3 ms·

It blows my mind how quickly people put up home cameras with zero thought to * (1) what gets captured * (2) who gets what gets captured Walk down the street

by gffrd 4y ago

It blows my mind how quickly people put up home cameras with zero thought to * (1) what gets captured * (2) who gets what gets captured Walk down the street of any middle-class neighborhood in a major suburb: a healthy chunk have cameras. Let's say 60%. So, you and your family are being passively surveilled on a massive scale … for the benefit of someone who's not you preventing another someone from stealing their bike. Is this a reasonable tradeoff? Is it fair to others?

Pakdef 4y ago
In addition to that, they pay a lot for the service... someone I know just had 3 cameras installed and pays $80 a month for cloud storage... Buying your own and hosting it yourself would pay for itself in just a couple months with something like Reolink RLC-510A and a cheap VPS https://www.lowendstock.com/ https://www.lowendstock.com/.
helen___keller 4y ago
> Is this a reasonable tradeoff? Is it fair to others? Devils advocate: You word this in a way that implies it is negative, but the fact so many people do it suggests many or most people don’t agree with you. Maybe having cameras around makes the average person feel safe? It sucks for you as a privacy minded individual, but ultimately who are you to tell your neighbors they can’t have cameras on their property? The street itself is public, there’s no implied right to privacy for what can be seen from the public road. Truthfully many American suburbs have only ever had privacy by chance, many places in more urban locales there’s always eyes from the public street. It’s just happened that because cars are efficient and convenient, nobody walks by or spends time on the sidewalk in the modern American suburb. That doesn’t mean they have no right to do so.
- gffrd 4y ago
  > Maybe having cameras around makes the average person feel safe? Interesting point! Attempted interpretation: "I'm a person walking by a house that has a camera, and it makes me feel better knowing there's a recording of what's happening to me … in the event that I'm robbed/harassed/assaulted/etc." Also: no need for an alibi, when there's record of you being pretty much everywhere. I wonder if anyone has studied whether cameras being present in communities increase the net level of trust with which people operate? I would assume the net benefit would be "everyone's less worried/suspicious, so operates with greater baseline trust." This feels like similar territory as social media, where we (humans) tend to think the system operates with the same set of rules/principles as normal socialization, but vastly underestimate the scale in which we're now operating.
cm42 4y ago
I suppose it's a reasonable tradeoff to people who can't quantify risk and treat everything as uncertain, have too much money, too few problems, oh! - and whose neighbor just got one. The same busy-bodies posting long Facebook screeds about how they narrowly avoided a pack of child traffickers at Local Suburbia Shopping Plaza with a picture of two hispanic dudes in work clothes and a work van buying diapers. I find them to be generally unconcerned with anybody else except for the monthly PFP change.

by gffrd 4y ago

Pakdef 4y ago

In addition to that, they pay a lot for the service... someone I know just had 3 cameras installed and pays $80 a month for cloud storage... Buying your own and hosting it yourself would pay for itself in just a couple months with something like Reolink RLC-510A and a cheap VPS https://www.lowendstock.com/ https://www.lowendstock.com/.

helen___keller 4y ago

> Is this a reasonable tradeoff? Is it fair to others? Devils advocate: You word this in a way that implies it is negative, but the fact so many people do it suggests many or most people don’t agree with you. Maybe having cameras around makes the average person feel safe? It sucks for you as a privacy minded individual, but ultimately who are you to tell your neighbors they can’t have cameras on their property? The street itself is public, there’s no implied right to privacy for what can be seen from the public road. Truthfully many American suburbs have only ever had privacy by chance, many places in more urban locales there’s always eyes from the public street. It’s just happened that because cars are efficient and convenient, nobody walks by or spends time on the sidewalk in the modern American suburb. That doesn’t mean they have no right to do so.

gffrd 4y ago
> Maybe having cameras around makes the average person feel safe? Interesting point! Attempted interpretation: "I'm a person walking by a house that has a camera, and it makes me feel better knowing there's a recording of what's happening to me … in the event that I'm robbed/harassed/assaulted/etc." Also: no need for an alibi, when there's record of you being pretty much everywhere. I wonder if anyone has studied whether cameras being present in communities increase the net level of trust with which people operate? I would assume the net benefit would be "everyone's less worried/suspicious, so operates with greater baseline trust." This feels like similar territory as social media, where we (humans) tend to think the system operates with the same set of rules/principles as normal socialization, but vastly underestimate the scale in which we're now operating.

cm42 4y ago

I suppose it's a reasonable tradeoff to people who can't quantify risk and treat everything as uncertain, have too much money, too few problems, oh! - and whose neighbor just got one. The same busy-bodies posting long Facebook screeds about how they narrowly avoided a pack of child traffickers at Local Suburbia Shopping Plaza with a picture of two hispanic dudes in work clothes and a work van buying diapers. I find them to be generally unconcerned with anybody else except for the monthly PFP change.