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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

This just seems extreme to me, considering how you've likely never been in this scenario and will in all likelihood not ever be in a scenario where you wouldn't give the police this information but Google would (e.g. your own home being robbed or a masked stranger ringing your doorbell).

Sometimes I think people covet privacy for its own sake, and don't think about the practicalities. The whole point of living in a collective society is that we give up some freedoms for the sake of overall increased prosperity, that's always been the tradeoff, and this is just one of those tradeoffs.

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We already have that tradeoff. It’s called a warrant. If the police get one, you are forced to give them access to your otherwise-private affects.

This is a step beyond that. Warrants are granted at the discretion of a judge, the bar is high, the scope is narrow and you (theoretically) have recourse if it’s abused. Here, the discretion is Google’s, the bar is nonexistent, the scope is unlimited and you have zero recourse if you think you’ve been wronged.

This wouldn’t be an issue if people trusted Google or the police. But they don’t, and it’s pretty easy to imagine ways in which this could be abused to harm people.

Let’s say you live in Texas and get abortion pills in the mail. If the police have a warrant to search your house for something unrelated, they (theoretically) can’t see the pills and decide to charge you with an unlawful abortion (unless they were “in plain view”, etc). But if Google gives police access to footage of your house extrajudicially, police can use anything they see as evidence against you. And make no mistake — things like that will happen as a result of this policy.

I think you're taking this way further than anyone actually involved would. IF what you're saying ever did even come close to occurring, we both know Google would shut it down quickly. Not just because it's horrible, but because it's also bad for business, and they've shown a propensity to protect data when it would be used as you hypothesize here.

Google is smart enough to know that "snitching" on its users is bad for business.

Think "track a burglar as he moves through a neighborhood" not "snoop (illegally) on the contents of people's mail".

"I think you're taking this way further than anyone actually involved would"

Just because you currently seem to have a "failure of imagination" does not mean that law enforcement, corrupt/facist/dystopian government officials or even unscrupulous employees within the tech sector itself will not absure their observational powers now or in the future.

Or maybe you just haven't been paying attention to the news for the last "n" decades.

I have a failure of actual data of problems occuring.

We all deal with "sky is falling" person on our development teams, and it's pointless doomsaying then as it's pointless doomsaying now.

When the bad things happens, we can react. Until then, let's try to stay reasonable.

> Think "track a burglar as he moves through a neighborhood" not "snoop (illegally) on the contents of people's mail".

It’s not illegal, though. Google is (presumably) fully legally in the clear to just hand over footage to police. That means that, if Google decides to hand over your footage to the police, anything on tape can be used as evidence against you. And Nest offers indoor security cameras, so your entire house could be fair game.

> Google is smart enough to know that "snitching" on its users is bad for business.

Is it bad for business? That’s not clear. Your whole argument is that this is fine so long as you think the likelihood of abuse is low. My guess is that it actually won’t hurt Google’s business at all, even as we start to discover police misusing this.

“It only happens to a handful of people! And anyway, they were [doing drugs/stealing/etc], so they deserved it. It’ll never happen to me!”

It's illegal to go through someone else's mail, and that was the hypothetical you proposed.

My argument is not that it's fine as long as the likelihood for abuse is low, my argument is that it's fine as long as there hasn't been any actual abuse. When something does happen, we can respond to it.

Until then, it's not reasonable to go through a bunch of worst-case scenarios.

My hypothetical is that if your mail is in the footage Google turns over to the police sans warrant, they can use it as evidence against you. That’s not “going through someone else’s mail”.

All I’ll say is that I’d prefer to stop the thing that will very clearly harm someone before that actually happens, not pretend we haven’t seen a million times before what happens when you give police more power.

And I'm grateful people like you aren't actually able to implement pre-crime divisions!

It sounds arrogant, to me, to be so sure you know what the outcome will be of a given situation, considering all of the necessary ingredients for that outcome have existed for some time and what you claim is "inevitable" has still not happened.

I think we’ve reached an impasse. I’d just like to point out that advocating that companies not give police access to our private lives except when forced to by a warrant is basically the exact opposite of “pre-crime”.

It fits the very definition of a pre-crime because you don't have a problem with how they're currently using that information (sparsely to catch criminals), only with how they might, in the future, use that information.

In the vein of principals, yes, privacy for its own sake is valuable to me.

In the vein of practicalities, both Google and the justice system (USA for me) are monstrously large bureaucracies known to make difficult-to-redress errors. Google's capricious account banning, police raiding incorrect addresses, eg. The decision to share with them more information than the law requires is one I'd prefer to make myself.

>bureaucracies known to make difficult-to-redress errors

Or just plain out refusing to fix errors where they would be relatively easy to fix; compare Scalia's "it's fine to fry a provably innocent person as long as the procedures are followed" argument.

And I think this view is irrational. Privacy for its own sake is effectively hoarding, and as you clearly show, hoarding can be caused by fear, which you have for Google and the justice system.

A numerate person would know how rare these things you're afraid of are, and not let those fears drive how they live. I (hopefully) follow that path, and I recommend you check it out!

I read what you wrote in the same way I suspect you would read someone who is afraid of space because meteors have killed people (as a rough example).

It just doesn't seem like the rates at which the things you're worried about are happening in a volume that would actually matter to a society.

Louis Brandeis on the right to privacy:

https://louisville.edu/law/library/special-collections/the-l...

Yeah, like I said, you give up some of your rights in order for a prosperous society to exist.

I'm not denying the right exists, I'm saying we give up our other rights all the time for the benefit of society, why is privacy any different?

Further, it's a spectrum. You're not putting a camera up for police to peruse at their leisure, it's only in specific situations.

You are not giving up privacy to a prosperous society, you are just giving up privacy.

I couldn't find evidence that mass surveillance is good a society.

What was the discussion I remember seeing long ago, about two kinds of surveillance-in-society?:

Kinda-good, 1, so and so can just go check the camera that points at the central plaza fountain that anyone can access, and sees that his spouse has arrived and is waiting for him as agreed.

or Bad, 2, cameras all over that everyone has no idea who controls, watches, and/or is recording

'prosperous society' ~= convenience, less human hours wasted on boring stuff. The convenience of a video doorbell and connected home sure seem worth it to me.

Agree to disagree. Systems that frustrate the accumulation and concentration of power seem to be integral to a functional society, nevermind a prosperous one, historically speaking.

“Convenience, less human hours wasted on boring stuff” is fine as an individual consumer mindset, but does not form sufficient criteria for evaluating complex social systems.

And how are either of those things substantially impacted if Google's policy was "we do not hand over user data without a warrant"?

I'm not saying they are, just that consumers are giving up privacy for some sort of return. It's not required, as there are E2E HomeKit alternatives, but it's inaccurate that 'all you do is give up privacy'.

You can have all of this without giving up data.

That attitude is the start of a slippery slope. If the end always justifies the means then none of your freedoms will be protected if someone else decides it's more convenient for you to not have them. This is the major problem with the big government authoritarianism that has infected the republican party.

Slippery slope arguments are a fallacy. If something bad happens, or is proposed, we can address it when the bad thing happens or is proposed. Nothing actually bad is happening or is proposed here.

As noted above, the trade-off our society has chosen to make is search warrants. Otherwise, it might as well be "for the police to peruse at their leisure". Is Google going to rigorously vet every "emergency" request for data the police make?

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