8 ms·

Good but don't exempt the government. Many local cities are building out vast networks. Including my very own Miami Beach Police Department.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago
Nah. That's boomer-tier dumbass thinking.
stevehawk 7y ago
If you're out in public then what privacy are you expecting?
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  I'd expect the same privacy we were getting before such technology came along.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    Which is none? Anyone can walk up to you on the street and take your picture.
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      And I'd be fine with that whenever that would happen by a person organically making the decision to do so.
      - nitrogen 7y ago
        Next gig economy job/alternate reality game: public surveillance
        mirimir 7y ago
        Yeah, like Followr in Gibson's Agency.
        ta999999171 7y ago
        Public plate scanning as a job into private databases for private investigators, repo men, and the feds to purchase already exists.
    - catalogia 7y ago
      Doing that systematically is called stalking.
    - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
      If you purposely ignore the power of new tech. Might as well say nothing changed with the invention of earth moving machinery because you could have done the same thing with a shovel.
      - TylerE 7y ago
        Way to miss the point. The invention of the bulldozer didn't change property rights.
        caconym_ 7y ago
        I don't think he's missing the point so much as you're missing his, possibly intentionally. The point is that the degree to which something is possible at scale has an impact on the practical applications of that thing, and therefore on the people subject to its application. Viz., earth moving machinery (and related engineering) has made possible things that would previously have required orders of magnitude more time and/or manpower, likely making them economically infeasible except in rare cases where money was no object. He didn't say anything about property rights. That was you... for some reason.
        Polylactic_acid 7y ago
        Our existing laws and ideas of privacy were build based on the limitations of the current tech. Yes you could take a photo of a random person in public but it wasn't very useful or harmful to do so. Now we have supercharged spyware tech we have the ability to cause a lot of harm without being in violation of any existing laws because such a thing simply wasn't possible previously.
        TylerE 7y ago
        Citation needed. Current laws predate the invention of such fundamental technology as the camera, never mind video recording.
        scrps 7y ago
        Saying technological changes don't subvert the underlying structure of a concept is like saying war didn't change after the introduction of gunpowder or flight. These technological changes add additional dimensions, they may not radically change the initial structure but they lead to radically different outcomes than anticipated which society doesn't have to accept.
    - Barrin92 7y ago
      Worthwhile to point out that this applies predominantly to the US. In many countries, public pictures can only be taken with the individuals' consent, Germany for example and many other European countries have a 'right to your own image/likeness' or a concept along similar lines. That said the difference between law enforcement collecting your data and private citizens should also be obvious.
    - stubish 7y ago
      The camera was invented and this became a problem for public figures. It became more of a problem with digital photography. Much more of a problem with camera phones. And became the privacy nightmare we are now dealing with around the rise of Twitter and Instagram.
    - dTal 7y ago
      There's a huge quantitative and qualitative difference between the possibility of something happening once, and it actually happening 24/7. It's like the difference between listening to Coltrane in the afternoon, vs operating a 24h trumpet school out of your living room.
- caconym_ 7y ago
  1. What one expects != what one thinks is right. 2. I suppose you would be ok, then, with a police officer tailing you everywhere you go, recording everything you do, everywhere you go, everything you say, and to whom, peering in the windows of your home if you forget to keep your blinds drawn? Just in case that information happens to be useful to a government at some point in the future?
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    Yep, and its also not a reasonable thing to say "If you go outside you accept total surveillance." Since going outside is a requirement for life. I find it acceptable that if I go outside I might get caught on some store security camera and that video sits on a hard drive for a week and then gets written over but I do not find it acceptable that the store camera recognizes my face and stores my presence in an easily searchable internet connected database.
    - caconym_ 7y ago
      Yeah, "find it acceptable" is good verbiage. There seems to be a lot of conflation on this subject between "expectation of privacy" in the practical sense and "expectation of privacy" in the legal sense. Like, you'd better fuckin believe I expect not to be followed by cops or secret agents everywhere I go. I expect it on the persistence forecast basis and because I understand that it's practically impossible to allocate manpower in that way, assuming they don't think I've done anything wrong in particular. I also expect that the government, local and federal both, will try to erode my effective privacy in any and every way they can afford and get away with. None of that has much to do with e.g. the fact that legally, if a cop peers in my window and sees bales of cocaine stacked on the floor of my living room, or whatever, he can come in and take them from me and arrest me.
      - ta999999171 7y ago
        With aerial planes, and facial recognition everywhere, they won't have to. They can sit at home, and watch you, and you yesterday, and if they're really intrigued, you ten years ago!
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Helen Nissenbaum, "Toward an approach to privacy in public: Challenges of information technology", Ethics and Behavior 7 (3):207 – 219 (1997) https://nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/papers/toward_an_approach.pdf https://nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/papers/toward_an_approac... (pdf) https://lawreview.law.miami.edu/privacy-in-public/ https://lawreview.law.miami.edu/privacy-in-public/
- dathinab 7y ago
