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Comment by blitmap | Hacker News Reader

I definitely feel like we're missing positive opportunities for mass surveillance. Things like being able to recognize someone in cardiac arrest, or who is at risk for a stroke. Someday mass surveillance will help as much as it hurts society.

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What's interesting is that anyone implementing mass surveillance could care less about your proposed benefits.

I believe technology will ever erode privacy, and that the best we can hope for is to make sure the transparency goes both ways. The government should become more transparent to the people as the people become more transparent to the government. Like you though, I'm afraid we'll end up with a vast and reliable surveillance system which police will be able to use, while the police themselves are still "struggling" to get their body cams to work reliably.

Or exactly the opposite - it may be their primary motivation, with the negatives ending up being caused by others co-opting the system.

> could care less about your proposed benefits.

Could they? Oh well, that is at least something then.

> Things like being able to recognize someone in cardiac arrest, or who is at risk for a stroke.

Can those things actually be done with a vanishingly low false-positive rate? If I'm walking down the sidewalk and a camera sees me suddenly grimace because a rock got into my shoe, I don't want paramedics rushing to the scene to offer me assistance for a heart attack.

Currently? No. In the future, sure why not. Just don't ask when.

All I see here is a slightly different version of “it’s for the children”.

I'm the last one to stay "it's for the children". I don't think mass surveillance can be rolled back though I will continue to support changing legislation that harms us. There are positives to consider if we must live in that reality. It's the best we can do if we can't go back.

Many prisons have blanket surveillance systems. I suggest you ask the prisoners how beneficial they find it, and extrapolate.

"Prison has X, therefore X is bad" isn't a very compelling argument.

Its exactly analagous. The government agencies want to implement this technology for the same reasons they do it in prisons - not for your benefit.

It isn't analogous because someone walking freely on the street has not been convicted of a crime.

Extrapolating is not always useful... See relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/605/

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