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>Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said officers are often working on scant or even inaccurate information when they respond to calls, so Beware and the Real Time
by intopieces 11y ago
>Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said officers are often working on scant or even inaccurate information when they respond to calls, so Beware and the Real Time Crime Center give them a sense of what may be behind the next door.
This assumes that the information present on the Internet is accurate, a scary thought. How difficult would it be for someone to make a profile with your first and last name on any or all of the major social networks, painting you as a gun nut, a recovering drug addict, or worse?
Allowing this system to inform police work without the least bit of public oversight is irresponsible. But that won't become a concern, I suspect, until something unfortunate happens. For now, the only stories we have about this technology's use point to the 'bad guys' being caught.
- gregmac 11y ago> But that won't become a concern, I suspect, until something unfortunate happens. And then it will just be dismissed as an unfortunate side effect, shadowed by all the times the system worked and did good. After all, isn't it worthwhile to have a SWAT team bust down a few doors and maybe kill one innocent person if it helps catch hundreds of 'bad guys'? (/sarcasm, in case it isn't obvious)
- wfo 11y agoI think the idea of someone fabricating legal-but-indicitave online information about you so that you turn red in the police's system and then setting you up to be considered a threat in an incident where the police assume you are dangerous but you are not and are goaded into shooting you is kind of a stretch. Maybe a good plot for a movie. But the program itself is somewhat troubling. But right now we have a profiling system the police use. It's 'dark skin -> almost certainly has a gun' instead of 'BEWARE says green BEWARE says red'. Is looking at public info with an explicit review-able algorithm better or worse than letting officers profile naturally? I'd agree using data like this for police purposes can be fraught with issues and is troubling but even as a privacy advocate this system seems at the very least not worse than what we currently do. Not because it is good, but because what we currently do is so bad.
- mordocai 11y agoIt'd be a pretty easy way to get rid of someone you don't like. If you use tor and public wifi it is pretty unlikely they'll track it to you and you could set them up to get beat up/killed by police by making them look super dangerous and then calling in a tip. There are people motivated enough to do things like this.
- bas 11y agoRemember that SWATting is a thing.
- AaronM 11y agoNo really, how many people online get Swatted? Now if someone goes to the extra trouble, you could end up dead.
- pjc50 11y agothe idea of someone fabricating legal-but-indicitave online information about you so that you turn red in the police's system and then setting you up to be considered a threat in an incident where the police assume you are dangerous but you are not and are goaded into shooting you is kind of a stretch SWATting is doing exactly that, with just a voice call. http://nypost.com/2014/09/15/online-gamers-use-police-hoax-swatting-to-attack-opponents/ http://nypost.com/2014/09/15/online-gamers-use-police-hoax-s...
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoThe notion of people seeing a comment they thought was sexist and hounding your employer to ensure you were fired seems kinda far fetch as well. The issue is that there are enough people out there that even far fetch scenarios will happen from time to time.
- newman314 11y agoAnd it only seems far fetched until it happens to you. Then it's front and center.
- newman314 11y ago