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I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road. It's a lot of responsibility, so you should

I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road. It's a lot of responsibility, so you should be scrutinized when you do it. That's part of my grievances against the urbanism of the U.S.A. When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy. It's important to advocate for public places to be livable for everyone, not just drivers.

mikrl 2y ago
> When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy. I don’t think there’s privacy in the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card world either.
- sebstefan 2y ago
  I think that's more of a technicality of billing you for a service than something by design ("the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card " => Google sent me to "List of public transport smart cards" so I assume you're refering to some branded public transit system)
  - masfuerte 2y ago
    No, it's not a side-effect, it's a deliberate decision. You used to be able to get an Oyster card anonymously and top it up with cash. I still have one, but they are not accepted now.
    - Symbiote 2y ago
      You can buy Oyster cards at many newsagents, and top them up there too. There will probably be CCTV, but privately owned by the shop.
      - masfuerte 2y ago
        Thank you. It seems like I was misinformed. Last time I was in London my old Oyster card wouldn't work and I was told I couldn't top it up (which is probably true) and I couldn't get a new card without ID (which seems to be false).
        Symbiote 2y ago
        Apparently even the first generation Oyster cards should work [1] so at some point I was also misinformed. On Trip Advisor some people say cards can become deactivated if not used for years, but staff in a ticket office can reactivate them. [1] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets-and-oyster/tfl-oyster-and-contactless-app/first-generation-oyster-cards https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets...
  - mikrl 2y ago
    Presto is Toronto’s equivalent to London’s oyster card. Actually there’s no tap off IIRC (unlike the Dutch chipkaarts) but still, I would assume the modern station where you enter is a veritable panopticon of CCTV, RF signal interception, etc
- harvey9 2y ago
  Used to be possible to buy and top up oyster with cash. Don't know if that's still the case and you will still be on CCTV at every station anyway.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
There has never been an expectation of privacy in public.
- bluGill 2y ago
  There has been though - it wasn't perfect, but there was the expectation that people generally forgot about enough that in practice you were private so long as you were not obvious. Now computers/cameras can store data on everyone as opposed to just people acting "abnormal".
  - ta1243 2y ago
    It's not about the right to be private now, it's about the right to be forgotten by tomorrow.
- Spivak 2y ago
  This is the "scale invariant fallacy." When you're in public you can be casually observed by people or followed by police if they happen to be interested in you. And so therefore observing every person's movements in public 24/7 with perfect detail and memory must be also okay like these aren't two very different things. Scale can change the fundamental nature of a thing: walking down the street while being pissed as your government is one thing, but if you get 1000 friends to do it with you it's a march.
  - otterley 2y ago
    Your point is well-taken, but why is it called a fallacy, though? There's nothing fallacious about scale.
- kube-system 2y ago
  That’s just simply incorrect. There are plenty of expectations of privacy in public. For example, it is illegal to look up a woman’s skirt, and it is illegal for police to arbitrarily search someone, etc. Now, what is reasonably expected in public is less than what is reasonably expected in private, but it certainly isn’t zero privacy. It is true that one might expect, if they are driving around, that someone might see them. But is it expected that they might sometimes be followed? Is it expected that they are always followed? Is it expected that everyone is followed and those locations are cataloged indefinitely for anyone to FOIA? These are all very different questions.
gpm 2y ago
I'm all for automated traffic law enforcement via camera, but I think it's very reasonable to say that if the camera doesn't detect a violation of the law, the data needs to be deleted not warehoused.
- echoangle 2y ago
  So you would be against storing the data for a few days so if a non-traffic crime is detected later (a murder for example), the traffic recordings can be used to help in the investigation? I think that's useful too.
  - shkkmo 2y ago
    Thag entirely depends on the implementation details of the access controls to that data and if the police need a warrant to access that data.
  - gpm 2y ago
    Yes. As soon as the automated traffic enforcement purpose is done with (the car wasn't speeding/wasn't running a red/so on) the data should be deleted. If the police reach the data before it's deleted after they know it may have evidence of a crime that's ok (realistically this is rare, but I can imagine it happening with paired cameras that measure speed over a long distance of road. You could also get lucky where a false positive image happened to capture a different crime), but we shouldn't be storing surveillance data that tracks everyone's movements on the off chance that it has evidence of a crime. The harm outweighs the use at that point.
- ldoughty 2y ago
  I personally agree, but there has to be a time frame allowed... e.g. cameras at an intersection that had an accident: It probably would take 'a day or two' at least for such a request to get to the camera operators to request they send a copy. I'd also personally prefer speed cameras that are not point-in-time records. This just encourages police to put them where they know people are more likely to violate the law, like at the bottom of hills, where there's not really a danger, but it generates more revenue. I'd want speed cameras that are miles apart... and the determination that you get a speeding ticket is that you traveled several miles at high speed.
codedokode 2y ago
Data retention time matters though. One thing if it is one week, another if it is one century.
n4r9 2y ago
