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I don't know (I'm just a Brit watching from afar), but I'd assume the LAPD have databases full of information on citizens, of course not shared with the public

I don't know (I'm just a Brit watching from afar), but I'd assume the LAPD have databases full of information on citizens, of course not shared with the public web, only shared with police forces, mostly. The public web though is how citizens share information with each other, I'm not sure excluding police officers would make it better. Seeking an equivalence here also strikes me as a false equivalence - the power balance between an LAPD office and a citizen is not equal.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago
So how would you feel if there was a database of tech employees? Tech companies have absolute power over people’s lives and a huge amount of private information used for malicious purposes. Would you be happy if it said “Here are tim and james, here is where they live, make them accountable!”?
- haswell 4y ago
  > Tech companies have absolute power over people’s lives The kind of power wielded by tech companies is not the same kind of power wielded by the police. Comparing them directly in this way runs into some major false equivalence problems. I still see major potential for abuse of such a database and I’m not claiming it is without issue. But logging an interaction with an armed public servant who has the power to detain/arrest you, who works for an organization that has a worrisome tendency towards shooting civilians, and whose role is to be a sworn servant and protector of the public - cannot be casually compared with some vague notion of “big tech has your data”. For sale of argument, if we did dignify that comparison, the first problem is that the vast majority of workers in tech have no such power at all. The rank and file are generally powerless. Opportunities for abuse are generally concentrated to a small number of people with access. The same cannot be said about the police force.
  - briandear 4y ago
    A tendency towards shooting civilians? Here’s every officer involved shooting in Los Angeles for 2022: https://da.lacounty.gov/reports/ois/2022 https://da.lacounty.gov/reports/ois/2022 When reading the reports it seems that those shootings were not unreasonable given the circumstances.
    - jstarfish 4y ago
      > When reading the reports it seems that those shootings were not unreasonable given the circumstances. With cops and teenagers, the only narrative you're ever going to hear is whichever one paints them in a sympathetic light. They would never do anything to provoke a violent response from the subject, no sir. They always announce their presence loud and clear and never surprise volatile subjects. They always opt for nonlethal measures before pulling out the service weapon. Both cliques will also stick to their story even when you discover video evidence directly contradicting it.
  - vuln 4y ago
    > The kind of power wielded by tech companies is not the same kind of power wielded by the police. Police and Law Enforcement salivate at the data and control Social Media/Tech companies have. One could look to the twitter files to see how much the US government attempted and successfully controlled a public company to push narratives of the current regime and or censor dissenting views. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files Some tinfoils out there belief the Facebook (now Facebook) was originally LifeLog. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog The US gov and LEO have made social media a _national security issue_ which gives the government inferred power to abuse the data collected by these companies.
    - haswell 4y ago
      > Police and Law Enforcement salivate at the data and control Social Media/Tech companies have. Of course they do, but the core point remains: the kind of power wielded is not the same. Pinterest can’t show up at your door with guns based on the things you pin. The reason police salivate is because of the possibilities unlocked by having such data while also being “the law”. I’m in no way claiming that this power is not dangerous for other reasons in the hands of tech companies, but tech having this data means something entirely different than LEO having this data. The implications and failure modes are quite different and worthy of examination.
      - vuln 4y ago
        Sorry I guess I'm not keeping up. If tech has the data, law enforcement has access to said data. Simple as.
        ofchnofc 4y ago
        [dead]
        CatWChainsaw 4y ago
        Law enforcement has a mandate and "lawful" monopoly on violence. Pinterest does not. A private citizen acting as a vigilante does not.
  - Vaslo 4y ago
    I find the fact that I cannot post certain ideas to Reddit in my local city subreddit without getting downvoted to Oblivion and then no longer can post at all due to negative karma problematic. In fact, I find this way more problematic for me than s handful of asshole cops. Should I start posting information about community managers or employees at Reddit who don’t help in this situation? Doesn’t matter what your equivalency argument is. This is problematic and opens the door to abuse.
    - bigbillheck 4y ago
      What kind of ideas?
