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Privacy and Government

In the Movie

In The Matrix (1999), whether the citizens are aware of this or not, they are incapable of having any privacy whatsoever from the government. The government in this sense are the AI sentient programs that run the simulation that the people unknowingly experience. Everyone's actions inside the matrix are just ones and zeros in the code, which the sentient programs are able to read, interpret, and build a profile of what each person does on a daily basis. This is evident once Neo is detained by the authorities, and they reveal that they know that he is a hacker that goes by the alias “Neo” as well as how he takes out his landlord’s trash. Since Neo is not directly plugged into the matrix by a port created by the sentient programs, his location cannot be tracked, but a simple dial of a cell phone by the traitorous Cypher was able to pinpoint their location, resulting in the arrival of the sentient program’s in-simulation representation as “Agents.”

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Privacy as a Theme

One of the movie's themes is warning of how a government can spy on the people it governs over, building profiles on each person and using it to their advantage. The government’s overbearing presence on the main cast reaffirms this, as the sentient programs are always on the tail of Neo and Morpheus, following the trail they leave throughout the program. Indeed, The Matrix was ahead of its time with these concerns, as some of them have already become a reality. Being under constant surveillance, like Neo was, is now possible with the invention and rolling out of AI Surveillance Camera networks in cities and small towns alike [3]. This technology has been steadily expanding and creeping deeper and deeper into our personal lives, with government spending on AI Surveillance technologies up 1,900% in the previous decade [1]. Not even your cell phone is safe, just as the cell phone in The Matrix was tracked with a ping to a tower or server, governments are already actively harvesting your location data on a daily basis [2].

Privacy in Real Life

This technology is starting to show its impacts on society, with a case example being the city of New York. In 2017, New York’s 15,000 facial recognition cameras were used as evidence in over 20,000 criminal trials, with both of those figures only increasing every year [4]. While catching genuine criminals is good for society, this technology comes with its own host of problems. These cameras are also used for “predictive policing,” where data is fed to algorithms to determine citizens at high risk for committing crimes [5]. This system is extremely error-prone, where people are falsely classified as a danger to society, either as a result of poor data entered or a fault in the algorithm [5]. People who are misclassified as “high risk” are frequently unfairly stopped or investigated by the police as a result, showing how government surveillance takes its toll on innocent people [5]. 

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References:


[1] Grady McGregor, The world’s largest surveillance system is growing—and so is the backlash, (November 3, 2020),https://fortune.com/2020/11/03/china-surveillance-system-backlash-worlds-largest/ (October 3, 2021)

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[2] Nathan Wessler, The U.S. Government Is Secretly Using Cell Phone Location Data to Track Us. We’re Suing, (December 2, 2020),https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/the-u-s-government-is-secretly-using-cell-phone-location-data-to-track-us-were-suing/ (October 3, 2021)

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[3] Steve Nouri, How AI Is Making An Impact On The Surveillance World, (December 4, 2020), https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/12/04/how-ai-is-making-an-impact-on-the-surveillance-world/ (October 3, 2021)

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[4] Amnesty International, Surveillance city: NYPD can use more than 15,000 cameras to track people using facial recognition in Manhattan, Bronx and Brooklyn, (June 3, 2021), https://amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/06/scale-new-york-police-facial-recognition-revealed/ (October 3, 2021)

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[5] Apolline Rolland, ETHICS, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND PREDICTIVE POLICING, (July 23, 2021), https://thesecuritydistillery.org/all-articles/ethics-artificial-intelligence-and-predictive-policing (October 3, 2021)

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