Public surveillance should come with certain guarantees, though. Like being transparent about what data is collected and how/where it's stored. And purging the data after a fixed time unless it's involved in a case.
- renegat0x0 2y ago
  transparent in what data is collected, how/where it's stored ...also if it is sold to anybody, or handed to.
thesuitonym 2y ago
The problem isn't that you're visible, or that what you're doing should be private, it's that any cop can access your location history for any reason, at any time, with no scrutiny. Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs, and giving them this ability is definitely a dangerous route. IMO these recordings should be kept by a third party, and cops should need to appeal to that third party to access it. Going before a judge to get a warrant would be preferred.
- floatrock 2y ago
  There's precedent where it's easier to spend some money and buy it from the third party data brokers. Why go through lawyer hurdles when you can just buy it perfectly legally?
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Then don't make the 3rd party a for profit private company. Make it a new branch of the government. Make it part of the DoT or which ever company is responsible for collecting taxes in your locale. Intra agency operations would still be possible while removing direct access to LEOs. If you want your own information, pay your $25 type fees after proving who you are for printing/research/etc that are typical when requesting official gov't records. If you're another gov't agency, provide the warrant granting access to civilian records.
    - hiatus 2y ago
      > Then don't make the 3rd party a for profit private company. Make it a new branch of the government. Who is this directed at? The company wasn't started as a branch of government. What exactly are you proposing? That the government create its own network of cameras for surveillance? Have government-created solutions never been abused by law enforcement in the past?
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      We already do that. Government has strict firewalls to access DMV data, so DMVs sell the stream of data to various parties, and the government buys it back from the third party or any non-police purpose. A company like ID.me basically performs a function that any state government could do itself or through a contractor at lower cost and without the privacy issues of providing the data to third parties. The law has failed us here - privacy attorneys basically focus on providing notification on a “take it or leave it” basis.
Majromax 2y ago
> I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road. Technology allows surveillance at scale, and that attacks privacy in a new and deeply unintuitive direction. In the pre-information era, people still didn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, in that everything they did could be noted. However, that notice was far from automatic, and people were only remembered if they were memorable. That could happen from doing something or appearing out of the ordinary, or it could happen from specific interest (e.g. being followed). Nowadays, the surveillance is automatic, and hard drives don't forget. The technology allows aggregators to answer retrospective questions about the target's ordinary behaviour. People now need be concerned about how their actions today will be viewed weeks, months, or years from now if they later attract scrutiny. This technology is here today for cars and license plates, but it's only a matter of scale before it's applied to pedestrians with face, gait, or other individual recognition modalities. We don't have the social scripts to properly deal with it.
- rconti 2y ago
  Yeah; the risk was lower because the implementation costs were higher. Take a speeding ticket, for example. If the fine is $400, it's created with the knowledge that it'll only be triggered occasionally, and it's created as a deterrent. If I speed 50 times and get caught one time, I pay $400. If you setup a bunch of speed cameras all over town, the fine should go down to have the same impact.
  - tstrimple 2y ago
    Instead municipalities have been known to tweak whatever variables they can to maximize their fees collected. In the city I live in, they illegally put speed cameras too soon after a speed change. The city fought against it and won, so the cameras stayed where they are. There is a 5mph drop right before one of the speed cameras and the road jumps up 10mph shortly after. This creates dangerous highway situations where locals aware of the cameras speed up to the camera point, slam on their brakes, and then speed off again after. There is no reason other than revenue for the speed to drop like that on a highway for such a short and straight section without abnormal entrances and exits. Throw in red light camera setups where they reduce the yellow lights to dangerous levels for everyone in order to collect more fees despite longer yellow light times being one of the most effective ways to prevent collisions in intersections. https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-to-you-revenue-hungry-cities-mess-with-traffic-lights-to-write-more-tickets_partner/ https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-to-y...
graemep 2y ago
In the UK public transport increasingly pushes you to use trackable tickets or means of payment such as apps or credit cards.
afarah1 2y ago
The cameras are central to the privacy aspect, not the cars. A car can be identified by its plates, while a pedestrian can be identified by their face or other features. Perhaps not today by some legal or technical difficulty, but the infrastructure to do so is in place. There is a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places. One might not reasonably expect that one's photograph should not be taken in public, but one may reasonably expect not to have one's every move recorded, profiled, indefinitely stored and shared with various third parties, or to have one's every conversation on the phone or with other people recorded with sophisticated cameras or sensors, and for that to be attached to one's detailed profile. What is described is a surveillance state, which anyone who values some degree of personal freedom will reasonably object to. The installment of sophisticated cameras capable of tracking one's movement throughout an entire country provides the means for such surveillance state, and should be strongly objected by anyone who values one's personal freedom. Those in favor of such installment for the facilitation of criminal persecution should at the very least require strong guarantees about its usage, such as storage limits and regular public audits of such implementation, closed circuits instead of publicly networked solutions, etc, and strongly oppose any arrangements that do not fulfill stringent privacy requirements. Unfortunately I am yet to see any real person advocate for this with any real political strength.