  Counter question. Do you expect/are ok with that the moment you leave your house you are constantly followed by a person with a camera recording everything you do. Which shops you visite etc.? Because this is basically what this will sooner or later boil down to, except that's more subtle (i.e. instead of having a person following you you have a innumerable amount of cameras sharing the recording burden, but producing the _same end result_). Also, you might want to say you don't have to hide anything. But consider how "god" the cyber security of the police is (or most times is not). Also consider that there are frequently cases of police misbehaving by e.g. stalking or discriminating. (I mean there is a lot of police and they are human so it would be surprising if there wouldn't be such cases). Lastly consider how long it will take until police stations would want to sell some most likely very badly anonymized data about people in the city to e.g. shops.
  - Frost1x 7y ago
    People expect a degree of anonymity in public as well--disappearing into crowds or groups of people. That too will be gone soon when biological recognition services are in the hands of people. I suspect it won't be long until you can arbitrarily pull your phone, grab some video/image and/or audio data, pass a few (hundred) signature markers off to a service and identify people with a variety of metadata associated with them.
  - tictok4 7y ago
    >>Counter question. Do you expect/are ok with that the moment you leave your house you are constantly followed by a person with a camera recording everything you do. Which shops you visite etc.? >>Because this is basically what this will sooner or later boil down to This exists now in Miami Beach, Florida, USA.
  - bsenftner 7y ago
    You realize your phone is providing everything anyone tracking you needs, without FR, already, TODAY?
    - bathtub365 7y ago
- m-p-3 7y ago
  Would you agree with having a police officer following and watching you everytime you leave your house? You'd expect someone on probation to have that kind of situation.
- anonsivalley652 7y ago
  "Nothing to hide" is indicative of condoning inverted/actual totalitarianism, until the Chinese-inspired tracking system follows you around every moment of your life and gives you a social credit score that tells you that you can't fly on a plane or take a train. Or looks extra hard for any technicality felonies you commit unwittingly in your professional career as reprisal if you speak out against their abuses. So maybe you might want some privacy now? Also, I guess you won't mind publishing all of your passwords, physical location at all times, never wearing clothes, living in a transparent house and being video and audio recorded 24x7 either. (Yes, it's unreasonably absurd ad infinitum.) Still not wanting any privacy? How about other people can have as much privacy as they want, and stay the heck off my lawn? ;-P
  - unhashable 7y ago
    Boom.
  - whydoineedone 7y ago
    having a person follow you around is not the same as an AI. you're comparing apples and oranges. I think having laws to control how and when the data is accessed as well as a degree of transparency into that access along with safeguards/oversight is reasonable. to simply say that we shouldn't use the technology is luddite fearmongering. should we have kept filing cabinets full of papers instead of databases for tracking criminals across state lines as well? see? I can make bullshit comparisons too!
    - homonculus1 7y ago
      >should we have kept filing cabinets full of papers instead of databases for tracking criminals across state lines as well? Yes.
- sb057 7y ago
  It's less a matter of privacy at any given moment and more of having every given moment and location you're in public logged.
- flattone 7y ago
  Publix’s privacy expectations aside ... Facial recognition is more like being owned as a result of existing
- tluyben2 7y ago
  Here in Spain for instance; https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/spains-strict-new-limitations-on-video-surveillance.html https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/spains-strict-new-li... (basically; you cannot film/photograph anyone without their consent, including in public)
- mtgx 7y ago
  Quite a lot actually. I don't expect having someone or something register everywhere I move within a city or country. I don't expect the government identifying each protest I go to. It seems most people forget that in a supposed democracy, the people can decide how to leave pretty much however they want (caveat: if they can convince their lawmakers of that, at least). You can decide whether there is a death penalty or not. You can decide whether gay people can marry and live together or not. You can decide if the police has the "right" to monitor your movement and have access to all of your digital communications in real-time or otherwise, or not. Isn't that the purpose of a democracy? If the rulers decide everything, then it's no longer a democratic country (and sadly, yes, I don't think the US is currently a democratic country in any way, sadly - at best it's a plutocracy).
- tictok4 7y ago
  I'm expecting not to be tracked by 50 axis cameras with analytic software the moment I step out my front door and go for a walk or run in my city. To not have my path tracked or reviewed should someone unaccountable decide to do so.
  - bsenftner 7y ago
    Yet, you carry your phone.
thrwaway69 7y ago
Every thread with privacy debates make me more and more curious about what kind of things HN users want/need to hide so bad from the public ;) Maybe they own goog stocks in secret. Edit: this isn't serious.
- kick 7y ago
  Snowden has a great quote that points out how ridiculous that line of thinking is: "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
t223 7y ago
Unfortunately ANPR is becoming ubiquitous - especially around A1A. I’d support banning this as well.
- tictok4 7y ago
  I might be content with a large warning sign "LICENSE PLATE READER AHEAD" for each location.
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    So in the end people who don't want to be tracked in their movement by the government only have the option to drive through small back-in-the-woods roads, while the new "highway toll" is to have your data harvested?
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    Telling people you're doing something, but giving them no other options, isn't good enough. There are roads near me which do "toll by mail" where they snap a picture of your license plate, and then bill you the toll even if you don't have EZ-Pass. There are signs which announce this, but unless you're planning to drive 90 minutes out of your way, those sections of highway aren't avoidable. Even if there are other viable options, the average citizen doesn't really understand the implication of losing their privacy, so they can't make an educated decision about whether to give it up. A simple sign doesn't solve that fundamental problem.
    - tictok4 7y ago
      It'd inform those that weren't aware at least... Some of which may find it reprehensible. And maybe lobby to change.
      - kerkeslager 7y ago
        Sure, it's a step in the right direction, but you said "I'd be content with...", i.e. you're content with stopping there, which isn't nearly a good enough spot to stop.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago

