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Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

My view on this is that we're not going back and it would be silly to try to do so. Once you have the technology to record, track, and ultimately apprehend criminals, simply not doing so in the name of ideological purity becomes increasingly obscene. What we need are courts that understand the technology, prosecutors who fear censure for overreach, and fair laws about standards of access to the data.

It's here to stay. We just need good rules around its use. The benefits are too compelling.

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Did you just wave away all concerns and criticisms of an increasingly aggressive surveillance and police state as “ideological purity?”

People use that word because they think their own biases are realistic, but it doesn’t get more ideological than believing that giving police and courts more surveillance power has benefits that are “too compelling.”

This isn't about "ideological purity" nor technology: My home is literally the only place where my family and I still have some form of privacy, is it too hard to understand that we don't want random strangers having the power to lurk into our lives 24/7?

You're confusing random people looking whenever they feel like with a well run system the GP is asking for.

Maybe the way is to store the footage or a decryption key locally so the police have to physically get it off you (and you can't refuse) if they want access and can't drag-net. That's what's traditionally done with business's surveillance cameras.

By that logic, we should use illegally obtained evidence to record/track criminals. Not sure that's how the courts actually operate.

There are vendors who provide exactly the same service that Ring does, but allow you to retain sovereignty over the data. Ubiquity, for example.

That still doesn't protect my sovereignty if my neighbour points their camera at my drive way (which was described by another commenter in this thread).

> We just need good rules around its use.

Rules change. The people in power change. They may say "fuck those rules" in the future. The only way to prevent abuses like this is to not surveil unnecessarily.

What, we're just going to skip over the fact that the police can beat the shit out of you and throw you in jail for a few hours, largely consequence-free, before any of those parties even get involved?

"We can't surveil criminals because the cops will beat them up before they're even charged" does not seem to me to describe a problem that has absolutely anything to do with cameras.

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