soulofmischief 2y ago
It sounds like you have never needed to organize against a government which threatens your safety, or that you haven't found yourself engaging in any activities that were well-protected at the dawn of the US Constitution but are now considered to be felonious, whether for self-medication, as an act of protest, or as an act of survival. This means that you have a lot to be grateful for, but your perspective is privileged and may not take into account that not every life is like yours. You don't feel the chains of oppression until you need to break them. I would recommend considering what kind of person might not benefit from mass surveillance in this current political climate where students are disappearing just for protesting against a religious genocide. You could definitely argue that surveillance is inevitable as a technology; but the government is supposed to serve its people, and without strong guarantees of established freedoms and protection from the negative effects of mass surveillance, the people should not allow the government to engage in such surveillance. Especially not the dragnet style of surveillance that is common today, and especially in the wake of modern analysis tools where prejudice can be automated.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  This is a great comment marred by the “students disappearing” statement. An earned but short jail sentence or deportation is quite distinct from a one-way ticket to the gulag, unfortunately implied.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    I could have chosen my language better. But in general, corporate and state-sponsored surveillance of students and protestors goes back many decades, and we have seen enough witch hunts over things like Communism, Vietnam protestors, psychedelic users, etc. that we simply cannot allow our local, state and federal governments in their current shape to wield mass surveillance, because they will not do it ethically.
- miohtama 2y ago
  Last time British had guts to organise anything about their shitty government they first sailed to a new continent.
threatofrain 2y ago
Why shouldn't public transportation have even more cameras? A lot of shit goes down there.
- genewitch 2y ago
  So put a transit cop on all the public transport. This whole "we gotta make the cops' jobs easier" is so sickening.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    Because it's not feasible, and even if it was it doesn't protect you from police itself. Whereas a camera is a cheap deterrent.
rcpt 2y ago
The problem is that they do all this but don't use the cameras to enforce speed limits or red lights. We get all the surveillance but none of the road safety.
Telemakhos 2y ago
Most of the comments on this article regard the privacy of the individual against the police or other state authorities, but a main point in the article is that this license plate/vehicle fingerprinting data is public information subject to FOIA requests, and thus any citizen can use FOIA requests to track any other citizen. The article touches briefly on the implications of that for jealous lovers or people motivated to stalk others. That's a bit different from scrutinizing the operation of (potentially dangerous) vehicles on a public road. At some point US society really needs to have a debate about how FOIA and the surveillance state intersect.
01100011 2y ago
The great thing about democracy is that we can debate subtleties and choose a path between extremes. So we can say that while the extremes of this argument are either total surveillance or no surveillance at all, we can instead opt for a more balanced approach. We can recognize that guaranteeing privacy in public or when using a publicly provided service is silly, but also that some forms of automation and data mining elevate simple observations into a level of surveillance that we are not comfortable with.
- goatlover 2y ago
  Assuming the voters are informed enough and aren't persuaded by propaganda, that is a good thing.
- rangestransform 2y ago
  I'm not confortable with a tradeoff, we saw during the pandemic how many amongst us are closeted authoritarians and i don't trust them to choose freedom over safety as per the founding principles of the USA
kccqzy 2y ago
What if you are not operating a car? Many governments in the United States have outlawed or are trying to outlaw wearing masks in public.
timewizard 2y ago
Yes. You can watch me in public and you can even record things like my license plate number if you like. When you start following me around to all my destinations and making a detailed log of everything I do you are stalking me. That would be a crime if you did it physically. Why should it be different if you are doing it digitally? Should be police be able to walk behind you down the street everywhere you go just waiting for infractions? What's the difference?
verisimi 2y ago
> I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road yes - we all voted for this so here it is. /s ... except no one did vote for it. So why do we have it?
atoav 2y ago
Sure. If you got a very well behaving (and systematically scrutinized) executive and a legal system that protects the rights of each individual. The reason states shouldn't be given every power over their citizens just villy nilly is because power in a free society is given by the citizens. And if the state can target those indiscriminately without due process that is no longer the case. So it can make sense to withold certain powers from the state, even if with trustworthy leadership and actors these powers would be useful to keep the people in the state safe. And that is because untrustworthy leadership can come around at any point and then you don't want to give them an operational surveillance structure that would have given any authoritarian in history the shivers.
jillyboel 2y ago
Ok. Can you post a log of every time you drove your car on the public road during the past 5 years? You shouldn't have an expectation of anonymity, like you say.

