Privacy Online and Off

 

     The global information security products and services market exceeded $200 billion, driven heavily by 

artificial intelligence integration and video surveillance.

Juan Enriquez

After watching the Juan Enriquez video I realized that a lot of what I hear about surveillance is unfortunately true. Automatic license plate readers, including those made by companies like Flock Safety, are now common in cities, neighborhoods, and shopping center parking lots. Each image is a small data point. Put together over weeks and months, they can show where you live, where you worship, who you visit, and when you're usually away from home. 

In 2018, it came out that the consulting firm Cambridge Analytics had harvested the data of roughly 87 million Facebook users without their meaningful consent. Most of those people never took the quiz that started it. 

That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that police generally need a warrant to get long-term cell phone location records.                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Facebook was called out in 2018 by Cambridge Analytics

The Court recognized that a log of where you've been reveals far more than any single moment can. Courts are still working out how that reasoning applies to cameras, plate readers, and data brokers.

Law Officials often seem to lead in the idea that privacy only matters if you're doing something wrong. Believe its about controlling your own life. With our freedoms it's deciding who knows your health concerns, your beliefs, your relationships, and your routines. That said, plate readers can help solve real crimes, like finding stolen cars or missing people. Being against surveillance overreach doesn't mean being against safety.

Plate Reader are positioned on any road

You can't opt out of everything, and you shouldn't have to. But staying curious about who is collecting your data and why is something you should be deeply concerned about.

Data also lasts longer than we expect and gets used in ways we didn't intend. Information collected for one purpose can be shared, leaked, or repurposed later, and mistakes in it can be hard to correct.

AI Disclosure: AI was used to format it into a blog post. Using Claude. I took notes while watching the Ted Talk Videos. To help me improve the text I prompted Claude for grammar. I asked it to help shape my notes into a blog post in an MLA style.

Eight Values of Free Expression

Out of the Eight Values of Free Expression, the one I cared about and resonated with is #7, Promoting Innovation. Most of the Values ring the same note, but the idea articulated by Yale law professor Jack Balkin in Living Originalism, that a community that values and protects free speech ends up more energized, creative, and interesting. I don't see the "innovation" in the Silicon Valley version Balkin likely meant. 

Every project I've worked on exists because nobody had to approve the idea first. Nobody vetted my script for being "commercial enough" or checked my footage before I was allowed to post it. That freedom to make something weird, small, and personal and put it out there without a gatekeeper's permission is exactly what Balkin is describing. 

A culture that protects expression doesn't just protect political speech; it protects the right of an 21-year-old with a camera in North Carolina to try something and fail, or try something and make it work. Multiply that by millions of people doing the same thing, and you get a wildly more inventive culture than one where creative output has to clear a permission gate first. 

Second-Level Thinking: This Already Happened Once  Here's the connection I keep coming back to. This isn't the first time new tools have shaken up who gets to make films. In the earliest days of cinema, Thomas Edison controlled the key patents on the motion picture camera through the Motion Picture Patents Company the "Edison Trust" and used that control to dictate who could legally make movies and how. Independent producers who wanted freedom to experiment and actually own their work didn't win that fight in court right away; they just packed up and moved west, out of the Trust's reach, and built what became Hollywood. The desire for open, ungated creative expression literally created the American film industry.  

I think we're watching a smaller version of that same story right now with Employing artificial intelligence techniques to make films. At Cannes film Festival last year, the conversation about AI in filmmaking shifted from "should this be allowed at all" to "whose tools are these, and who do they serve." Generative AI is estimated to be able to cut production costs by as much as 30 percent, and industry voices are framing this less as a threat to established filmmaking and more as a door being widened. Adobe's own Sundance case studies this year highlighted independent filmmakers using generative tools like Firefly specifically to compress timelines and expand what they could tell a story about, not to replace their creative judgment. But this is the part that keeps me from being purely optimistic it should make us suspicious of new gatekeepers replacing the old ones. Today's "chokepoint" risk is that the most powerful AI filmmaking tools are being built and licensed by a handful of large companies, and unresolved fights over whether AI models can train on copyrighted footage and scripts without permission could just as easily freeze independent creators out as free them. Like most creators were all just trying make some sense of it all as the industry changes