6 ms·

I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. If the busine

I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. If the business models can't be made illegal, it should at least come with liabilities so high that no sane business would want to hold data that is essentially toxic waste. Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong person gets access to the data, entire populations are threatened.

stevemk14ebr 6mo ago
You want to stop the source, which is that the government and other agencies can purchase surveillance data that would otherwise be disallowed by the 4th amendment. We need to end this 'laundering' of information through third parties, and enforce the constitution by its intent.
- caconym_ 6mo ago
  Honestly it should probably just be illegal for anyone, private or public, to engage in mass surveillance (or "data gathering", whatever) of anybody who didn't expressly consent to it. As long as the data exist, they will be abused.
  - inetknght 6mo ago
    Not only that, but it should be illegal (eg: fines for the company and potential jail time for executives) for tying consent to use/purchase of services or products. Consent should be _voluntary_, not mandatory.
  - nandomrumber 6mo ago
    But I did expressly consent. When I installed the SoundCloud app and it told me by continuing I agree to them sharing my data with their 954 partners.[1] 1. I’m not even joining. When I mostly recently installed the SoundCloud app - for the first time on a new device, that’s what’s it said: 954 partners. How can anyone reasonably understand what it is their agreeing to in that scenario.
    - Perseids 6mo ago
      This is the important point. You need the right to not be discriminated when you withhold your consent, otherwise your consent is effectively meaningless, as it is forced on you by your impossible bargaining position. This is one of the central pillars of the GDPR without which it wouldn't work at all. Be advised to make asking customers for consent that doesn't directly benefit them illegal as well, lest you risk creating another wave of malicious cookie banners.
      - Joker_vD 6mo ago
        > You need the right to not be discriminated when you withhold your consent, otherwise your consent is effectively meaningless, as it is forced on you by your impossible bargaining position. Which is why "we don't serve patrons without shoes and pants" policy is unconstitutional, yeah. If you don't want to agree to a business's demands — you're welcome to not deal with them and look for an alternative. All the alternatives have the same (or even worse) demands? Unless you can prove collusion, that's just how the invisible hand of the market worked its magic out. Go petition you congressman to violate laissez-faire even more than it already is, I guess.
        LadyCailin 6mo ago
        The trouble with this is that I, at least, am trying to live in a society. And society has both rights and responsibilities. Sometimes you are forced to do things, or don’t do things, contrary to your desires. Every freedom has two sides, you can’t ignore the fact that increasing some freedoms for one decreases other freedoms for others. The shirt and shoes example is a great example in fact that illustrates the point. You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes, just like a business does not have unlimited freedom to impose whatever terms it likes, just because it put it in its ToS.
        Joker_vD 6mo ago
        > You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes Okay, I am gonna be 100% serious here: you absolutely should have such a freedom. Just as loitering or jaywalking being a crime is inherently totalitarian, what the hell.
  - brazzy 6mo ago
    You mean something like a... general regulation for data protection?
- RHSeeger 6mo ago
  Not just the government. It shouldn't be possible for any random stalker to find someone's daily movements.
  - nullc 6mo ago
    They're also one and the same generally-- at least if the stalker has money or the right friends most kinds of law enforcement access means stalker access. It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker, and there are so many people that work in law enforcement that bribing, impersonating, or persuading your way to access is not that big a deal. Not to mention that enabled stalkers can just file a federal lawsuit and issue subpoena for records. The only safe thing is for the records to never exist in the first place.
    - soulofmischief 6mo ago
      Further reading: AP: Across US, police officers abuse confidential databases https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e16f43 https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
    - Tangurena2 6mo ago
