Hacker News Reader

Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

What I would like to see is for the police to actually track down crime when people give them video evidence. Here's a video of someone stealing a car, stealing a bicycle, breaking into a house. Go arrest them! Instead, the police just ignore reports like this.

I think it would be fair to do something like, if you are convicted of a crime, the police keep your face and other biometric data on file for the next five years. Then if you get caught on video committing another crime, they can just use face detection to know it's you.

The way it works now, the power dynamics are all wrong. It shouldn't be Amazon listening to the police who ignore the people, it should be the police listening to the people, and Amazon just sells people a data service.

View on HN

If you get convicted of a crime, the police will keep your biometric data forever. What leads you to imagine they don't?

I am not an expert, but right now it seems like the police generally keep around your biometric data, but they don't keep it in a very useful way. I can't walk into the police station, show them a video clip on my phone of someone breaking into my car last night, they scan the video and it says "we found them, this is John Q. Smith". The data is on a piece of paper somewhere, or it's in a database that is rarely used for whatever reason. So in practice it's like they aren't storing it at all.

If the police did keep biometric data in a useful way, I think our society would have to be more explicit about what biometric data we want the police to keep. I don't know what the right answer is, but something like, if you are convicted by a crime then your biometric data is at least kept for a few years, that seems reasonable to me.

Seems more likely they are storing it in a useful form but just don't care about your problem. Or perhaps a larger agency than your local pd is making use of it.

Agreed. I've found the last group that gets access to invasive surveillance data is the local police.

For a while, Google was offering reverse GPS lookups of phones to the police. ("List all phones in this bounding box at this time in the past"). If you had Google Maps installed on your phone, then you were automatically opted in to sharing the data.

(I think this may be illegal in some US jurisdictions now; though Biden is talking about specific carve outs preventing sharing of GPS traces near abortion clinics with state governments, so who knows...)

Someone broke into a remote building at 2AM. We had video of them doing it with a precise start / stop timestamp for the event, and of no one else in the area. The police said they couldn't ask Google to query the database for them.

So, we're in a situation where the data exists on everyone, but only abusive law enforcement types and creepy marketers are willing to use it.

We can't even really have an argument about the tradeoffs between privacy and security, since the data isn't available for the benefit of normal victims of normal crimes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com