Nah. That's boomer-tier dumbass thinking.

stevehawk 7y ago

If you're out in public then what privacy are you expecting?

mehrdadn 7y ago
I'd expect the same privacy we were getting before such technology came along.
- TylerE 7y ago
  Which is none? Anyone can walk up to you on the street and take your picture.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    And I'd be fine with that whenever that would happen by a person organically making the decision to do so.
    - nitrogen 7y ago
      Next gig economy job/alternate reality game: public surveillance
      - mirimir 7y ago
        Yeah, like Followr in Gibson's Agency.
      - ta999999171 7y ago
        Public plate scanning as a job into private databases for private investigators, repo men, and the feds to purchase already exists.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Doing that systematically is called stalking.
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    If you purposely ignore the power of new tech. Might as well say nothing changed with the invention of earth moving machinery because you could have done the same thing with a shovel.
    - TylerE 7y ago
      Way to miss the point. The invention of the bulldozer didn't change property rights.
      - caconym_ 7y ago
        I don't think he's missing the point so much as you're missing his, possibly intentionally. The point is that the degree to which something is possible at scale has an impact on the practical applications of that thing, and therefore on the people subject to its application. Viz., earth moving machinery (and related engineering) has made possible things that would previously have required orders of magnitude more time and/or manpower, likely making them economically infeasible except in rare cases where money was no object. He didn't say anything about property rights. That was you... for some reason.
      - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
        Our existing laws and ideas of privacy were build based on the limitations of the current tech. Yes you could take a photo of a random person in public but it wasn't very useful or harmful to do so. Now we have supercharged spyware tech we have the ability to cause a lot of harm without being in violation of any existing laws because such a thing simply wasn't possible previously.
        TylerE 7y ago
        Citation needed. Current laws predate the invention of such fundamental technology as the camera, never mind video recording.
      - scrps 7y ago
        Saying technological changes don't subvert the underlying structure of a concept is like saying war didn't change after the introduction of gunpowder or flight. These technological changes add additional dimensions, they may not radically change the initial structure but they lead to radically different outcomes than anticipated which society doesn't have to accept.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    Worthwhile to point out that this applies predominantly to the US. In many countries, public pictures can only be taken with the individuals' consent, Germany for example and many other European countries have a 'right to your own image/likeness' or a concept along similar lines. That said the difference between law enforcement collecting your data and private citizens should also be obvious.
  - stubish 7y ago
    The camera was invented and this became a problem for public figures. It became more of a problem with digital photography. Much more of a problem with camera phones. And became the privacy nightmare we are now dealing with around the rise of Twitter and Instagram.
  - dTal 7y ago
    There's a huge quantitative and qualitative difference between the possibility of something happening once, and it actually happening 24/7. It's like the difference between listening to Coltrane in the afternoon, vs operating a 24h trumpet school out of your living room.
caconym_ 7y ago
1. What one expects != what one thinks is right. 2. I suppose you would be ok, then, with a police officer tailing you everywhere you go, recording everything you do, everywhere you go, everything you say, and to whom, peering in the windows of your home if you forget to keep your blinds drawn? Just in case that information happens to be useful to a government at some point in the future?
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  Yep, and its also not a reasonable thing to say "If you go outside you accept total surveillance." Since going outside is a requirement for life. I find it acceptable that if I go outside I might get caught on some store security camera and that video sits on a hard drive for a week and then gets written over but I do not find it acceptable that the store camera recognizes my face and stores my presence in an easily searchable internet connected database.
  - caconym_ 7y ago
    Yeah, "find it acceptable" is good verbiage. There seems to be a lot of conflation on this subject between "expectation of privacy" in the practical sense and "expectation of privacy" in the legal sense. Like, you'd better fuckin believe I expect not to be followed by cops or secret agents everywhere I go. I expect it on the persistence forecast basis and because I understand that it's practically impossible to allocate manpower in that way, assuming they don't think I've done anything wrong in particular. I also expect that the government, local and federal both, will try to erode my effective privacy in any and every way they can afford and get away with. None of that has much to do with e.g. the fact that legally, if a cop peers in my window and sees bales of cocaine stacked on the floor of my living room, or whatever, he can come in and take them from me and arrest me.
    - ta999999171 7y ago
      With aerial planes, and facial recognition everywhere, they won't have to. They can sit at home, and watch you, and you yesterday, and if they're really intrigued, you ten years ago!
