4 ms·

Mugshots are typically available to the public anyway. I think they traded easier access to mugshots.

Arainach 1y ago
Big data is different, has different threat models, and needs to be treated differently. Technically, in 1960, you could pay a huge number of people to listen to a huge number of telephones or watch a huge number of cameras, but it was so insanely expensive that unless you were in East Germany or Moscow it wasn't a threat you had to consider. Cheap cameras and cheap hard drives and LLM vision processing models which mean that you can have a permanent archive of every license plate or face that went by a location mean that things are very different and even though things were legally possible before, it's a totally different problem now.
- roughly 1y ago
  The Supreme Court has historically recognized this, too - the FBI tried to argue that putting a tracker on a car was no different than having an agent tail the car, and were roundly shut down for that.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    Yes, but the majority opinion in that case was based on the physical intrusion of placing the tracker, which doesn't apply here.
    - ytpete 1y ago
      I've always thought it will be really interesting to see the courts grapple with mass tracking by drone instead someday. Precisely for this reason, that the rationale the Supreme Court previously used to strike down warrantless tracking devices wouldn't apply. It's an even closer analogy to actual human officers tailing the car, just replaced by robots. Certainly hope they would still overrule that too... but drawing a bright line somewhere between "scales really cheaply due to technology" and "scales more expensively due to human labor" is such a fascinating and critical problem to solve in the era we live in now.
- seeknotfind 1y ago
  Mugshots are pretty locked down now, but when I was younger, you could just scroll and scroll. Used to go through, check to see if I knew anybody. Got lucky a few times. Well, if you think you're safe, you're not, and if you think it's deleted, it knows everything about you. The difference between the marginal mugshot and the whole database is how prepared you are. Scrape that data every day, baby.
godelski 1y ago
I'm not sure that makes the trade right. If you think they shouldn't be public (I don't) then it certainly wouldn't. Just to be clear: having a mugshot does not mean you're a criminal. It means the person was arrested, not convicted (charged with a crime). I'm not finding good statistics but other data makes it seem reasonably high. Even if very low it would still violate the spirit of "innocent until proven guilty"

Big data is different, has different threat models, and needs to be treated differently. Technically, in 1960, you could pay a huge number of people to listen to a huge number of telephones or watch a huge number of cameras, but it was so insanely expensive that unless you were in East Germany or Moscow it wasn't a threat you had to consider. Cheap cameras and cheap hard drives and LLM vision processing models which mean that you can have a permanent archive of every license plate or face that went by a location mean that things are very different and even though things were legally possible before, it's a totally different problem now.

roughly 1y ago
The Supreme Court has historically recognized this, too - the FBI tried to argue that putting a tracker on a car was no different than having an agent tail the car, and were roundly shut down for that.
- tptacek 1y ago
  Yes, but the majority opinion in that case was based on the physical intrusion of placing the tracker, which doesn't apply here.
  - ytpete 1y ago
    I've always thought it will be really interesting to see the courts grapple with mass tracking by drone instead someday. Precisely for this reason, that the rationale the Supreme Court previously used to strike down warrantless tracking devices wouldn't apply. It's an even closer analogy to actual human officers tailing the car, just replaced by robots. Certainly hope they would still overrule that too... but drawing a bright line somewhere between "scales really cheaply due to technology" and "scales more expensively due to human labor" is such a fascinating and critical problem to solve in the era we live in now.
seeknotfind 1y ago
Mugshots are pretty locked down now, but when I was younger, you could just scroll and scroll. Used to go through, check to see if I knew anybody. Got lucky a few times. Well, if you think you're safe, you're not, and if you think it's deleted, it knows everything about you. The difference between the marginal mugshot and the whole database is how prepared you are. Scrape that data every day, baby.

godelski 1y ago

I'm not sure that makes the trade right. If you think they shouldn't be public (I don't) then it certainly wouldn't. Just to be clear: having a mugshot does not mean you're a criminal. It means the person was arrested, not convicted (charged with a crime). I'm not finding good statistics but other data makes it seem reasonably high. Even if very low it would still violate the spirit of "innocent until proven guilty"