&gt; <i>I also think that since modern society is the one we find ourselves in, that privacy should be aggressively protected. Privacy is more important now than ever precisely because we&#x27;re an urbanized and connected society.</i><p>That&#x27;s an interesting and important point I learned to appreciate in an explicit form only recently. Thank you for making it.<p>That said, I still don&#x27;t see from a practical point, how we can expect to keep privacy <i>and</i> progress? The always-on automated license plate readers exist because cameras and computing power are dirt chip now, and no amount of effort sans starting a third world war and rolling us back to medieval times will revert that. Laws are weaker than technology, and the current development will make it only easier to create more complex and cheaper machines that replicate various functions of humans, only faster and better.<p>We could try and fight for changes in law that would make mass-scale data collection illegal, but that would not make it impossible or unfeasible - it will only limit the access to &quot;the good guys&quot;. So criminals, creeps and government services (at least those secret ones) will keep spying on us anyway, while we would be throwing away a lot of potential improvements and scientific advancements that could be enabled by a &quot;god&#x27;s eye&quot; view.<p>And so I sometimes wonder, since we can&#x27;t put the genie back in the box, and fighting it only means giving up our own powers while merely inconveniencing the bad guys, maybe we should just embrace the society that&#x27;s becoming self-aware and make sure this awareness is put to a good use?<p>ETA:<p>&gt; <i>And to go full Godwin, the Nazis were far more effective with IBM&#x27;s help.</i><p>True, but I don&#x27;t think we should frame it as anything else as (1930&#x2F;1940) IBM helping evil people who they know were evil. The Nazis were equally more effective with help of any other country that provided them with materials they used for war.<p>On the other hand, we are <i>all</i> better off thanks to IBM, so this can&#x27;t be an argument against general-purpose computing, or punchcards and identification numbers.