mikrl 2y ago

> When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy. I don’t think there’s privacy in the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card world either.

sebstefan 2y ago
I think that's more of a technicality of billing you for a service than something by design ("the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card " => Google sent me to "List of public transport smart cards" so I assume you're refering to some branded public transit system)
- masfuerte 2y ago
  No, it's not a side-effect, it's a deliberate decision. You used to be able to get an Oyster card anonymously and top it up with cash. I still have one, but they are not accepted now.
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    You can buy Oyster cards at many newsagents, and top them up there too. There will probably be CCTV, but privately owned by the shop.
    - masfuerte 2y ago
      Thank you. It seems like I was misinformed. Last time I was in London my old Oyster card wouldn't work and I was told I couldn't top it up (which is probably true) and I couldn't get a new card without ID (which seems to be false).
      - Symbiote 2y ago
        Apparently even the first generation Oyster cards should work [1] so at some point I was also misinformed. On Trip Advisor some people say cards can become deactivated if not used for years, but staff in a ticket office can reactivate them. [1] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets-and-oyster/tfl-oyster-and-contactless-app/first-generation-oyster-cards https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets...
- mikrl 2y ago
  Presto is Toronto’s equivalent to London’s oyster card. Actually there’s no tap off IIRC (unlike the Dutch chipkaarts) but still, I would assume the modern station where you enter is a veritable panopticon of CCTV, RF signal interception, etc
harvey9 2y ago
Used to be possible to buy and top up oyster with cash. Don't know if that's still the case and you will still be on CCTV at every station anyway.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

There has never been an expectation of privacy in public.