      > It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker This was one of the motivations for passage of the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994. Nowadays, officers need a legitimate reason to run a plate - unless the patrol car is fitted with automatic cameras[1] that look up every plate of every car they drive past. > The Virginia state police used license plate readers to track people’s attendance at political events; > The New York Police Department used license plate readers to keep track of who visited certain places of worship, and how often; > Despite all this surveillance, ALPR technology has been repeatedly shown to be unreliable; like other police technologies, ALPRs can and do make mistakes.[2] Generally, court decisions have held that you have zero expectation of privacy when you are in public spaces. Current license plate standards[3] aim for plates that are not cluttered and are easily read by the human eyeball, despite being wrapped with license plate frames (which usually make the state hard/impossible to read which is the most common failure mode for ANLR[4]). If the reflectivity material (traditionally called "ScotchLite"[5]) is worn out (or defaced), most states require the plate to be replaced. Notes: 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_... Prior to passage, a slang term for running/looking up the plate/registration of a car with a pretty woman driver was "running a date". 1 - https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-readers-alprs https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-rea... 2 - https://www.aclum.org/publications/what-you-need-know-about-automatic-license-plate-readers/ https://www.aclum.org/publications/what-you-need-know-about-... 3 - https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/646bcc8a-219b-47d8-b5cd-726240473163/License-Plate-Standard-Edition-3_September-2025-Update.pdf https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/646bcc8a-219b-47d8-b5cd-72624... 4 - https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/0063bf88-cb44-4ab9-90b6-200c8742a06d/License-Plate-Reader-Program-Best-Practices-Guide-Edition-2_final.pdf https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/0063bf88-cb44-4ab9-90b6-200c8... 5 - https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/scotchlite-reflective-material-us/ https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/scotchlite-reflective-material-u... Disclaimers: I used to work for my state's motor vehicle department and had database/developer access to driving licenses and motor vehicle registration records. I graduated from a police academy when I was a youngster.*
- therobots927 6mo ago
  Means of Control by Byron Tau and Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine. Can’t recommend these books enough for anyone who is skeptical of the above claim.
- eru 6mo ago
  100 miles around your border is a constitution free zone anyway.
  - rpdillon 6mo ago
    It's not Constitution-free, but CBP does claim a lot of extra rights within that zone. It covers about two-thirds of the U.S. population. https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
- intended 6mo ago
  A significant chunk of the infrastructure that farms data is now from private organizations, who sell that information because it is a source of revenue. Government is the bogeyman we are afraid of, but ad tech is doing the actual heavy lifting.
- Terr_ 6mo ago
  Necessary, but not sufficient. Even if we somehow, perhaps via magic genie-wish, made the government totally disinterested... these systems would still enable dystopian levels of private surveillance and manipulation.
- dzhiurgis 6mo ago
  Yeah nah I’d rather stop the criminals.
  - alex_young 6mo ago
    That’s cool. The precogs over at flock say you drive too close to the criminals though, and you know what that means. Stay loyal, stay safe citizens.
    - dzhiurgis 6mo ago
      Criminals are long gone baby. Stop worshipping them.
      - righthand 6mo ago
        The Potus is literally a pedophile, criminals are here to stay and winning. Your camera company supports them as long as they have money and/or control of the system.
King-Aaron 6mo ago
> I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. Then you want to stop the company. Which is reasonable.
- ceejayoz 6mo ago
  Flock isn’t the only company.
  - jojobas 6mo ago
    One company getting destroyed could be a sign for others.
    - NegativeK 6mo ago
      The sign won't be "don't do mass surveillance". It'll be "make money off mass surveillance, but don't get caught like Flock did."
heyethan 6mo ago
[dead]
0x10ca1h0st 6mo ago
This is great sentiment. Companies can be stopped, and then the medusa grows another head. Kill the business model, make the brokering of data illegal, and if caught, fines would be paid directly to those effected. This would go a long ways to promoting privacy first.
someothherguyy 6mo ago
> we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone we are essentially already in that dystopia. it is now more of a question of how bad it gets, and if the population will ever stand against it in any meaningful fashion.
- GolfPopper 6mo ago
  Look at the silver lining - once the paperclip maximizers have crashed both modern civilization and the biosphere, it will be easy for any survivors to find privacy amid the metaphorical and actual ruins.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
01100011 6mo ago
There is a weird fetish with Flock right now. Privacy advocates have been screaming at the public for 25 years now and suddenly the public cares and is obsessed with this one very specific company. Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7. I mean, cool, stop Flock, but don't stop there. Flock is very much not the final boss in this fight. The cynic in me says we will all get bored once Flock is off the radar though.
- the_other 6mo ago
