I have lived in {} since the mid 2000’s. Stalking by strangers and acquaintances has gotten out of hand in (at least) the past five years. (Any such behavior against me has since calmed down in the past year, after reworking my digital devices, but the effects have had significant impact on me. I also dropped out and gave up on life this past year, which may make me a much less interesting target to harass.)

Such technologies are part of an ongoing increase in information and power asymmetries that can be abused to harass innocent competitors, as has happened to me. I’ve had strangers come up to me in public and discuss specifics of my private life, including non public details about my since failed startup, and personal/private comms. Concurrently, I was falsely accused of a serious crime and was put under the microscope and harassed on a regular basis by strangers regarding this. It became apparent that my life was completely owned at that point, digitally and publicly. It amounted to ongoing bullying which really pushed me beyond thresholds of learned helplessness already long since established.

There seems to be no recourse against this behavior. If you have a digital “kick me” sign attached to your back, there’s little you can do to remove it, short of avoiding being in public. Or, as in my case, one can drop out of life, go homeless, give up all of your assets, and prepare for suicide. Strangers can verbally harass/own/gaslight others, maintain perfect plausible deniability, have perfect encryption to cover their tracks, and devastate people who aren’t equipped to deal with this behavior.

Evolution of survival going forward is trending towards resilience to increasingly sophisticated psychological violence and harassment, as well as the ability to accept being an unwitting voyeur in all public places.

One of the most difficult aspects to this was reporting these incidents (admittedly, under duress in the heat of the moment), and being told that I must be delusional and mentally ill. To me, the delusion is genuinely believing that technology is not used to stalk or harass people in public. As a counterpoint, I will say that being stalked repeatedly does increase your paranoia, so you’ll start to look over your shoulder at every turn. If you believe that all of your devices and accounts are hacked and being used to harass you, the complete lack of digital privacy can have a profound impact on sanity.

To this day, I’m utterly freaked out by the presence of personal cameras, to the point where I’ve nudged people in the community to be aware of the cultural impact of holding phones vertically in coffee shops or other public places. As most people are of course good natured, I’ve noticed a trend in the places that I frequent towards people being more prudent in this regard. I personally cover the public facing back camera on my phone with my index finger as a matter of habit by now, to avoid pointing it at strangers in public. Personally I believe responsibility amongst the tech elite would include immediate installation of physical shutters that open only when a camera is in use. Shutters can be colored blue or yellow, perhaps as a culturally standardized signal that the camera is “closed”.

There’s clear benefit to tech such as Clearview but the potential for abuse by irresponsible or immoral actors is tremendous. As someone pointed out, such tech can be rolled yourself. It seems that the problem is therefore out of control. Welcome to the age of unwitting voyeurism.

Edit: I did make a comment on the linked NYT article, including my real identity. In this comment, I called out at least one person involved in shenanigans against me. This person name dropped {} as someone who would recognize him, before he trashed my startup without seeing it, encouraged me to drop out of my continuing Computer Science studies at the local University (due to the bad rep I would receive for doing so as a middle age adult, so he said), and then threatened my career/reputation if I told the truth about specific stalking incidents, all in one conversation. Not long thereafter, I experienced a stalking incident in public by two men with walkie talkies who harassed me about said startup, mentioning non-public specifics about an engagement we were seeking. In retrospect, these men could have been using tech such as Clearview to more easily enable their stalking and harassment of me. The location of this incident was the playground of wealthy folks in my city’s most affluent public area. My comment on the NYT article was not approved by the moderators, understandably.