Smart streetlights are casting a long shadow
failedarchitecture.com
failedarchitecture.com
"Citizens of Ancient Rome started to install an oil lamp in front of every villa to prevent tripping or thefts, and an enslaved person would be designated to watch the lamp—lighting was already paired with the notion of control through slavery. "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_light#History
OTOH 'Link boys' make sense; article explains "In thieves' cant, a linkboy was known as a "Glym Jack" ("glym" meant "light")"
Also, this unnecessarily long and hyperbolic style of writing is exactly what undergrads have been trained to produce in college in the humanities for many years imo.
I'm sorry, but I don't think any normal definition of "surveillance" would include a lamp that simply allows those in the area to see their surroundings better.
Distributed observation by unconnected individuals without record keeping just doesn't seem to come close to a normal idea of "surveillance". And usually there's an element of surreptitiousness to the activity that's implied.
Looking upon your way as you travel is not surveillance. Putting a light on a night is not surveillance. We are talking about a particular thing, notwithstanding irrelevantly broad archaic or foreign usage.
The conclusion is the ability for passive surveillance using multiple vectors and ability of public sector to combine with other data is open to abuse.
I didn't really read the whole thing though, it was painful, I wouldn't have made it past the first line but I saw that this thread seemed to be bumped by mods. so I assumed it must be for a reason.
It could just be an unrelated glitch, but my guess is that the story was submitted yesterday, never made it past new, and one of the mods thought it was important enough to deserve a boost and reposted it. Or maybe there was a natural dupe unrelated to mods. but then the two threads merged and the previous comments had their timestamps updated. Maybe there was a validation error and it was done manually to have the timestamps on the comments be larger than the timestamp on the story, or maybe its a bug in the merging process. really it was just a guess at hn internals.
After a few hours the original timestamp gets restored. Revisit this tomorrow (certainly) or in a few hours and the times will change.
And what do they suggest police are going to do? Track the movement of political dissidents? Ain't no one got time for that kind of spy shit. People need to stop imagining they live in a dystopian movie.
The one realistic use/abuse I can see now is tracking homeless people and keeping them from stopping anywhere overnight. Still way too much effort for most police, but maybe in some gated-community-wannabe location.
The article makes that point too, but from the perspective that they have always been bad. Which I find almost as absurd as thinking it's ok to have disguised electronic surveillance run by the government and deployed at scale.
> “This is not a surveillance system—nobody is watching it 24 hours a day,”
Surveillance doesn't mean being watched by a human 24 hours a day, nor has it ever. Not only that, but this is misdirection - they're surely storing the data so that if police (or politicians, or advertisers, or criminals) want to they can look it up and watch you 24h a day retroactively.
They are way too blue, way too bright, spaced too far apart, placed too high up in the air, and not diffused adequately.
Orange sodium lamps are so, so, so much better in every way.