dredmorbius 7y ago
Helen Nissenbaum, "Toward an approach to privacy in public: Challenges of information technology", Ethics and Behavior 7 (3):207 – 219 (1997) https://nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/papers/toward_an_approach.pdf https://nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/papers/toward_an_approac... (pdf) https://lawreview.law.miami.edu/privacy-in-public/ https://lawreview.law.miami.edu/privacy-in-public/
dathinab 7y ago
Counter question. Do you expect/are ok with that the moment you leave your house you are constantly followed by a person with a camera recording everything you do. Which shops you visite etc.? Because this is basically what this will sooner or later boil down to, except that's more subtle (i.e. instead of having a person following you you have a innumerable amount of cameras sharing the recording burden, but producing the _same end result_). Also, you might want to say you don't have to hide anything. But consider how "god" the cyber security of the police is (or most times is not). Also consider that there are frequently cases of police misbehaving by e.g. stalking or discriminating. (I mean there is a lot of police and they are human so it would be surprising if there wouldn't be such cases). Lastly consider how long it will take until police stations would want to sell some most likely very badly anonymized data about people in the city to e.g. shops.
- Frost1x 7y ago
  People expect a degree of anonymity in public as well--disappearing into crowds or groups of people. That too will be gone soon when biological recognition services are in the hands of people. I suspect it won't be long until you can arbitrarily pull your phone, grab some video/image and/or audio data, pass a few (hundred) signature markers off to a service and identify people with a variety of metadata associated with them.
- tictok4 7y ago
  >>Counter question. Do you expect/are ok with that the moment you leave your house you are constantly followed by a person with a camera recording everything you do. Which shops you visite etc.? >>Because this is basically what this will sooner or later boil down to This exists now in Miami Beach, Florida, USA.
- bsenftner 7y ago
  You realize your phone is providing everything anyone tracking you needs, without FR, already, TODAY?
  - bathtub365 7y ago
m-p-3 7y ago
Would you agree with having a police officer following and watching you everytime you leave your house? You'd expect someone on probation to have that kind of situation.
anonsivalley652 7y ago
"Nothing to hide" is indicative of condoning inverted/actual totalitarianism, until the Chinese-inspired tracking system follows you around every moment of your life and gives you a social credit score that tells you that you can't fly on a plane or take a train. Or looks extra hard for any technicality felonies you commit unwittingly in your professional career as reprisal if you speak out against their abuses. So maybe you might want some privacy now? Also, I guess you won't mind publishing all of your passwords, physical location at all times, never wearing clothes, living in a transparent house and being video and audio recorded 24x7 either. (Yes, it's unreasonably absurd ad infinitum.) Still not wanting any privacy? How about other people can have as much privacy as they want, and stay the heck off my lawn? ;-P
- unhashable 7y ago
  Boom.
- whydoineedone 7y ago
  having a person follow you around is not the same as an AI. you're comparing apples and oranges. I think having laws to control how and when the data is accessed as well as a degree of transparency into that access along with safeguards/oversight is reasonable. to simply say that we shouldn't use the technology is luddite fearmongering. should we have kept filing cabinets full of papers instead of databases for tracking criminals across state lines as well? see? I can make bullshit comparisons too!
  - homonculus1 7y ago
    >should we have kept filing cabinets full of papers instead of databases for tracking criminals across state lines as well? Yes.
sb057 7y ago
It's less a matter of privacy at any given moment and more of having every given moment and location you're in public logged.
flattone 7y ago
Publix’s privacy expectations aside ... Facial recognition is more like being owned as a result of existing
tluyben2 7y ago
Here in Spain for instance; https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/spains-strict-new-limitations-on-video-surveillance.html https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/spains-strict-new-li... (basically; you cannot film/photograph anyone without their consent, including in public)
mtgx 7y ago
Quite a lot actually. I don't expect having someone or something register everywhere I move within a city or country. I don't expect the government identifying each protest I go to. It seems most people forget that in a supposed democracy, the people can decide how to leave pretty much however they want (caveat: if they can convince their lawmakers of that, at least). You can decide whether there is a death penalty or not. You can decide whether gay people can marry and live together or not. You can decide if the police has the "right" to monitor your movement and have access to all of your digital communications in real-time or otherwise, or not. Isn't that the purpose of a democracy? If the rulers decide everything, then it's no longer a democratic country (and sadly, yes, I don't think the US is currently a democratic country in any way, sadly - at best it's a plutocracy).
tictok4 7y ago
I'm expecting not to be tracked by 50 axis cameras with analytic software the moment I step out my front door and go for a walk or run in my city. To not have my path tracked or reviewed should someone unaccountable decide to do so.
- bsenftner 7y ago
  Yet, you carry your phone.