bluGill 2y ago
There has been though - it wasn't perfect, but there was the expectation that people generally forgot about enough that in practice you were private so long as you were not obvious. Now computers/cameras can store data on everyone as opposed to just people acting "abnormal".
- ta1243 2y ago
  It's not about the right to be private now, it's about the right to be forgotten by tomorrow.
Spivak 2y ago
This is the "scale invariant fallacy." When you're in public you can be casually observed by people or followed by police if they happen to be interested in you. And so therefore observing every person's movements in public 24/7 with perfect detail and memory must be also okay like these aren't two very different things. Scale can change the fundamental nature of a thing: walking down the street while being pissed as your government is one thing, but if you get 1000 friends to do it with you it's a march.
- otterley 2y ago
  Your point is well-taken, but why is it called a fallacy, though? There's nothing fallacious about scale.
kube-system 2y ago
That’s just simply incorrect. There are plenty of expectations of privacy in public. For example, it is illegal to look up a woman’s skirt, and it is illegal for police to arbitrarily search someone, etc. Now, what is reasonably expected in public is less than what is reasonably expected in private, but it certainly isn’t zero privacy. It is true that one might expect, if they are driving around, that someone might see them. But is it expected that they might sometimes be followed? Is it expected that they are always followed? Is it expected that everyone is followed and those locations are cataloged indefinitely for anyone to FOIA? These are all very different questions.

gpm 2y ago

I'm all for automated traffic law enforcement via camera, but I think it's very reasonable to say that if the camera doesn't detect a violation of the law, the data needs to be deleted not warehoused.

echoangle 2y ago
So you would be against storing the data for a few days so if a non-traffic crime is detected later (a murder for example), the traffic recordings can be used to help in the investigation? I think that's useful too.
- shkkmo 2y ago
  Thag entirely depends on the implementation details of the access controls to that data and if the police need a warrant to access that data.
- gpm 2y ago
  Yes. As soon as the automated traffic enforcement purpose is done with (the car wasn't speeding/wasn't running a red/so on) the data should be deleted. If the police reach the data before it's deleted after they know it may have evidence of a crime that's ok (realistically this is rare, but I can imagine it happening with paired cameras that measure speed over a long distance of road. You could also get lucky where a false positive image happened to capture a different crime), but we shouldn't be storing surveillance data that tracks everyone's movements on the off chance that it has evidence of a crime. The harm outweighs the use at that point.
ldoughty 2y ago
I personally agree, but there has to be a time frame allowed... e.g. cameras at an intersection that had an accident: It probably would take 'a day or two' at least for such a request to get to the camera operators to request they send a copy. I'd also personally prefer speed cameras that are not point-in-time records. This just encourages police to put them where they know people are more likely to violate the law, like at the bottom of hills, where there's not really a danger, but it generates more revenue. I'd want speed cameras that are miles apart... and the determination that you get a speeding ticket is that you traveled several miles at high speed.

codedokode 2y ago

Data retention time matters though. One thing if it is one week, another if it is one century.

n4r9 2y ago

Public surveillance should come with certain guarantees, though. Like being transparent about what data is collected and how/where it's stored. And purging the data after a fixed time unless it's involved in a case.

renegat0x0 2y ago
transparent in what data is collected, how/where it's stored ...also if it is sold to anybody, or handed to.

thesuitonym 2y ago

The problem isn't that you're visible, or that what you're doing should be private, it's that any cop can access your location history for any reason, at any time, with no scrutiny. Cops are known to be abusive, violent thugs, and giving them this ability is definitely a dangerous route. IMO these recordings should be kept by a third party, and cops should need to appeal to that third party to access it. Going before a judge to get a warrant would be preferred.

floatrock 2y ago
There's precedent where it's easier to spend some money and buy it from the third party data brokers. Why go through lawyer hurdles when you can just buy it perfectly legally?
- dylan604 2y ago
  Then don't make the 3rd party a for profit private company. Make it a new branch of the government. Make it part of the DoT or which ever company is responsible for collecting taxes in your locale. Intra agency operations would still be possible while removing direct access to LEOs. If you want your own information, pay your $25 type fees after proving who you are for printing/research/etc that are typical when requesting official gov't records. If you're another gov't agency, provide the warrant granting access to civilian records.
  - hiatus 2y ago
    > Then don't make the 3rd party a for profit private company. Make it a new branch of the government. Who is this directed at? The company wasn't started as a branch of government. What exactly are you proposing? That the government create its own network of cameras for surveillance? Have government-created solutions never been abused by law enforcement in the past?
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    We already do that. Government has strict firewalls to access DMV data, so DMVs sell the stream of data to various parties, and the government buys it back from the third party or any non-police purpose. A company like ID.me basically performs a function that any state government could do itself or through a contractor at lower cost and without the privacy issues of providing the data to third parties. The law has failed us here - privacy attorneys basically focus on providing notification on a “take it or leave it” basis.

