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Have you considered that the activists might be okay with surveillance if the surveillance is fair? That is, if it's not misidentifying people and adds a sense
by mc32 4y ago
Have you considered that the activists might be okay with surveillance if the surveillance is fair? That is, if it's not misidentifying people and adds a sense of security and auditability, maybe they would be okay, just as they themselves might install Nest/Ring in their own abode?
Now, I agree that if the argument is "surveillance is inaccurate" then some landlords and landladies might come back and say, "ours is more accurate than trained crowds of professional forensic experts" and it's possible the activists would not want that and just don't want any surveillance, or maybe they are looking for accuracy and the elimination of misattribution.
- fwlr 4y agoI have considered that, empirically speaking I’ve seen a few activists do exactly that, and I am definitely not going around believing that activists are all some kind of anti-all-surveillance, defund-the-cops, legalize-crime parody. But also empirically speaking, I have seen that highly accurate systems with no racial bias still disproportionately impact minorities (often because they are employed by institutions like law enforcement or landlords that have racial bias themselves). I really just think that if activists see two stats like “provably 99.999…% accurate” and “provably impacts minorities more” at the same time, most of them are still going to care about the impact than the accuracy - and I don’t think that caring about the impact is in any way intellectually dishonest, it’s quite moral really.