6 ms·
Tech startups selling to police
- GeorgeRichard 3y ago[flagged]
- throwaway743 3y agoIt means to pile up, as in to stack up onto by the dozens.
- codetrotter 3y agoI think they use it in the same sense that the word “dogpiling” can be used: > gerund or present participle: dogpiling > (of a number of people) jump on top of another person or one another so as to form a disorderly heap. "the players poured out of the dugout to dogpile on Wright at second base"
- dartos 3y ago“Piling” is the verb form of “pile”
- Avshalom 3y agowell it's (being used in the headlines as) the present progressive form of the verb pile: clowns had piled in; clowns piled in; clowns were piling in; clowns pile in; clowns are piling in; clowns will pile in; clowns will be piling in; clowns will have piled in; pile in, clowns...
- linohh 3y agoIt's no typo. to pile can also mean entering something (in this case a market) by force.
- loeg 3y agohttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pile https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pile > to move or press forward in or as if in a mass
- alistairSH 3y agoOthers covered the definition. It’s definitely awkward as written in that headline.
- clouddrover 3y agoHere you go. Pile in: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pile%20in https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pile%20in And "pile on" has a different meaning: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pile%20on https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pile%20on
- rvba 3y agoEconomist is known to be the magazine that uses a broad vocabulary.
- odysseus 3y agoMore readable headlines: Silicon Valley is getting into the snooping business Silicon Valley is getting in on the business of snooping
- ascendantlogic 3y agoInstead of typing inflammatory nonsense about the "quality of their journalism" you could have very easily looked up the definition of the word in the same amount of time. You're obviously just attempting concern trolling.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kjs3 3y agotl;dr: I'm ignorant and lazy, so everyone else is wrong. You are the problem, not journalism.
- coldtea 3y ago>If the Economist makes such mistakes in their headlines what does that say about the quality of their journalism? IMHO, it has always been crap, because of their biases, and pandering to their audience. But that's beside the point. "Mistakes in a headline" happen to the best of outlets, and always have had. I assume you are OK with an outlet making a typo now and then, no? (There's even a name for this phenomenon, the "printer's devil"), and that making some doesn't mean the outlet's journalism is bad, right? Your question would only make sense if they frequently made typos, and showed some huge careleness about it. Not something one would generalize from seeing this ONE mistake. Anyway, this isn't even a typo or mistake. It's a well known expression. Wouldn't it be prudent to first look it up in a dictionary before questioning those that dared to use it? It just means that SV businesses are jumping in that particular domain (piling in: to move into a place quickly).
- GeorgeRichard 3y agoFair enough, I must remember to wake up properly and think before I type. I suppose it was the lack of a preposition that threw me. The jibe about the quality of their journalism was gratuitous nonsense and which I regret and apologise for.
- andypea 3y agoIt's a very common term in British English (the Economist is a British magazine): https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/piling https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/piling
- greenyoda 3y agoArchive with full text of article: https://archive.ph/oYZEv https://archive.ph/oYZEv
- xkekjrktllss 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20231105213806/https://www.economist.com/business/2023/11/05/silicon-valley-is-piling-in-to-the-business-of-snooping https://web.archive.org/web/20231105213806/https://www.econo...
- _fat_santa 3y agoAt the end of the day, government agencies are just another customer, no different than a private sector customers. It's not that tech companies have some nefarious intent to spy on Americans, all they want to do is sell more of whatever it is that they make.
- edgyquant 3y agoThe difference is that government money is recession proof
- nonrandomstring 3y agoWhen you reduce it to a simplistic economic take you miss a much broader and graver reality. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a US president and 5-star general no less coined a phrase for it; "The Military Industrial Complex". Today it's the "Data Industrial Complex", but no matter. In his farewell address to the American nation he noted the tension between the economic prosperity obtained by armaments with the dangerous "acquisition of unwarranted influence".
- psunavy03 3y agoWhile Ike had a point, that point is also usually blown way the hell out of proportion by people with zero experience in foreign relations, national security, or the military itself. Usually to make some ideological point it's arguable whether Ike himself would have agreed with. We're seeing right before our eyes why a defense sector is a crucial part of a Western democracy's economy, and if the struggles to keep Ukraine in the fight don't convince people, just wait until Xi Jinping gets a bug up you-know-where about Taiwan.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoIn my philosophy one should not dismiss the words of an intelligent or experienced person because other fools misunderstood them. I think you're right that naive people adopted Eisenhower's slogan as a banner for their own, sometime quite nutty theories. "Military Industrial COmplex" has such a theatrically sinister sound to it doesn't it? It almost immediately conjures an image of the Death Star. But I'm interested here in the point that this highly credible figure did make, and why, and that it's ever more important today in a world where kinetics and geophysical boundaries mean less than networks of business and financial relations. As a pro-defence person, I sometimes use the example of the Claymore mine to explain this to hawkish, but simplistic thinkers; On one side it has the words "THIS SIDE TOWARDS ENEMY" written in large clear letters. One can only cringe at the misadventures preceding that necessity, but I think the same needs writing on a lot of other technologies. > a defense sector is a crucial part of a Western democracy's economy, More. A defence sector is a crucial part of any nations existence. It is deflating that to a mere "economy" that is problematic. Because a bad defence sector can serve an economy while undermining an existence. That's happens when, through expedient financial alliances with the wrong sorts you end up with the pointy end facing towards your own people and not the enemy.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoI find it bemusing that this is presented as somehow suprising and clashing with formerly held SV ideals. As if a lot of these companies don't already have mass user survellance as their primary business model.
