This shows that in most societies mechanical devices can acceptably have certain behavior that humans cannot exhibit. People can see that a camera recording something to a video recording system is different from a person watching and photographing someone.
So these analogies by way of “what if a person were to do this other thing that implies an intent a mechanical system does not?” do not land with me.
This is a systemic problem.
There's a ton of things that are considered bad and questionably legal when small timers do them but if you spend millions producing fake bullshit paperwork to legitimize it it becomes a good thing.
I put a shed in my back yard, I'm an evil person for violating the Wetland Protection Act in my state, the city fines me and tries to turn it into leverage for stealing my house, the useful idiots cheer.
Blackrock pays some engineers to produce mumbo jumbo reports, they bulldoze the exact same f-ing "wetland" 100yd further back and put up solar panels, declare themselves to be saving the planet, and the same exact useful idiots once again cheer.
You can find a litany of examples like that in any industry, I just chose that one because I feel it's particularly on point for this audience.
Your hysterics about photographing children in a park is silly and no one but the most online ideologue would find it at all comparable. Find a better argument if you want to convince other reasonable people who just want to live in safe neighborhoods and don't care much about your verbal word games and stretched analogies
And I don’t. I think my right to privacy shouldn’t arc to nil.
Cops don’t care about stolen cars. Or stolen things from cars. I’ve given them footage of such a crime and.. nada.
And they have armies of police and armament to do the other police work. They have access to individually produced recordings that they do nothing with.
Instead of just dismantling all civic rights for _some_ property rights, maybe we should have a national convention about what police are obligated to do and their best practices to do so. Courts have already established that it is not public safety, so I personally wont support any action that simply gives them more.
> Find a better argument
That is just a reversed no-true-scottsman fallacy. If the poster's "hysterics" are a poor argument, please break down why rather than just calling it silly.
It is obvious that many in this community are against wholesale collection of information, public or private, as evidenced by the thousands of posts that state such reservations.
Posts on forums are not real life. Look at revealed preferences. Many people have cameras on their property. People prefer to live in neighborhoods with well funded police with tech resources.
Again, it's entirely reasonable to collect license plates and use it to apprehend criminals. Crime is a thing, almost everyone is affected by it at some point in their lives. I don't need a proof or study, it's common sense. You know it's true but you're just pretending you don't understand.
Go ask them if they realize their videos are being stored on a company's server somewhere and those companies employees can watch their camera feeds whenever they want
Most people have no clue, they think the camera handles all of it
I'm doubtful more than a single-digit percentage of those people would then take down those cameras.
How about we have something good w technology, like using it to catch criminals
The point the original poster is making is that this is a private system which has a high potential for abuse and often is abused, à la the posters “hysterics”, as you driveled, of people taking pictures of children and sharing it amongst themselves. Nitwit
I'm calling out, specifically, that "A camera capturing an image of a license plate that is openly displayed on a vehicle is not searching for someone's private life. It is recording what anyone standing on the same street could already observe."
... implies that a very absurd and objectionable thing like folks standing around each playground recording children and comparing notes is actually also supported by that defense and that we should consider if that defense is objectionable or not based on what it enables as much as what it is defending.
On this very forum, you can find backlash against geofencing, and here, support for flock cameras? The contradiction is bananas. Automated logging of people in public places is dystopian. You can object with that claim, fine.
You went from recording license plates on public roads to logging people in public places.
If someone steals my car, I would want to be able to give police my license plate and have them track down the person very easily by all the cameras on public roads. This is not dystopian. This is what an orderly society should look like.
You're talking about children and random stuff that's completely irrelevant. If you can't or refuse to see that, I can't convince you.
No, man, the argument is in the linked article, the one from TFA, the one I quoted. It is about public spaces and recording "what anyone standing on the same street could already observe".
That is insufficiently restrictive of a criterion because it's overly broad, and therefore can lead to absurd situations we'd never expect. Like kid tracking mafias. Any device that records "what anyone on the street observe" becomes awful creepy real quick, and we shouldn't accept that kind of argument ever.
TFA goes on to say that it breaks down at scale, and I'm trying to call out that, no, it is creepy at local scales too, because recording public activity is a bad precedent to set. I don't know how to make it more clear.
> stolen car
Having a use for an overbroad surveillance tech is only a defense for you, not for me and probably not for the courts either. It's not like they only activate it when there's a car stolen. It records all the time.
We've stated our opinions clearly now, I think the back and forth can end.
"Monitor the movements of everyone in case of the minute chance of car theft and astronomical chance of the police caring" is patently absurd. We probably need cameras in bathrooms too, in case someone passes out and needs medical attention.
Good luck with that.
I've heard plenty of stories of victims of theft and crime literally leading police to the door of their assailant and they can't get any action because this "privacy" movement has made their efforts pretty meaningless.
You're naive and you obviously have no real experience in this regard. It's just sad that you promote policies that help no one but criminals and you're completely unaware.
So the police are useless when given a precise location, and you want to give them more invasive tools to continue to be useless? That's not the argument you think it is.
There's more than one person on this forum. Why do you expect consistency? Different people have different opinions. Different people comment on different articles. HN is not a hivemind; don't expect consistency.
I should have stated something weaker: There are legitimate arguements, even on this forum, against geofencing, so entertaining arguments against camera-based always-on tracking shouldn't be automatically out of scope.
Some things are too dangerous to allow to exist, however reasonable and useful they might seem.
But sure, "word games". Sure.
Do you actually believe this?
Wow, a surveillance system that's auditable through public records. Sounds pretty good system to me. Of course there are cases of abuse but seems like the worst system besides all the rest.
This is an insane ideological battle. Another technology people talk about is recorders that are trained to identify and triangulate gun shots. The most common sense stuff doesn't pass muster with these groups so theres really no point in debating. Just know that you are in the minority, unfortunately your groups have captured some politicians.
But hopefully we'll have some choice. I would welcome this an most tech to prevent crime in my neighborhood. And you can live in a completely "free" neighborhood where criminals are free from reasonable technology measures to prevent crime.
Also, please don't do this here either—it's against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
> some important monkey
I'm genuinely asking what I'm not supposed to do and why it could be taken "literally", considering the words of my comment you quoted.
There should not be any system that allows a person to be continuously tracked at all times short of as a consequence of criminal activity with a judge signing off on it.
It's so basic that a 3rd grader gets it.
(which... we should, if we have the data to do it, why not actually enforce traffic laws?)
The cameras built for automatic speeding detection do fulfill their purpose, and I agree that it would be great to have more.
Imagine how much HN would be defending them if they started with speed cameras or something else that could be contrived as beneficial and kinda pandered to the whims of the demographics and then moved to 1984 rather than just going straight from zero to 1984.
The whole discussion would be framed as "these are critical safety infrastructure, besides they have strict controls around access and you have no privacy when driving a 2-ton death machine" and they could literally be doing facial recognition on pedestrians and tracking cyclists for years and years and years and it would take an insane mountain of beyond undeniable evidince to change the narrative of the discussion. Because once a bias prone vote base community picks a side, it's basically impossible to change. Welcome to modern discourse.