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And relatedly, I'm sorry that while you were speeding your brother to the hospital, you blew through a red light you couldn't stop for and caused a three-car pi

And relatedly, I'm sorry that while you were speeding your brother to the hospital, you blew through a red light you couldn't stop for and caused a three-car pileup that killed an elderly woman. There's a reason we have these rules, and the problem of better enforcement leading to more application of the rules isn't a late-stage-capitalism problem; it's a "rules require flexibility" problem (but it's not great if the nature of the flexibility is "you didn't get caught").

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> And relatedly, I'm sorry that while you were speeding your brother to the hospital, you blew through a red light you couldn't stop for and caused a three-car pileup that killed an elderly woman. Firstly, surveilling every person in the world at all times to ensure safety is a gross misapplicaiton of tech that flies in the face of personal freedom and privacy. Secondly, we're not even talking about authorities surveilling you to prevent safety situations (which would, by itself, already be plenty vile enough). We're talking your insurance company checking on you to make sure your roof doesn't have moss on it, and jacking your price/nuking your policy if they feel your behavior is too "risky," according to a model you (and probably they) don't fully understand how it works. There's so much wrong with this and if you don't think so I doubt a comment here is going to change your mind. If you place ANY value at all on personal autonomy and privacy, I don't believe it's possible to, at the same time, say your insurance company by virtue of insuring your car, has the right to surveil that car at a time and via a method of their choosing, with no notification, and with no oversight, solely for the purpose of jacking up your price and/or rewriting your contract on the fly. These relationships already heavily, heavily bias in the favor of the corporation. Do they really need YET MORE unearned, unchecked authority in our lives?!
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  > surveilling every person in the world at all times to ensure safety is a gross misapplicaiton of tech that flies in the face of personal freedom and privacy Not at all times, of course. But if we built the technology to do it whenever someone is operating a multi-ton vehicle on a shared roadway (similar to how we require police to wear body-cams), I wouldn't actually be sad about it or feel unduly watched. I do concur, however, that routing it through the insurance company is pretty sub-optimal; I'd much prefer a public authority that I could vote out if they screw up.
  - getwiththeprog 2y ago
    Not at all times, just when they are driving 2 tons of deadly metal. I look forward to police metadata monitors that identify speeding and dangerous driving.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Way back in high school, I remember learning the Mean Value Theorem in calculus, and I asked the teacher (little annoying asshole that I was) whether the consequence of the theorem that "for a continuous function, the mean of the values in the interval is one of the values in the interval" implies that you could track how long it took someone to get from point A to point B on the highway and conclude that even if you didn't see them speed, they must have sped. He paused and responded "yes, but nobody will stand for getting tickets like that." Fast-forward to the 2020s and I find there are actually plenty of people who would, in fact, stand for that.
- ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
  > Firstly, surveilling every person in the world at all times to ensure safety is a gross misapplicaiton of tech that flies in the face of personal freedom and privacy. Are you referring to the opt-in system of surveillance which insurance companies use to monitor driving (install our app/plug our device into your OBD port)? Or are they, these days, buying data on your driving from stuff like traffic cams (wouldn't be surprising, sorry if I'm giving them the idea now)?
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    In the thread I saw yesterday, can't spend the time to find it atm, the topic was specifically about an insurance company using drones and AI to ascertain that someone's roof had moss growing on it. The homeowner fully acknowledged that this was a lapse in his upkeep, but also, I am incredibly opposed to the notion that a company can surveil people as such simply because they buy insurance from them.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    > Are you referring to the opt-in system of surveillance which insurance companies use to monitor driving (install our app/plug our device into your OBD port)? Not the person you're replying to, but yes, absolutely stuff like that. (I think GP was talking about drone surveillance and stuff like that, but sure, we can talk about this too.) The problem is that people are being coerced into giving up their privacy and autonomy. In this particular case, the coercion is (as usual) money: you presumably get a discount for letting your insurance company spy on you. I expect, though, that ultimately the insurance companies use these things as justification to charge more on average. Let's face it: most people are not particularly good drivers. That's a problem, certainly, but not one that should or will be solved by a company with a profit motive. Some people will drive within whatever arbitrary, poorly-understood parameters that makes the insurance company's algorithms happy, but most probably will not, and will likely see their premiums go up, but not realize why. And even if this did actually result in lower premiums on average (for the people who opt into this dystopia), it's still a problem, because the implication is that only rich people are allowed to have privacy.
    - 2y ago

