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Comment by Noos | Hacker News Reader

Even before all of this tech, if you looked suspicious you would get stopped or worse. A story was when I moved to a different state, I went out walking in my new area. Exploring the suburbs. I had brought a book with me, and it was starting to rain. I kept my book under my shirt to protect it. As I went home, I was suddenly stopped by four police cars; apparently a resident thought my book was a gun, and I was casing the area or something and the suburb I walked through must have been worried about crime. It was darkly funny to show them my book, which was a defense of political civility. It stopped me from walking there, though, as long as i lived there.

I think one aspect of this is the surprise that an engineer would get swept up in this, but this isn't really something that can be solved by tech.

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>>Even before all of this tech, if you looked suspicious you would get stopped or worse.

Tech is IMPROVING our lives. Software is an enabler, it solves our problems. If the software is making our problems worse, then there is something wrong with the software, we fix the software. But the issue here isn't the software, the issue here is privacy invasion. Terms of Use and Privacy Policy aren't comprehensive enough to inform users what they are doing or how and when they are collecting their personal data.

From the story “I didn’t realize that by having location services on that Google was also keeping a log of where I was going, I’m sure it’s in their terms of service but I never read through those walls of text, and I don’t think most people do either.” McCoy said.

Steve Jobs had a solution for this:

"Privacy means that people know what they’re signing up for. In plain English, and repeatedly. I believe that people are smart. Some people want to share more than others. Ask them...Make them tell you to stop asking them. Let them know what you’re going to do with their data"

If it changes the phenomena that trigger false-positives of suspicion towards "was actually present near the scene of the crime" and away from "wrong skin color in the neighborhood," it can be argued the tech has improved people's lives.

The problem is that it isn't. The police have routinely conducted similar dragnets with racial profiling in the past.

Even in systems with less human intervention (e.g automated loan approval systems) bias is still being built in.

If anything this could provide people with the excuse of "see! it was the algorithm!".

>> Even in systems with less human intervention (e.g automated loan approval systems) bias is still being built in.

Just because there is bias in the system does not mean it is OK to open the floodgates and introduce more

>> If anything this could provide people with the excuse of "see! it was the algorithm!".

It doesn't work that way. First the person has to come up with tens of thousands of dollars to defend themselves and hire lawyers and expert witnesses. What you are stating is just a luxury of the rich. If the new system is that rich people get extra avenues of defense, you are right.

> The police have routinely conducted similar dragnets with racial profiling in the past

How does the geofence-based system to determine whether you were in the area of a crime when it was committed know what race you are? I'm suggesting that in the absence of a tool like this, cops will use their eyeballs and knock on doors, and we already know that process is racially biased.

>>it can be argued the tech has improved people's lives.

I have a problem with general cynicism toward technology. I believe the core problem we have with tech is all about privacy.

We are on the fringe of a golden era, and we should resolve these issues about privacy and dark UX that deceive users.

We don't need to "argue" whether tech improved our lives. It already did!! When did we ever in the history of mankind had the chance to communicate, and access information in real-time?!

Software is neutral, neither good or evil. It only increases our effectiveness of what we were doing before.

It has its faults, but I really loved Adam Curtis’s documentary ‘ All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’. Full of anecdotes, but it is a fun watch!

I would modify this: Software increases our effectiveness at what it's applied to.

Sometimes, that's what we were doing before. Sometimes it isn't.

Sometimes it changes what we're doing enough that the old way becomes untenable, even if the new way is worse. Like if you take a crappy, mostly okay, sometimes terrible system and make it enough cheaper than the old system that always worked, most of the market may switch to the new shitty cheap thing.

Yes.

I occasionally miss the quality of landline phone calls, for one example.

I wouldn't say software is entirely neutral. As you say, they have their faults, and some are designed in a way that lends itself to evil purposes.

Openness is the key, as the Steve Jobs quote in a parent comment is saying. Users need to know what's going on, and our clickwrap culture hasn't been cutting it these past two decades.

I don't mean to be rude, but you really haven't said much in the way of OP or the article. All you've said is that tech is good. I'm not sure anyone in this forum would disagree with that comment, but what about privacy implications, and the horrors of being hauled through the court system because some third party fingered you as being somewhere at some time.

>All you've said is that tech is good. I'm not sure anyone in this forum would disagree with that comment...

I'm sure plenty would disagree, myself included. Tech is not blanket good. It can be good, it can be bad. It depends on the tech, and even then it's not always one or the other.

I said it in the first paragraph.

“But the issue here isn't the software, the issue here is privacy invasion. Terms of Use and Privacy Policy aren't comprehensive enough to inform users what they are doing or how and when they are collecting their personal data.”

> Tech is IMPROVING our lives. Software is an enabler, it solves our problems.

Oh good. Glad to see we have that sorted out.

> Tech is IMPROVING our lives.

Yes. But not without also creating significant dangers, frictions, and negatives.

Either way, it is safe to say Tech is a magnifier. It all depends on whose hands it's in and how they're using it.

> Tech is IMPROVING our lives

Sadly, it’s also improving the police state

I didn't intend to say it was good or bad. My point is more that technology won't eliminate the kind of thing the OP suffered, because you can simply just hang around the area in a police car or ask the neighbors. It may make it more efficient, but neighbors have been calling the cops on people quite all right without cell phones.

The main issue is the nature and cost of the legal system if you are accused, which is less privacy and more protection.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/techn...

I read that in his voice. Rest in peace <3

Technology is a tool, same as I can chop down a tree with an Axe, I can chop down a person.

What counts as a problem is hardly so clearly defined, usually it's a matter of politics. You say it's a privacy issue but another person could say it's a precision issue and be no less wrong. After all, had the police used a more precise form of software surveillance they probably would have been able to find the right person.

Tbf, my parents have been to the US in the 90s, and they keep saying that the most bizarre part of that trip was that they were stopped by a random police officer and questioned who they were and what they were doing because they "looked suspicious".

So not, it's not normal by any measure. It's just America.

There are so many stories of people becoming a suspect just because a neighbor named them, or they were just at the wrong place at the wrong time, or other kinds of random coincidence.

At the end of the day, the hope is that the evidence is taken in the right context and proper investigation will catch the right person. Unfortunately, especially in this era of True Crime documentaries, we've seen it go awry one too many time, and people are rightly scared that they may be next.

>> if you looked suspicious you would get stopped or worse.

Off topic, but remember when Bob Dylan was picked up by cops, mistaken for a homeless man in Long Beach, NJ when he walked up to a house for sale?

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2009/08/bob_dylan_st...

Not to trivialize the subject, this is literally the only funny story I've heard about this kind of thing

You honestly do not see the difference between your story and this one?

You do not see the difference between being actively observed, vs having your movements recorded 24/7 to then be gone over in retrospect weeks, months, or years later?

Really, there is no difference in your mind here?

Similar situation happened to me. There were multiple burglaries in my neighborhood, and I was coming home from school wearing a hoodie, and 2 officers jumped out of an unmarked vehicle, and slammed me on the hood, cuffed me, and began searching my backpack.

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