      - Vaslo 4y ago
        Ideas like I’m not pro-Union and tend to vote republican. Just because people don’t like a side doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have voice. I’m certainly not against investigating and punishing bad cops to the full extent of the law,but to post the names of all officers, many who are doing their job right and just, and many of whom are undercover? That’s ridiculous.
    - hobs 4y ago
      Sign up a new account I guess? If the cops decide to beat your ass or follow you in reality your life is meaningfully changed, crying about post karma on reddit is so far divorced from the reality of the situation of cops killing people, stealing, and getting away with it. My partner is an attorney and she just sued the cops for improperly looking up a specific woman tens of thousands of times, checking in on her, harassing her, following her, stalking her with his cop authority. Now imagine the opposite, you are on reddit and someone wont stop replying to your comments, which one of these might need some accountability?
      - Vaslo 4y ago
        How does one cop unlawfully looking up and harassing someone justify producing all the names of all the officers including those who are undercover? That’s like asking for every mod name to be revealed on Hacker News in order to be able to pushback against a ban. I don’t worry about cops beating my ass. I always comply when I’m confronted and it’s amazing but they treat me with respect. I also don’t commit violent crimes, that helps as well.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  > if there was a database of tech employees You mean kind of like LinkedIn? Of course LinkedIn has the whole consent thing going for it, people make their accounts there willingly (if we ignore the whole address-book farming they do/did). On the other hand the typical LinkedIn profile contains way more information, about people who are way less critical to public safety. But neither this LAPD database nor LinkedIn tell you where people live.
- distant_hat 4y ago
  I don't remember the last time some tech company employees got together to beat someone to death and the companies mounted a defense for those employees.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
    Facebook employees triggered a genocide in Myanmar, does that count?
    - harimau777 4y ago
      Individual Facebook employees triggered a genocide?
      - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
        I don't think any of them were conjoined twins or borg-like linked collectives if that's what you mean. So yes they were all individual people.
        ok_dad 4y ago
        Which ones, specifically?
        Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
        The ones that ignored the warnings of what was happening and did not enforce facebook's own policies on hate speech.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bigbillheck 4y ago
  I don't generally have to worry about a DBA shooting my dog.
- antifa 4y ago
  > how would you feel if there was a database of tech employees? There's probably 100 recruiter companies.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

So how would you feel if there was a database of tech employees? Tech companies have absolute power over people’s lives and a huge amount of private information used for malicious purposes. Would you be happy if it said “Here are tim and james, here is where they live, make them accountable!”?

haswell 4y ago
> Tech companies have absolute power over people’s lives The kind of power wielded by tech companies is not the same kind of power wielded by the police. Comparing them directly in this way runs into some major false equivalence problems. I still see major potential for abuse of such a database and I’m not claiming it is without issue. But logging an interaction with an armed public servant who has the power to detain/arrest you, who works for an organization that has a worrisome tendency towards shooting civilians, and whose role is to be a sworn servant and protector of the public - cannot be casually compared with some vague notion of “big tech has your data”. For sale of argument, if we did dignify that comparison, the first problem is that the vast majority of workers in tech have no such power at all. The rank and file are generally powerless. Opportunities for abuse are generally concentrated to a small number of people with access. The same cannot be said about the police force.
- briandear 4y ago
  A tendency towards shooting civilians? Here’s every officer involved shooting in Los Angeles for 2022: https://da.lacounty.gov/reports/ois/2022 https://da.lacounty.gov/reports/ois/2022 When reading the reports it seems that those shootings were not unreasonable given the circumstances.
  - jstarfish 4y ago
    > When reading the reports it seems that those shootings were not unreasonable given the circumstances. With cops and teenagers, the only narrative you're ever going to hear is whichever one paints them in a sympathetic light. They would never do anything to provoke a violent response from the subject, no sir. They always announce their presence loud and clear and never surprise volatile subjects. They always opt for nonlethal measures before pulling out the service weapon. Both cliques will also stick to their story even when you discover video evidence directly contradicting it.
