The Things I've seen
I often find that people don't seem to believe the things I've seen and done. When they finely do start to believe me, they are always apologizing. I don't tell them the crap to get sympathy but to get them to understand that the world they live in, is not what they think.
Back in Michigan, I even slept in a portable chemical toilet one night in a snowstorm.
I ride the city busses a lot. People use smartphones to pay the fares? I see the same in the big box stores and gas stations. It was bad enough when we used credit cards, now we use phones? Why doesn't that scare the shit out of you? Every day, I see people giving up their privacy for “convenience” because the corporations tell you that its easier.
To quote Mr. Edward Snowden: “People really don't realize how utterly dependent modern surveillance is on the idea that everybody is carrying a phone — which is always tracked. Their car has a cellular modem in it — which is always tracked. 99% of investigation is one guy and a search box. If you're not low-hanging fruit, you aren't gonna merit the Eye of Sauron of manual, well-resourced, focused team attention—and if you did, you probably planned ahead for it, right? Because it's not a mystery what would get you on Santa's Naughty List.
Anyway, the point is that even in a big city, the phoneless guy in a “covid” mask is going to be invisible to anything less than that exhaustive manual investigation — at least for a few more years. That may go away once they start networking all the cameras and having AI start trying to match up clothing sets moving from camera to camera, but that capability is hard to hide, so it'll be in the news. And it won't work that well in places with less camera density and, perhaps, for people who wear the most-common outfits (the visual equivalent of a “shared fingerprint”).
Remember: Phones are useful, but dangerous. And the people who will still wear covid masks to the beach are helping to normalize facial obscurity—regardless of their intention. Don't be mean to them. Encourage them to wear them everywhere. For passport photos. In police booking photos. At the customs desk. Family portraits! The sky is the limit—let them push the boundaries so that you don't have to.” at [Mr Snowden]