Majromax 2y ago

> I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road. Technology allows surveillance at scale, and that attacks privacy in a new and deeply unintuitive direction. In the pre-information era, people still didn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, in that everything they did could be noted. However, that notice was far from automatic, and people were only remembered if they were memorable. That could happen from doing something or appearing out of the ordinary, or it could happen from specific interest (e.g. being followed). Nowadays, the surveillance is automatic, and hard drives don't forget. The technology allows aggregators to answer retrospective questions about the target's ordinary behaviour. People now need be concerned about how their actions today will be viewed weeks, months, or years from now if they later attract scrutiny. This technology is here today for cars and license plates, but it's only a matter of scale before it's applied to pedestrians with face, gait, or other individual recognition modalities. We don't have the social scripts to properly deal with it.

rconti 2y ago
Yeah; the risk was lower because the implementation costs were higher. Take a speeding ticket, for example. If the fine is $400, it's created with the knowledge that it'll only be triggered occasionally, and it's created as a deterrent. If I speed 50 times and get caught one time, I pay $400. If you setup a bunch of speed cameras all over town, the fine should go down to have the same impact.
- tstrimple 2y ago
  Instead municipalities have been known to tweak whatever variables they can to maximize their fees collected. In the city I live in, they illegally put speed cameras too soon after a speed change. The city fought against it and won, so the cameras stayed where they are. There is a 5mph drop right before one of the speed cameras and the road jumps up 10mph shortly after. This creates dangerous highway situations where locals aware of the cameras speed up to the camera point, slam on their brakes, and then speed off again after. There is no reason other than revenue for the speed to drop like that on a highway for such a short and straight section without abnormal entrances and exits. Throw in red light camera setups where they reduce the yellow lights to dangerous levels for everyone in order to collect more fees despite longer yellow light times being one of the most effective ways to prevent collisions in intersections. https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-to-you-revenue-hungry-cities-mess-with-traffic-lights-to-write-more-tickets_partner/ https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-to-y...

graemep 2y ago

In the UK public transport increasingly pushes you to use trackable tickets or means of payment such as apps or credit cards.

afarah1 2y ago

The cameras are central to the privacy aspect, not the cars. A car can be identified by its plates, while a pedestrian can be identified by their face or other features. Perhaps not today by some legal or technical difficulty, but the infrastructure to do so is in place. There is a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places. One might not reasonably expect that one's photograph should not be taken in public, but one may reasonably expect not to have one's every move recorded, profiled, indefinitely stored and shared with various third parties, or to have one's every conversation on the phone or with other people recorded with sophisticated cameras or sensors, and for that to be attached to one's detailed profile. What is described is a surveillance state, which anyone who values some degree of personal freedom will reasonably object to. The installment of sophisticated cameras capable of tracking one's movement throughout an entire country provides the means for such surveillance state, and should be strongly objected by anyone who values one's personal freedom. Those in favor of such installment for the facilitation of criminal persecution should at the very least require strong guarantees about its usage, such as storage limits and regular public audits of such implementation, closed circuits instead of publicly networked solutions, etc, and strongly oppose any arrangements that do not fulfill stringent privacy requirements. Unfortunately I am yet to see any real person advocate for this with any real political strength.

