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Comment by xyience | Hacker News Reader

It's more people complaining about unforeseen possible use cases that are now seen and possible rather than the underlying bits of tech that make it possible. (What, should we make cameras illegal?) But because aspects of our law have a tradition of "if it's not explicitly illegal, it's legal, unless you get sued for it and the judges decide it's illegal" then it is not a bad idea to nip these sorts of unintended purposes in the bud with an explicit law before someone actually does it and we have to wait for a long court battle for it to be resolved. (And when that someone is the government, the odds aren't exactly 50-50.)

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The harmful use cases are not only entirely forseen, but also realized at this point. Many times over. Government use of bulk data needs to be regulated. Unfortunately, our government has a bit of an accountability problem, so such regulation may not even be useful.

I don't think it was foreseen when license plates were created the harmful use case of having a cop at every street corner with photographic memory and accurate speed measuring abilities who occasionally notes cars down for speeding / running a red light and who is networked with every other cop all working together reporting on such-and-such car now at position x,y while a team at HQ is constantly updating large maps with tacks showing the last known location of car x,y. Agree that the modern tech equivalent of the above has already been happening to various extents. Indeed we're fast approaching a time when we'll have enough sensors-of-all-sorts penetration to be able to track the whereabouts of anything of interest worldwide -- the underlying geospatial tech to make that scale already exists.

>I don't think it was foreseen when license plates were created the harmful use case of having a cop at every street corner with photographic memory and accurate speed measuring abilities who occasionally notes cars down for speeding (...)

That's not a harmful use case. That's an efficient implementation of the intended use case.

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