The growth of Organizations transitioning from physical cards to Digital Cards stored on an app such as Apple Wallet or Google Wallet makes me think about whether this transition means more than just convenience, but rather carries another type of Ethical Consideration. While a factual representation of my member’s data is only found on a physical card, those same data points may leave behind traces of information about me (Timestamps, Location information, Device ID, Transaction History, etc.) when stored or retrieved using Digital memberhsip Cards. Even if some of that information is anonymized in a larger global intent to build out a larger data system, All that information will still appear somewhere. Does this represent a gradual acceptance of the effects of our behaviour through Surveillance? We have all learned the abstract principles that Michel Foucault illustrates using the “Panopticon”, the effect of how a society where individuals learn to be Overseen will have society on a whole…Are we all getting closer every day to be part of or contribute to a greater traceable society? When Does Convenience Begin to Outweigh the Privacy we Have? When Is there a Value in Informed Consent for Digital Participation when it is something that most People Cannot Avoid? I am also very Interested to see how Other People View the Balance between Efficiency and Autonomy When Using Digital Tools in The Normal Course of Life.
Interesting topic.
Does this represent a gradual acceptance of the effects of our behaviour through Surveillance?
If the question is: “Are digital cards more popular now because people are less privacy conscious or more accepting of surveillance?”, it is not clear to me this is the case. It isn’t even clear to me people are aware of the privacy implications of the switch.
When Does Convenience Begin to Outweigh the Privacy we Have?
As much as I personally enjoy privacy, I think this is a pretty personal question, in the sense that there probably isn’t one true answer. Different people will weight their convenience and their privacy differently.
When Is there a Value in Informed Consent for Digital Participation when it is something that most People Cannot Avoid?
If you are talking about situations like the following: someone prefers physical cards but every company switched to digital ones, can we still give value to the person “choosing” (so consenting) to use digital cards.
So here “cannot avoid” but not in a strict sense. I personally still consider it a choice about convenience like any other. I sometimes see people using this idea of “hard to avoid (usually for modern living standards)” to get convenient conclusions, but this seems questionable to me.
As I said previously, I would definitely consider myself privacy conscious. I definitely sacrificed convenience sometimes, but I am pretty okay with what I did. Without saying too much, I don’t have Google and switched to a custom OS on my phone for example.
The so-called information society where we live in is surely very traceable and with AI the huge mass of information is also more controllable.
We can compare this to earlier totalitarian police-states just how difficult this kind of control was when it was basically done manually. Hence if someone was to be followed by the secret police, then literally there had to be a person listening to the phone calls or wiretaps. There had to be a giant system of informers. Usually these systems simply became too huge and unworkable contraptions and in the end, the “finest” surveillance systems like in East Germany collapsed like a house of cards as everybody had come disillusioned of the state.
Hence there is the ability, yet the real question is if there genuinely is the intent of similar control as in an authoritarian state. Usually in Western Democracies there isn’t a similar drive as in “revolutionary” states like China, North Korea or Iran where the state is a creation of an ideological revolution and the security apparatus is there to fight for the state against it’s perceived enemies. Dictatorships use and rely on the surveillance to be in power, democracies don’t.
In democracies this surveillance comes through the back door with fighting terrorism or curtailing money laundering etc. And that’s why we have the discourse of how much information is there of us and can it be used illegally etc. The intent isn’t at all so clear as in an authoritarian state where the objective is directly influence for example public and even private discussion and behavior. This difference should be noted, because I think we too eagerly jump to the conclusions that we actually don’t have freedoms and are surveyed just like in an police state when there is the ability for this kind of surveillance. Yet ability to do something and doing something are two different things.
There really has to be the intent from the state. When there is that, we won’t discuss the issues anymore on a Philosophy Forum site.