp cannot be reliably tied to an identity of the person using the device and thus tickets could be proxied/shared around with semi technical tools (and/or an ai agent tasked with creating a proxy). This really isn't solvable without device-level attestation[0], as if a website needs to reliably say "this person is actually this person" then it needs all pieces of data itself.

  This could be solved by adding in a still privacy-preserving step like "The device is doing periodic face id scans and matching them to an identity, and constantly renews/re-presents to the age assurance consumer", but that has its own drawbacks[0].

  0: Namely, lock in to devices that can do this, and that includes basically guaranteeing a double digit percentage of adult humans would not have access due to their device being old, unsupported, missing the hardware, etc. And with so many humans excluded, you would not have mass adoption. Probably also excludes rooted devices if we bring in attestation of unmodified software.

  by judge2020