  It’s easier to consider responses or solutions to specific problems, rather than to solve for a broad, general principle. You can see this in many areas of life. Solving for general principles requires group effort (usually); you can get buy-in from individuals if you csn focus them on specific cases or subsets. So the Floxk fetish is reasonable at this point, IMO. There’s also nothing inherently wrong with carrying sensors in your pocket. The “wrong” is in the providers/manufacturers exploiting the position they put themselves in. Managing data is hard, and most people don’t want to do the necessary work most of the time, so the providers/manufacturers offer to do that for their users/customers. However, they also exploit their csretaker position by tresting the data like they own it too, and extracting profit. If the solutions to the Flock problems could be framed such that other providers/manufacturers had to build systems that were “local first” or “private by default” (as in pre-internet home computing plus explicit, finegrained shsring consents), then it would also be fine to carry sensors. I want my fitness tracker and GPS. I just don’t want the data it generates used to build advertising profiles on me such that ads (and government mass surveillance dragnets) can follow my every other move.
- kortex 6mo ago
  I don't think it's a "weird fetish." It's just most of the things privacy advocates have been warning about - PRISM, warrantless metadata requests, tech companies handing over data - are all largely invisible. A camera pointing at your child's playground or gymnastics class is much more salient.
- nobody9999 6mo ago
  >Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7. While the above is a difference in scale, the various "credit bureaus" have been doing this stuff for much, much longer.[0][1][2] That's not to excuse the use of ALPRs and tracking on mobile devices. It's all really creepy and collection and trade in such should have strong negative incentives (company breaking fines, loss of corporate charter, jail time, etc.). In the meantime, one has to deal with at least some of this stuff unless you're willing to go live in a leanto in the woods. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#History [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experian#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experian#History [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransUnion#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransUnion#History
neya 6mo ago
This should ironically start at the VC level - and that includes YC et al. Some one comes and says "hey, we got this idea, we collect facial recognition data for training proprietary AI models", the response from the VC should "I'm gonna stop you right there. This is unethical." Not "Did you say I can 5x my ROI? Here, shut up and take my money!"
- jychang 6mo ago
  When you put it that way, the answer is obvious: Assume VCs are brainless profit maximizers who don't understand ethics. How do you get them to say "I'm gonna stop you right there"? Answer: Make it unprofitable to collect this data. Change the incentives. So really, the correct answer IS on the legal level. Make a set of laws which make it burdensome at best and completely unprofitable at worst, and then the incentives within the system aligns.
  - neya 6mo ago
    Agree with your point and the solution. Make it risky to operate - so that most VCs would wash their hands off due to legal risks. Kind of like what happened to the crypto space. But, it always gets worse before it gets better. Tons of rug pulls happened before SEC took action.
- kaliqt 6mo ago
  YC is responsible for Sam Altman, need I say more?
  - neya 6mo ago
    Fair enough. But, to be fair to them, they did have a falling out. There was a story on here how it went all the way to PG and then they asked Sam to leave (Something like that). I think saw it in a comment here, really don't remember.
- Joker_vD 6mo ago
  Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated. We today can also add crypto schemes and mass surveillance to the examples. And mind you, VC are people who are both pretty good at earning money and also eager for even more money. That's how they got to where they are, after all, not necessarily by being virtuous (over a certain minimally required amount, or a social signaling of possessing such an amount).
boriskourt 6mo ago
If we can set a legal precedent then this can cascade into policy, or an enforceable standard much faster.
NegativeK 6mo ago
Make HIPAA include PII. That hits your toxic waste goal real fast.
- duskdozer 6mo ago
  HIPAA explicitly allows government collection.
Tangurena2 6mo ago
One simple remedy would be to make companies (that collect such private data) and their directors/executives jointly & severally liable[0] for any identity theft. It should come with "forever" liability equivalent to SuperFund sites[1] Notes: 0 - Financial penalties would not be limited to "your share" of the penalty. If you have money, and the other parties don't, the plaintiffs can collect from whichever defendant has money. 1 - Everyone who ever owned the site with the toxic waste is liable for the cleanup. This is why when a gas station is sold (in the US), all of the fuel tanks are dug up and replaced - this way, none of the future leakage can be attributed to the previous owners.
itomato 6mo ago
Without their unique business model, what is the company? The product? What is the addressable market for ubiquitous public surveillance devices? Who is the customer?
razster 5mo ago
When you have dedicated groups of ppl on IRC and Newsgroups showing how easy it is to access these systems and teach others, you know it’s a bad thing. There are dozens of them and most of the people gathering this information and using it is not for good. It’s a flawed system