soulofmischief 2y ago

It sounds like you have never needed to organize against a government which threatens your safety, or that you haven't found yourself engaging in any activities that were well-protected at the dawn of the US Constitution but are now considered to be felonious, whether for self-medication, as an act of protest, or as an act of survival. This means that you have a lot to be grateful for, but your perspective is privileged and may not take into account that not every life is like yours. You don't feel the chains of oppression until you need to break them. I would recommend considering what kind of person might not benefit from mass surveillance in this current political climate where students are disappearing just for protesting against a religious genocide. You could definitely argue that surveillance is inevitable as a technology; but the government is supposed to serve its people, and without strong guarantees of established freedoms and protection from the negative effects of mass surveillance, the people should not allow the government to engage in such surveillance. Especially not the dragnet style of surveillance that is common today, and especially in the wake of modern analysis tools where prejudice can be automated.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
This is a great comment marred by the “students disappearing” statement. An earned but short jail sentence or deportation is quite distinct from a one-way ticket to the gulag, unfortunately implied.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  I could have chosen my language better. But in general, corporate and state-sponsored surveillance of students and protestors goes back many decades, and we have seen enough witch hunts over things like Communism, Vietnam protestors, psychedelic users, etc. that we simply cannot allow our local, state and federal governments in their current shape to wield mass surveillance, because they will not do it ethically.
miohtama 2y ago
Last time British had guts to organise anything about their shitty government they first sailed to a new continent.

threatofrain 2y ago

Why shouldn't public transportation have even more cameras? A lot of shit goes down there.

genewitch 2y ago
So put a transit cop on all the public transport. This whole "we gotta make the cops' jobs easier" is so sickening.
- epolanski 2y ago
  Because it's not feasible, and even if it was it doesn't protect you from police itself. Whereas a camera is a cheap deterrent.

rcpt 2y ago

The problem is that they do all this but don't use the cameras to enforce speed limits or red lights. We get all the surveillance but none of the road safety.

Telemakhos 2y ago

Most of the comments on this article regard the privacy of the individual against the police or other state authorities, but a main point in the article is that this license plate/vehicle fingerprinting data is public information subject to FOIA requests, and thus any citizen can use FOIA requests to track any other citizen. The article touches briefly on the implications of that for jealous lovers or people motivated to stalk others. That's a bit different from scrutinizing the operation of (potentially dangerous) vehicles on a public road. At some point US society really needs to have a debate about how FOIA and the surveillance state intersect.

01100011 2y ago

The great thing about democracy is that we can debate subtleties and choose a path between extremes. So we can say that while the extremes of this argument are either total surveillance or no surveillance at all, we can instead opt for a more balanced approach. We can recognize that guaranteeing privacy in public or when using a publicly provided service is silly, but also that some forms of automation and data mining elevate simple observations into a level of surveillance that we are not comfortable with.

goatlover 2y ago
Assuming the voters are informed enough and aren't persuaded by propaganda, that is a good thing.
rangestransform 2y ago
I'm not confortable with a tradeoff, we saw during the pandemic how many amongst us are closeted authoritarians and i don't trust them to choose freedom over safety as per the founding principles of the USA

kccqzy 2y ago

What if you are not operating a car? Many governments in the United States have outlawed or are trying to outlaw wearing masks in public.

timewizard 2y ago

Yes. You can watch me in public and you can even record things like my license plate number if you like. When you start following me around to all my destinations and making a detailed log of everything I do you are stalking me. That would be a crime if you did it physically. Why should it be different if you are doing it digitally? Should be police be able to walk behind you down the street everywhere you go just waiting for infractions? What's the difference?

verisimi 2y ago

> I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road yes - we all voted for this so here it is. /s ... except no one did vote for it. So why do we have it?

atoav 2y ago

Sure. If you got a very well behaving (and systematically scrutinized) executive and a legal system that protects the rights of each individual. The reason states shouldn't be given every power over their citizens just villy nilly is because power in a free society is given by the citizens. And if the state can target those indiscriminately without due process that is no longer the case. So it can make sense to withold certain powers from the state, even if with trustworthy leadership and actors these powers would be useful to keep the people in the state safe. And that is because untrustworthy leadership can come around at any point and then you don't want to give them an operational surveillance structure that would have given any authoritarian in history the shivers.

jillyboel 2y ago

Ok. Can you post a log of every time you drove your car on the public road during the past 5 years? You shouldn't have an expectation of anonymity, like you say.