thrwaway69 7y ago

Every thread with privacy debates make me more and more curious about what kind of things HN users want/need to hide so bad from the public ;) Maybe they own goog stocks in secret. Edit: this isn't serious.

kick 7y ago
Snowden has a great quote that points out how ridiculous that line of thinking is: "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."

t223 7y ago

Unfortunately ANPR is becoming ubiquitous - especially around A1A. I’d support banning this as well.

tictok4 7y ago
I might be content with a large warning sign "LICENSE PLATE READER AHEAD" for each location.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  So in the end people who don't want to be tracked in their movement by the government only have the option to drive through small back-in-the-woods roads, while the new "highway toll" is to have your data harvested?
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  Telling people you're doing something, but giving them no other options, isn't good enough. There are roads near me which do "toll by mail" where they snap a picture of your license plate, and then bill you the toll even if you don't have EZ-Pass. There are signs which announce this, but unless you're planning to drive 90 minutes out of your way, those sections of highway aren't avoidable. Even if there are other viable options, the average citizen doesn't really understand the implication of losing their privacy, so they can't make an educated decision about whether to give it up. A simple sign doesn't solve that fundamental problem.
  - tictok4 7y ago
    It'd inform those that weren't aware at least... Some of which may find it reprehensible. And maybe lobby to change.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      Sure, it's a step in the right direction, but you said "I'd be content with...", i.e. you're content with stopping there, which isn't nearly a good enough spot to stop.