- vuln 4y ago
  > The kind of power wielded by tech companies is not the same kind of power wielded by the police. Police and Law Enforcement salivate at the data and control Social Media/Tech companies have. One could look to the twitter files to see how much the US government attempted and successfully controlled a public company to push narratives of the current regime and or censor dissenting views. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files Some tinfoils out there belief the Facebook (now Facebook) was originally LifeLog. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog The US gov and LEO have made social media a _national security issue_ which gives the government inferred power to abuse the data collected by these companies.
  - haswell 4y ago
    > Police and Law Enforcement salivate at the data and control Social Media/Tech companies have. Of course they do, but the core point remains: the kind of power wielded is not the same. Pinterest can’t show up at your door with guns based on the things you pin. The reason police salivate is because of the possibilities unlocked by having such data while also being “the law”. I’m in no way claiming that this power is not dangerous for other reasons in the hands of tech companies, but tech having this data means something entirely different than LEO having this data. The implications and failure modes are quite different and worthy of examination.
    - vuln 4y ago
      Sorry I guess I'm not keeping up. If tech has the data, law enforcement has access to said data. Simple as.
      - ofchnofc 4y ago
        [dead]
      - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
        Law enforcement has a mandate and "lawful" monopoly on violence. Pinterest does not. A private citizen acting as a vigilante does not.
- Vaslo 4y ago
  I find the fact that I cannot post certain ideas to Reddit in my local city subreddit without getting downvoted to Oblivion and then no longer can post at all due to negative karma problematic. In fact, I find this way more problematic for me than s handful of asshole cops. Should I start posting information about community managers or employees at Reddit who don’t help in this situation? Doesn’t matter what your equivalency argument is. This is problematic and opens the door to abuse.
  - bigbillheck 4y ago
    What kind of ideas?
    - Vaslo 4y ago
      Ideas like I’m not pro-Union and tend to vote republican. Just because people don’t like a side doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have voice. I’m certainly not against investigating and punishing bad cops to the full extent of the law,but to post the names of all officers, many who are doing their job right and just, and many of whom are undercover? That’s ridiculous.
  - hobs 4y ago
    Sign up a new account I guess? If the cops decide to beat your ass or follow you in reality your life is meaningfully changed, crying about post karma on reddit is so far divorced from the reality of the situation of cops killing people, stealing, and getting away with it. My partner is an attorney and she just sued the cops for improperly looking up a specific woman tens of thousands of times, checking in on her, harassing her, following her, stalking her with his cop authority. Now imagine the opposite, you are on reddit and someone wont stop replying to your comments, which one of these might need some accountability?
    - Vaslo 4y ago
      How does one cop unlawfully looking up and harassing someone justify producing all the names of all the officers including those who are undercover? That’s like asking for every mod name to be revealed on Hacker News in order to be able to pushback against a ban. I don’t worry about cops beating my ass. I always comply when I’m confronted and it’s amazing but they treat me with respect. I also don’t commit violent crimes, that helps as well.
wongarsu 4y ago
> if there was a database of tech employees You mean kind of like LinkedIn? Of course LinkedIn has the whole consent thing going for it, people make their accounts there willingly (if we ignore the whole address-book farming they do/did). On the other hand the typical LinkedIn profile contains way more information, about people who are way less critical to public safety. But neither this LAPD database nor LinkedIn tell you where people live.
distant_hat 4y ago
I don't remember the last time some tech company employees got together to beat someone to death and the companies mounted a defense for those employees.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  Facebook employees triggered a genocide in Myanmar, does that count?
  - harimau777 4y ago
    Individual Facebook employees triggered a genocide?
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
      I don't think any of them were conjoined twins or borg-like linked collectives if that's what you mean. So yes they were all individual people.
      - ok_dad 4y ago
        Which ones, specifically?
        Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
        The ones that ignored the warnings of what was happening and did not enforce facebook's own policies on hate speech.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bigbillheck 4y ago
I don't generally have to worry about a DBA shooting my dog.
antifa 4y ago
> how would you feel if there was a database of tech employees? There's probably 100 recruiter companies.