stevemk14ebr 6mo ago

You want to stop the source, which is that the government and other agencies can purchase surveillance data that would otherwise be disallowed by the 4th amendment. We need to end this 'laundering' of information through third parties, and enforce the constitution by its intent.

caconym_ 6mo ago
Honestly it should probably just be illegal for anyone, private or public, to engage in mass surveillance (or "data gathering", whatever) of anybody who didn't expressly consent to it. As long as the data exist, they will be abused.
- inetknght 6mo ago
  Not only that, but it should be illegal (eg: fines for the company and potential jail time for executives) for tying consent to use/purchase of services or products. Consent should be _voluntary_, not mandatory.
- nandomrumber 6mo ago
  But I did expressly consent. When I installed the SoundCloud app and it told me by continuing I agree to them sharing my data with their 954 partners.[1] 1. I’m not even joining. When I mostly recently installed the SoundCloud app - for the first time on a new device, that’s what’s it said: 954 partners. How can anyone reasonably understand what it is their agreeing to in that scenario.
  - Perseids 6mo ago
    This is the important point. You need the right to not be discriminated when you withhold your consent, otherwise your consent is effectively meaningless, as it is forced on you by your impossible bargaining position. This is one of the central pillars of the GDPR without which it wouldn't work at all. Be advised to make asking customers for consent that doesn't directly benefit them illegal as well, lest you risk creating another wave of malicious cookie banners.
    - Joker_vD 6mo ago
      > You need the right to not be discriminated when you withhold your consent, otherwise your consent is effectively meaningless, as it is forced on you by your impossible bargaining position. Which is why "we don't serve patrons without shoes and pants" policy is unconstitutional, yeah. If you don't want to agree to a business's demands — you're welcome to not deal with them and look for an alternative. All the alternatives have the same (or even worse) demands? Unless you can prove collusion, that's just how the invisible hand of the market worked its magic out. Go petition you congressman to violate laissez-faire even more than it already is, I guess.
      - LadyCailin 6mo ago
        The trouble with this is that I, at least, am trying to live in a society. And society has both rights and responsibilities. Sometimes you are forced to do things, or don’t do things, contrary to your desires. Every freedom has two sides, you can’t ignore the fact that increasing some freedoms for one decreases other freedoms for others. The shirt and shoes example is a great example in fact that illustrates the point. You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes, just like a business does not have unlimited freedom to impose whatever terms it likes, just because it put it in its ToS.
        Joker_vD 6mo ago
        > You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes Okay, I am gonna be 100% serious here: you absolutely should have such a freedom. Just as loitering or jaywalking being a crime is inherently totalitarian, what the hell.
- brazzy 6mo ago
  You mean something like a... general regulation for data protection?
RHSeeger 6mo ago
Not just the government. It shouldn't be possible for any random stalker to find someone's daily movements.
- nullc 6mo ago
  They're also one and the same generally-- at least if the stalker has money or the right friends most kinds of law enforcement access means stalker access. It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker, and there are so many people that work in law enforcement that bribing, impersonating, or persuading your way to access is not that big a deal. Not to mention that enabled stalkers can just file a federal lawsuit and issue subpoena for records. The only safe thing is for the records to never exist in the first place.
  - soulofmischief 6mo ago
    Further reading: AP: Across US, police officers abuse confidential databases https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e16f43 https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
  - Tangurena2 6mo ago
    > It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker This was one of the motivations for passage of the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994. Nowadays, officers need a legitimate reason to run a plate - unless the patrol car is fitted with automatic cameras[1] that look up every plate of every car they drive past. > The Virginia state police used license plate readers to track people’s attendance at political events; > The New York Police Department used license plate readers to keep track of who visited certain places of worship, and how often; > Despite all this surveillance, ALPR technology has been repeatedly shown to be unreliable; like other police technologies, ALPRs can and do make mistakes.[2] Generally, court decisions have held that you have zero expectation of privacy when you are in public spaces. Current license plate standards[3] aim for plates that are not cluttered and are easily read by the human eyeball, despite being wrapped with license plate frames (which usually make the state hard/impossible to read which is the most common failure mode for ANLR[4]). If the reflectivity material (traditionally called "ScotchLite"[5]) is worn out (or defaced), most states require the plate to be replaced. Notes: 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_... Prior to passage, a slang term for running/looking up the plate/registration of a car with a pretty woman driver was "running a date". 1 - https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-readers-alprs https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-rea... 2 - https://www.aclum.org/publications/what-you-need-know-about-automatic-license-plate-readers/ https://www.aclum.org/publications/what-you-need-know-about-... 3 - https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/646bcc8a-219b-47d8-b5cd-726240473163/License-Plate-Standard-Edition-3_September-2025-Update.pdf https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/646bcc8a-219b-47d8-b5cd-72624... 4 - https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/0063bf88-cb44-4ab9-90b6-200c8742a06d/License-Plate-Reader-Program-Best-Practices-Guide-Edition-2_final.pdf https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/0063bf88-cb44-4ab9-90b6-200c8... 5 - https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/scotchlite-reflective-material-us/ https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/scotchlite-reflective-material-u... Disclaimers: I used to work for my state's motor vehicle department and had database/developer access to driving licenses and motor vehicle registration records. I graduated from a police academy when I was a youngster.*
therobots927 6mo ago
Means of Control by Byron Tau and Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine. Can’t recommend these books enough for anyone who is skeptical of the above claim.
eru 6mo ago
100 miles around your border is a constitution free zone anyway.
- rpdillon 6mo ago
  It's not Constitution-free, but CBP does claim a lot of extra rights within that zone. It covers about two-thirds of the U.S. population. https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
intended 6mo ago
A significant chunk of the infrastructure that farms data is now from private organizations, who sell that information because it is a source of revenue. Government is the bogeyman we are afraid of, but ad tech is doing the actual heavy lifting.
Terr_ 6mo ago
Necessary, but not sufficient. Even if we somehow, perhaps via magic genie-wish, made the government totally disinterested... these systems would still enable dystopian levels of private surveillance and manipulation.
dzhiurgis 6mo ago
Yeah nah I’d rather stop the criminals.
- alex_young 6mo ago
  That’s cool. The precogs over at flock say you drive too close to the criminals though, and you know what that means. Stay loyal, stay safe citizens.
  - dzhiurgis 6mo ago
    Criminals are long gone baby. Stop worshipping them.
    - righthand 6mo ago
      The Potus is literally a pedophile, criminals are here to stay and winning. Your camera company supports them as long as they have money and/or control of the system.