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

> And relatedly, I'm sorry that while you were speeding your brother to the hospital, you blew through a red light you couldn't stop for and caused a three-car pileup that killed an elderly woman. Firstly, surveilling every person in the world at all times to ensure safety is a gross misapplicaiton of tech that flies in the face of personal freedom and privacy. Secondly, we're not even talking about authorities surveilling you to prevent safety situations (which would, by itself, already be plenty vile enough). We're talking your insurance company checking on you to make sure your roof doesn't have moss on it, and jacking your price/nuking your policy if they feel your behavior is too "risky," according to a model you (and probably they) don't fully understand how it works. There's so much wrong with this and if you don't think so I doubt a comment here is going to change your mind. If you place ANY value at all on personal autonomy and privacy, I don't believe it's possible to, at the same time, say your insurance company by virtue of insuring your car, has the right to surveil that car at a time and via a method of their choosing, with no notification, and with no oversight, solely for the purpose of jacking up your price and/or rewriting your contract on the fly. These relationships already heavily, heavily bias in the favor of the corporation. Do they really need YET MORE unearned, unchecked authority in our lives?!

shadowgovt 2y ago
> surveilling every person in the world at all times to ensure safety is a gross misapplicaiton of tech that flies in the face of personal freedom and privacy Not at all times, of course. But if we built the technology to do it whenever someone is operating a multi-ton vehicle on a shared roadway (similar to how we require police to wear body-cams), I wouldn't actually be sad about it or feel unduly watched. I do concur, however, that routing it through the insurance company is pretty sub-optimal; I'd much prefer a public authority that I could vote out if they screw up.
- getwiththeprog 2y ago
  Not at all times, just when they are driving 2 tons of deadly metal. I look forward to police metadata monitors that identify speeding and dangerous driving.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Way back in high school, I remember learning the Mean Value Theorem in calculus, and I asked the teacher (little annoying asshole that I was) whether the consequence of the theorem that "for a continuous function, the mean of the values in the interval is one of the values in the interval" implies that you could track how long it took someone to get from point A to point B on the highway and conclude that even if you didn't see them speed, they must have sped. He paused and responded "yes, but nobody will stand for getting tickets like that." Fast-forward to the 2020s and I find there are actually plenty of people who would, in fact, stand for that.
ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
> Firstly, surveilling every person in the world at all times to ensure safety is a gross misapplicaiton of tech that flies in the face of personal freedom and privacy. Are you referring to the opt-in system of surveillance which insurance companies use to monitor driving (install our app/plug our device into your OBD port)? Or are they, these days, buying data on your driving from stuff like traffic cams (wouldn't be surprising, sorry if I'm giving them the idea now)?
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  In the thread I saw yesterday, can't spend the time to find it atm, the topic was specifically about an insurance company using drones and AI to ascertain that someone's roof had moss growing on it. The homeowner fully acknowledged that this was a lapse in his upkeep, but also, I am incredibly opposed to the notion that a company can surveil people as such simply because they buy insurance from them.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > Are you referring to the opt-in system of surveillance which insurance companies use to monitor driving (install our app/plug our device into your OBD port)? Not the person you're replying to, but yes, absolutely stuff like that. (I think GP was talking about drone surveillance and stuff like that, but sure, we can talk about this too.) The problem is that people are being coerced into giving up their privacy and autonomy. In this particular case, the coercion is (as usual) money: you presumably get a discount for letting your insurance company spy on you. I expect, though, that ultimately the insurance companies use these things as justification to charge more on average. Let's face it: most people are not particularly good drivers. That's a problem, certainly, but not one that should or will be solved by a company with a profit motive. Some people will drive within whatever arbitrary, poorly-understood parameters that makes the insurance company's algorithms happy, but most probably will not, and will likely see their premiums go up, but not realize why. And even if this did actually result in lower premiums on average (for the people who opt into this dystopia), it's still a problem, because the implication is that only rich people are allowed to have privacy.
  - 2y ago