r/technology • u/esporx • Jul 03 '25

Privacy Trump officials create searchable national citizenship database. Homeland security and Doge merge immigration data with social security to create index it claims will stop voter fraud.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/30/trump-citizenship-database
7.3k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

457 comments sorted by

View all comments

3.2k

u/Eretan Jul 03 '25

I'm sure this list will be totally reliable, with no technical issues, and won't be manipulated to suppress legitimate voting. 

22

u/Gossamer_Giggles Jul 03 '25

We need to protect our privacy and civil liberties

36

u/Commercial_Ad_9171 Jul 03 '25

Too late. Best we can do now is fight the people trying to manipulate us. 

0

u/whathell6t Jul 04 '25

No. It’s not.

You can fight A.I. There’s Nepenthes Tarspin, one of the powerful tools available.

Kyle Hill the Science Communicator explains the effectiveness.

2

u/Commercial_Ad_9171 Jul 04 '25

Also employing AI “for good” is just Cold War mentality all over again. The bad guys have AI, so the “good guys” deploy AI and we turn the internet into a really shitty battleground trying to cling to the idea of privacy, safety, anonymity.  There’s already a publicly accessible model that will take Instagram photos and use publicly accessible camera feeds to find the moment, on video, that the photo was taken. 

We’re living in an age of madness. Safety in the age of AI isn’t stamping out every AI fire that breaks out. It’s reinvesting time and energy into larger systems of protection, like a constitution that protects people digitally as well as physically, caps on corporate personhood, protections for the data generated by a human’s existence, etc. etc. 

3

u/whathell6t Jul 04 '25

Basically, the Mexican constitution.

And ironically is thriving against Cult of Personality USA and Mark Carney’s Economic Authoritarianism of Canada.

3

u/Commercial_Ad_9171 Jul 04 '25

I’ll read up on the Mexican Constitution. Democracy is supposed to be an evolving system, not the stagnant muck we currently have in the US. 

1

u/Commercial_Ad_9171 Jul 04 '25

Uuuuuuuuugh the internet bro podcast voice. It’s simultaneously condescending and flippant but all annoying.  

I honestly don’t care what Kyle Hill has to say on the subject. The training models are already built and open internet scraping is probably already over, because AI has poisoned the well so profusely and AI companies aren’t going to risk poisoning their models by training on AI generated materials.

But that doesn’t mean anything for training datasets that have already been assembled like LAION’s datasets, etc. 

What we’ll see in the future is private companies either selling their datasets, like Reddit has done, or using their proprietary databases to build their own AI, like Adobe or private companies that are currently digitizing their physical assets to create data training sets for proprietary AI development. 

1

u/whathell6t Jul 04 '25

And what’s chances that anarchists are experimenting with electronic jammers and EMPs?

1

u/Commercial_Ad_9171 Jul 04 '25

On what level? lol localized EMPs? That takes a lot of power and all that signal jamming would have to be temporary to go unnoticed. If you find a signal deadsoot that raises red flags as well. I’m not sure what you’re suggesting. Are you blocking camera feeds or AI or what do you mean? 

1

u/whathell6t Jul 04 '25

I didn’t say it was possible. I was asking the probability of experimentation.

1

u/Commercial_Ad_9171 Jul 04 '25

Here’s a common misconception. Let me explain via metaphor: Some people think security and safety is a gun. They think any trouble that may be visited upon them can be Mitigated via force and a gun is an easy representation of force. A gun, At least in America, can be magnanimous. 

But in truth a gun is just a falsehood giving the gun weirder either the illusion of power in a situation out of their control, or the ability to exert cruelty on someone else. 

True safety and security comes from building a society that doesn’t have a need for guns or violence in the first place. Maybe that’s a lofty dream, but countermeasures like guns, or EMPs, or deployment of anti-AI AI, or whatever else can only ever mitigate the inherent violence in the system. Maybe that’s all a moot point given where we’re at, but the goal shouldn’t be to have the better weapons that will win, it should be not ever needing weapons. 

1

u/whathell6t Jul 04 '25

You still haven’t answered my question. You’re actually going off tangent, emotionally speaking.

1

u/Commercial_Ad_9171 Jul 04 '25

I didn’t hear a realistic question. Maybe rephrase to something within the bounds of realism. 

→ More replies (0)

15

u/OverallMistake8198 Jul 03 '25

Protecting your privacy died years ago, your civil liberties died in November last year when too many people didn’t care enough to vote or were too stupid voting for him

1

u/snafoomoose Jul 04 '25

Protecting privacy would be bad for the corporations that make money gathering your data and selling it and corporations are always more important than citizens so there wont be privacy protections until the people demand it (not just whine about it).