- Avshalom 3y agoRight, basically the entire post-2000-crash version of silicon valley has been built on selling user data to advertisers or selling ways to use that data to advertisers.
- Phiwise_ 3y ago>But even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways. Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise. -Neal Stephenson, 1999, "In the Beginning was the Command Line" The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?
- nonrandomstring 3y agoIt was on this HN forum that I was first introduced to the remarkable essay on the Californian Ideology[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
- Phiwise_ 3y ago>Above all, they are passionate advocates of what appears to be an impeccably libertarian form of politics - they want information technologies to be used to create a new 'Jeffersonian democracy' where all individuals will be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace. However, by championing this seemingly admirable ideal, these techno-boosters are at the same time reproducing some of the most atavistic features of American society, especially those derived from the bitter legacy of slavery. I suppose the loose definition of remarkable could indeed technically apply to the assertion that "capitalists" jumped on board the http and tcp/ip bandwagon to reassert plantation slavery. Regardless, you've missed the wider context of the anecdote. Stephenson is referring to the stereotypical experiences on hippie communes during the boomer scene era, well before Barbrook and Cameron's concerns about some sort of subversion or other. They even explicitly specify that some pre-90s era of the bay area ideology obviously knew better, so they're in direct disagreement with Stephenson here. We have to pick one or the other. Frankly, I think I know which I prefer between "There's more continuity between the hippies and the yuppies than you typically expect in the valley" and "investors are supercharging democratized communication because it will make you racist and capitalist, which are equally bad". For the rest of the context, you can read the essay here, which I think is a legal copy; Stephenson himself did also distribute it as a pdf: http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/in_the_beginning_was_the_command_line/ http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/in_the_beginning_was_the_com...
- HHC-Hunter 3y agoSilicon Valley and the VC's who fund it will take anybodies money if they could. I say this on the biggest VC platform.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoYup. Marc Andreessen is out there heavily begging Saudi princes for some cash.
- jonathankoren 3y agoNot just that, but Andersen and Thiel (especially Thiel) aren’t just amoral greedy men, but rather explicitly pro-authoritarians. Silicon Valley has a fascism problem.
- gottorf 3y ago> Silicon Valley has a fascism problem. I can imagine that if you see authoritarianism through the lens of the "constrained versus unconstrained" views of human nature a la Sowell, then it makes sense that Silicon Valley, ever so optimistic about the perfectibility of mankind, would tend towards that direction.
- pydry 3y ago>Silicon Valley, ever so optimistic about the perfectibility of mankind Is this sarcasm? Coz from what I can see Silicon Valley is primarily concerned with (in order of importance) 1. $$$, 2. $$$$ and 3. $$$$$
- beepbooptheory 3y agoRight, but in order to make that increasing profit year after year you need to pose that there is some vast frontier of unaccomplished innovation. There needs to be justification on some level for ever new iPhones and such.
- jwie 3y agoLEOs are ideal enterprise clients. Predictable, high budgets, very easy lock in, one success will create many other opportunities. Eventually the surveillance drone will identify the criminal, sell the criminals information to a bondsman, and try to line up a defense attorney for the defendant, and set a court date. Imagine the efficiencies. You could deploy them to schools as well to increase the funnel velocity.
- fzil 3y ago> funnel velocity. I read that as "funeral velocity"... maybe its all the school shootings that happen but that was a rather macabre.
- spandextwins 3y agoI'm sure it's different elsewhere.
- pyrophane 3y ago> That Silicon Valley is helping American law enforcement snoop on troublemakers may seem odd. Nope! Not odd at all. We have allowed the SV money folks to hide behind some version of the hacker ideal for too long. The go wherever cash and tech meet.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoWho wants (to use) the data we are collecting on people. If advertisers don't want it, we'll sell (access to) it to the government.
- mitchelldeacon9 3y agoThis is a great article. For more background on this growing industry, I recommend a recent academic study on the use of surveillance technology at the Los Angeles Police Department. The book documents the LAPD's use of data brokerage firms that collect and aggregate info from public records and private sources (e.g., Palantir), as well as automatic license plate readers (ALPR’s) which record vehicles are they move around the city, and Suspicious Activity Reports from police and civilians, which include reports of mundane activities such as using binoculars, drawing diagrams, or taking pictures or "video footage with no apparent aesthetic value." All this data ultimately gets parked in Fusion Center facilities built after 9/11 where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information. As the author observes, "The use of data in law enforcement is not new. For almost a century, police have been gathering data, e.g., records of citations, collisions, warrants, incarcerations, sex offender and gang registries, etc. What is new and important about the current age of big data is the role in public policing of private capitalist firms who provide database systems with huge volumes of information about people, not just those in the criminal justice system." Sarah Brayne (2020) "Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing," Oxford University Press https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Policing/dp/0190684097/ref=sr_1_1?crid=35RJP9Z8GMN1F&keywords=predict+and+surveil&qid=1699236348&s=books&sprefix=predict+and+sur%2Cstripbooks%2C359&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...