King-Aaron 6mo ago

> I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. Then you want to stop the company. Which is reasonable.

ceejayoz 6mo ago
Flock isn’t the only company.
- jojobas 6mo ago
  One company getting destroyed could be a sign for others.
  - NegativeK 6mo ago
    The sign won't be "don't do mass surveillance". It'll be "make money off mass surveillance, but don't get caught like Flock did."

heyethan 6mo ago

[dead]

0x10ca1h0st 6mo ago

This is great sentiment. Companies can be stopped, and then the medusa grows another head. Kill the business model, make the brokering of data illegal, and if caught, fines would be paid directly to those effected. This would go a long ways to promoting privacy first.

someothherguyy 6mo ago

> we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone we are essentially already in that dystopia. it is now more of a question of how bad it gets, and if the population will ever stand against it in any meaningful fashion.

GolfPopper 6mo ago
Look at the silver lining - once the paperclip maximizers have crashed both modern civilization and the biosphere, it will be easy for any survivors to find privacy amid the metaphorical and actual ruins.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

01100011 6mo ago

There is a weird fetish with Flock right now. Privacy advocates have been screaming at the public for 25 years now and suddenly the public cares and is obsessed with this one very specific company. Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7. I mean, cool, stop Flock, but don't stop there. Flock is very much not the final boss in this fight. The cynic in me says we will all get bored once Flock is off the radar though.

