How the UK Is Weakening Safety Worldwide

Unfortunately as a nation our culture appears to have shifted away from taking personal responsibility for anything. It's always someone else's fault now. Some else's responsibility. Someone else's job.

I have seen many comments that this has become worse since the isolation period caused by COVID. I tend to agree but I also think it goes deeper than that. We have some problems in our society that have been festering for much longer and have root causes like inequality, lack of opportunity, and a lack of constructive facilities and positive role models.

I hear a lot from friends who work in education about children coming to school with profoundly disturbing attitudes and other children who have experienced nasty forms of abuse. And yes - absolutely the schools and the government should push back against problems like bullying and misogyny and racism where they can.

But maybe the answer here isn't just trying to lock up this week's negative social media influencer or introduce unusual and potentially dangerous concepts like regulating online content that is "harmful" yet not illegal or expecting governments to spy on us all and interfere in our lives more often. Maybe we should first be asking why so many kids think they have nothing better to do than spend all day watching that nasty online content in the first place. Maybe we should be asking why so many kids are given unsupervised and unregulated access to ideas they aren't ready to deal with yet.

That's about education and children but you can pick almost any hot button topic and find similar examples. Try immigration or people who live entirely off state benefits. You can find plenty of examples where people advocate for papering over social problems but there's a sad lack of discussion about properly fixing the cracks underneath. Those are the real social harms we should be trying to reduce. Unfortunately their perpetrators are often among the first to assume it must be someone else's problem.

> Here’s a poll from 2019, showing 91% of the US cares:

This is a wrong poll, because "privacy" is too broad of a term to meaningfully to assess. Privacy is a "good" thing, so people, of course, respond "I care" because they want to feel good about themselves and care about good things. In reality they don't understand what privacy is and at what price or comes (in terms of inconvenience).

>Support for increasing regulation was at about 71% then and still is.

That's even better. I remember GDPR being legislated, and everyone was extremely fascinated by how much it "protects" the users, and literally a few days after GDPR came into power, my messenger company blocked me with the following message: "according to GDPR, we must keep your personal data private and secret, and since at the moment we don't have any of your personal data, we can't keep them secret, so we're blocking you. Please, upload a photocopy of you passport by following this link (link) to get unblocked".

Again, the word "regulation" is perceived as a "good thing", because the opposite of "regulation" is "chaos, anarchy", and people are afraid of anarchy. If people actually understood what "regulation" means, support would have been way way lower.

Privacy is simply unavailable if you want to live in a modern society.

I think that's unnecessarily defeatist. Privacy has never been a black and white concept. We all share some information with some other people for good reasons.

The big change with modern technology has been how easily information can be collected at a massive scale and how many people end up with access to that information and for what purposes they can then use it. Almost none of this change was inevitable or necessary to function in a modern society. Governments could step in to legally regulate the businesses making a fortune off data capitalism any time they wanted to. They just haven't.

A cynic might suggest that this is because those businesses have made an awful lot of money. Some of that goes back to the governments in tax revenues. No doubt some of it also goes back to the politicians in campaign contributions.

A different cynic might suggest that our governments are typically made up of career politics/media/economics types who are woefully underequipped to even understand the capabilities and implications of the technology that has become such a core part of our lives in the past 20-30 years and so almost totally fail to perceive or mitigate the threats it poses.

>They made a surveillance state... and don't really use it.

I imagine it sucks being the people for whom that statement constitutes an exception.

They're sitting on a capability that's turn-key authoritarianism at a mass scale, just as major western governments are.

> Police will look the other way as long as you don't force their hand.

They usually don't need to look the other way because people will do it secretly not talk about it openly and most people by a mile would never even use it (because it is illegal and most people don't want to do illegal stuff unless it's necessary and it is not necessary)

You don't need to enforce laws strictly to create an obedient population that does not dare think, you just need to have those laws and do a few show trials