I was going to look into this once, but instead I opted to go into Tosche station to pick up some power converters and unfortunately never quite got around to it.

> I just asked AI

Please stop doing this. If someone wants to read LLM-generated hooey of some variety, they can submit a prompt somewhere and read the resulting text themselves.

Well I could do a web search and read all the thousands of articles about social media censorship in Britian and write an essay on it with grammar errors, or I could go on here and blame Israel like the OP, because that's just what I'm feeling today and I saw a bunch of stuff while TikTok doomscrolling yesterday that made me believe that. You'd say the articles I quoted that didn't say Israel were not from reliable sources, and absolutely nobody's mind would be changed. I'll trust AI to be more objective about doing the research. However, I did write the comment myself. I mean I would go back and edit it and put in random no-no words for AI, just to prove that, but I'd get flagged.

Beware of "you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride." Some people don't survive that ride. Sometimes that ride lasts many years.

No. They shouldn't be able to do this within 100 miles of a border either, since that's not a reasonable distance for the border exception to apply by any sane reasoning. The rights of roughly 2/3 of the US population don't evaporate because of some absurd assertion of distance that is clearly off by two orders of magnitude. We must uproot this particular crop of dystopian bullshit and salt the earth in its place.

Do you think that corporate erosion of (or outright hostility to) privacy is somehow a compelling reason to deny rights to those of us who make different choices in an attempt to protect them? Just because some people decided to buy a smartphone on wheels, do I have to suffer and have my freedom of movement narrowed and protection from arbitrary inspection by government agents denied?

Of course not - it makes no sense to gather that from my post. Were you trying to respond to someone else?

In keeping with the grand traditions of corporate communications, perhaps we should all jump on a call to explore these issues in an unaccountable and likely adversarial way.

IME an n vs. m written discussion in a public forum can be clearer, more productive, and a hell of a lot more accountable than some potential n vs. 1 adversarial corporate firing-squad 'discussion' intended to reinforce whatever policy the n have already decided upon. IMO, much of the benefit of voice over text is likely offset by the latter scenario being real time with potential translation issues.

Consider a world where a sizeable fraction of the population has and uses such a device, such that its presence is assumed and ultimately mandated by authoritarian law enforcement entities, surveillance capitalist firms, and so on. Can you imagine the inescapable nightmare this would become even with the norms of today? Do you really want to offer fuzzy recall of two of five senses to "legitimate legal process", rapacious marketers, or anyone else who somehow gains access to these data?

Personally I would consider it a moral imperative to refuse to use such a device and to avoid anyone who does otherwise.

So no, please don't create such a thing. Stop now.

I completely understand your concern, and I agree, the kind of scenario you describe would be morally unacceptable. I wouldn’t want to build or be responsible for anything that could enable it.

That said, I often think about how this tension applies to nearly every new technology. Most tools can be used for good or bad, and history shows that progress tends to happen either way. If we had refused to develop technologies simply because they could be misused, we might not have any at all.

I do believe it’s possible to build responsibly through transparency, local-first design, and strong legal safeguards. The EU’s data protection laws, for example, give me some hope that we’re not entirely defenseless.

Do you see this kind of outcome as something we’re tangibly heading toward, or more as a warning of what could happen if we’re not careful?

You'd better carefully check the flight path of every longer distance route then, otherwise you may find yourself unexpectedly crossing the airspace of countries like Russia (e.g. IME Newark to Hong Kong flew over the polar region and right through the middle of Siberia).

This is trivial to check, but yes it’s a good idea to check this for anyone who works on sensitive technology.

Not all state machines are deterministic.