the_other 6mo ago
It’s easier to consider responses or solutions to specific problems, rather than to solve for a broad, general principle. You can see this in many areas of life. Solving for general principles requires group effort (usually); you can get buy-in from individuals if you csn focus them on specific cases or subsets. So the Floxk fetish is reasonable at this point, IMO. There’s also nothing inherently wrong with carrying sensors in your pocket. The “wrong” is in the providers/manufacturers exploiting the position they put themselves in. Managing data is hard, and most people don’t want to do the necessary work most of the time, so the providers/manufacturers offer to do that for their users/customers. However, they also exploit their csretaker position by tresting the data like they own it too, and extracting profit. If the solutions to the Flock problems could be framed such that other providers/manufacturers had to build systems that were “local first” or “private by default” (as in pre-internet home computing plus explicit, finegrained shsring consents), then it would also be fine to carry sensors. I want my fitness tracker and GPS. I just don’t want the data it generates used to build advertising profiles on me such that ads (and government mass surveillance dragnets) can follow my every other move.
kortex 6mo ago
I don't think it's a "weird fetish." It's just most of the things privacy advocates have been warning about - PRISM, warrantless metadata requests, tech companies handing over data - are all largely invisible. A camera pointing at your child's playground or gymnastics class is much more salient.
nobody9999 6mo ago
>Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7. While the above is a difference in scale, the various "credit bureaus" have been doing this stuff for much, much longer.[0][1][2] That's not to excuse the use of ALPRs and tracking on mobile devices. It's all really creepy and collection and trade in such should have strong negative incentives (company breaking fines, loss of corporate charter, jail time, etc.). In the meantime, one has to deal with at least some of this stuff unless you're willing to go live in a leanto in the woods. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#History [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experian#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experian#History [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransUnion#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransUnion#History

neya 6mo ago

This should ironically start at the VC level - and that includes YC et al. Some one comes and says "hey, we got this idea, we collect facial recognition data for training proprietary AI models", the response from the VC should "I'm gonna stop you right there. This is unethical." Not "Did you say I can 5x my ROI? Here, shut up and take my money!"

jychang 6mo ago
When you put it that way, the answer is obvious: Assume VCs are brainless profit maximizers who don't understand ethics. How do you get them to say "I'm gonna stop you right there"? Answer: Make it unprofitable to collect this data. Change the incentives. So really, the correct answer IS on the legal level. Make a set of laws which make it burdensome at best and completely unprofitable at worst, and then the incentives within the system aligns.
- neya 6mo ago
  Agree with your point and the solution. Make it risky to operate - so that most VCs would wash their hands off due to legal risks. Kind of like what happened to the crypto space. But, it always gets worse before it gets better. Tons of rug pulls happened before SEC took action.
kaliqt 6mo ago
YC is responsible for Sam Altman, need I say more?
- neya 6mo ago
  Fair enough. But, to be fair to them, they did have a falling out. There was a story on here how it went all the way to PG and then they asked Sam to leave (Something like that). I think saw it in a comment here, really don't remember.
Joker_vD 6mo ago
Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated. We today can also add crypto schemes and mass surveillance to the examples. And mind you, VC are people who are both pretty good at earning money and also eager for even more money. That's how they got to where they are, after all, not necessarily by being virtuous (over a certain minimally required amount, or a social signaling of possessing such an amount).

boriskourt 6mo ago

If we can set a legal precedent then this can cascade into policy, or an enforceable standard much faster.

NegativeK 6mo ago

Make HIPAA include PII. That hits your toxic waste goal real fast.

duskdozer 6mo ago
HIPAA explicitly allows government collection.

Tangurena2 6mo ago

One simple remedy would be to make companies (that collect such private data) and their directors/executives jointly & severally liable[0] for any identity theft. It should come with "forever" liability equivalent to SuperFund sites[1] Notes: 0 - Financial penalties would not be limited to "your share" of the penalty. If you have money, and the other parties don't, the plaintiffs can collect from whichever defendant has money. 1 - Everyone who ever owned the site with the toxic waste is liable for the cleanup. This is why when a gas station is sold (in the US), all of the fuel tanks are dug up and replaced - this way, none of the future leakage can be attributed to the previous owners.

itomato 6mo ago

Without their unique business model, what is the company? The product? What is the addressable market for ubiquitous public surveillance devices? Who is the customer?

razster 5mo ago

When you have dedicated groups of ppl on IRC and Newsgroups showing how easy it is to access these systems and teach others, you know it’s a bad thing. There are dozens of them and most of the people gathering this information and using it is not for good. It’s a flawed system