Government asks the people to delete old photos and email to free up resources, as the government itself ramps up it's data retention requirements to conduct mass surveillance of the people.
Slightly far-fetched, but I wonder if there is not a more nefarious goal behind this recommendation.
It goes like this: Imagine that, as a government, you want to be able to reshape a narrative in the future, of the type "Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia".
For that, you need to be able affirm, without to much push-back, that the view you are trying to re-model, has always been as you claim it was. This implies that there are not too many "historical traces" people can uses are references to successfully argue against your reshaping.
What's on the internet is not too difficult to deal with. You can rely on SEO rigging and AI slope to drown any useful information in an almost unpenetrable sludge of garbage. Worst case, you can use the pretext of child protection to pull down some sites or go after some hosting companies keeping information you would like to see removed.
What's left is the personal records of your citizens. That's a bit more tricky, because it is less easily accessible. It might even be encrypted enough for it to be a nuisance.
Now, if you can convince users that they are "sparing the environment" by deleting their data, they might slowly make it a habit to delete information they don't use that often. Old pictures, invoices, etc. And in the long run, also delete any tangible information that could be used to make your government accountable for the degradation of quality of life, life expectancy, etc.
Even better, by deleting old pictures and memories, you also delete, at the same time, the association thoughts that might come with those resources. A picture at a train station might remind you of a certain convenient train connection that existed in the past, and got removed after privatization. Or a picture of a ticket fare could remind you how disproportionately prices have increased with respect to wages, etc.
With iCloud encryption being no longer offered in the UK, and Apple having already built the infrastructure needed to fingerprint and snitch on users possessing specific images, erasing events from the citizens' devices is entirely possible. Sooner or later this power will be abused.
Of course we laugh at this nonsense here, but the general public will swallow it. We should be aware that it is not just in this one area of policy/technology that the governments brightest minds recommend nonsense, it very likely applies to all areas of policy and recommendations. [1].
UK government inexplicably tells citizens to delete old emails and pictures to save water during national drought — 'data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems'
Have we considered that the major issue is lack of investment in reservoirs and general infrastructure including power, for many years to keep up with demand.
We have considered that 99% of the problem is from our institutions and the best way for them to deflect that criticism is to give the people something they should have done for the 1% of the problem that they can influence.
There's this population-management strategy that involves giving people something useless but (emotionally or intellectually) difficult to do; it creates psychological buy-in with the stated objective.
We saw it a lot during the pandemic, between the time when we realized the pathogen was airborne and the time we stopped putting up hand sanitizer stations every few feet; and again, when we learned that perspex shields made airflow worse, not better, but kept them installed (and kept putting up more.)
You also see it in wartime a lot; e.g. the 'if you see something, say something' campaign after 9/11 mostly just got you put in touch with a very bored phone operator who filed your complaint with the ten thousand others that, let us be honest here, mostly amounted to, "I saw a brown person."
"There is nothing you can do" is anathema to any campaign.
Government asks the people to delete old photos and email to free up resources, as the government itself ramps up it's data retention requirements to conduct mass surveillance of the people.
Slightly far-fetched, but I wonder if there is not a more nefarious goal behind this recommendation.
It goes like this: Imagine that, as a government, you want to be able to reshape a narrative in the future, of the type "Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia".
For that, you need to be able affirm, without to much push-back, that the view you are trying to re-model, has always been as you claim it was. This implies that there are not too many "historical traces" people can uses are references to successfully argue against your reshaping.
What's on the internet is not too difficult to deal with. You can rely on SEO rigging and AI slope to drown any useful information in an almost unpenetrable sludge of garbage. Worst case, you can use the pretext of child protection to pull down some sites or go after some hosting companies keeping information you would like to see removed.
What's left is the personal records of your citizens. That's a bit more tricky, because it is less easily accessible. It might even be encrypted enough for it to be a nuisance.
Now, if you can convince users that they are "sparing the environment" by deleting their data, they might slowly make it a habit to delete information they don't use that often. Old pictures, invoices, etc. And in the long run, also delete any tangible information that could be used to make your government accountable for the degradation of quality of life, life expectancy, etc.
Even better, by deleting old pictures and memories, you also delete, at the same time, the association thoughts that might come with those resources. A picture at a train station might remind you of a certain convenient train connection that existed in the past, and got removed after privatization. Or a picture of a ticket fare could remind you how disproportionately prices have increased with respect to wages, etc.
Just a far-fetched thought..
With iCloud encryption being no longer offered in the UK, and Apple having already built the infrastructure needed to fingerprint and snitch on users possessing specific images, erasing events from the citizens' devices is entirely possible. Sooner or later this power will be abused.
> erasing events from the citizens' devices is entirely possible. Sooner or later this power will be abused.
Absolutely. Which is why they forced the removal of the encryption in the first place.
Our wonderful government “news” agency trying to legitimise this while also playing lip-service to balanced reporting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cwy05zznyplt?post=asset%3A3e...
> Overall, the agency told BBC Verify that deleting 1,000 emails with attachments would save approximately 77.5 litres of water per year.
I very, very strongly doubt that.
I don't doubt the agency said that.
I bet that was the kind of stuff where everyone on the office was supposed to contribute an idea.
No one would contribute such an idiotic thing. This was obviously AI generated.
I am afraid that you underestimate the power of organic, human stupidity.
Not enough attendance on public servants meetings?
...and then one gets picked at random.
Delete emails to save water.
It’s clapping for carers every Thursday at 8 pm, all over again, haha.
Why do I instinctively feel like they want to memory-hole something?
Because it’s them.
Of course we laugh at this nonsense here, but the general public will swallow it. We should be aware that it is not just in this one area of policy/technology that the governments brightest minds recommend nonsense, it very likely applies to all areas of policy and recommendations. [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Flagging the previous submission and then submitting the same article and title is a bit shit behavior.
And did someone do that?
True title.
UK government inexplicably tells citizens to delete old emails and pictures to save water during national drought — 'data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems'
Data at rest, also? Meanwhile, same govt. invests in LLMs slurping power by the megawatt, but surely that is an unproblem.
"ChatGPT, come up with a list of ways that people can save water"
Have we considered that the major issue is lack of investment in reservoirs and general infrastructure including power, for many years to keep up with demand.
We have considered that 99% of the problem is from our institutions and the best way for them to deflect that criticism is to give the people something they should have done for the 1% of the problem that they can influence.
There's this population-management strategy that involves giving people something useless but (emotionally or intellectually) difficult to do; it creates psychological buy-in with the stated objective.
We saw it a lot during the pandemic, between the time when we realized the pathogen was airborne and the time we stopped putting up hand sanitizer stations every few feet; and again, when we learned that perspex shields made airflow worse, not better, but kept them installed (and kept putting up more.)
You also see it in wartime a lot; e.g. the 'if you see something, say something' campaign after 9/11 mostly just got you put in touch with a very bored phone operator who filed your complaint with the ten thousand others that, let us be honest here, mostly amounted to, "I saw a brown person."
"There is nothing you can do" is anathema to any campaign.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877292
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