Giving Compass' Take:

• This Effective Altruism argues that striking a balance in surveillance — between protecting people's privacy and making sure we're all safe — is always tricky, but future technology may provide tools to ease people's fears.

• In an ideal world, automation may be able to execute surveillance without invasive data collection. This will require transparency and accountability for those building the new tech.

• Here's how such matters apply in to the philanthropy world: Global health has a patient privacy problem.

Too much surveillance can lead to privacy violations and creeping authoritarianism, but too little can lead to catastrophe. In general, debates about surveillance involve taking a position on the tradeoff between privacy and security. But what if we could have it both ways?

A useful thing to do would be to look for opportunities to reduce these two trade offs. This means looking for ways to make surveillance more accountable and privacy preserving. While this sounds a bit idealistic, we can get some intuition that it is possible by looking at different forms of surveillance which are applied today, and that definitely vary quite significantly in how much they protect people's privacy. So if we were trying to get into the case of a bag that may or may not have a bomb in it, suppose that instead of just opening the bag, a police officer has access to a bomb sniffing dog. In this case, they can have the dog come up to the bag and sniff it. If the dog barks, the officer opens the bag and search. If the dog doesn't bark, the officer doesn't.

A more sort of abstract case for optimism is that in the future, it's likely that surveillance and law enforcement will become more heavily automated. While this has a number of scary components to it, there's also some reasons to think that this trend may actually make it easier to ensure privacy and accountability.

Read the full article about the future of surveillance by Ben Garfinkel at effectivealtruism.org.