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Comment by orangeteacups | Hacker News Reader

Hmm: "The specific incident in question was a grand larceny case where two men tried (and failed) to steal a robot owned and operated by Serve Robotics". Sounds like someone chose a pretty sensational title when in reality Serve so far only provided footage of a case that involves their own property. It's like saying "Car drivers are feeding dashcam footage to police" as soon as one driver uses their dashcam footage as evidence in a hit-and-run they were victim of.

That is entirely true, but don't miss the forest through the trees:

> The incident highlights the fact that delivery robots that are being deployed to sidewalks all around the country are essentially always filming, and that their footage can and has been used as evidence in criminal trials.

Nest and the like are already queried by law enforcement, and those are fixed in place. They're raising awareness that there is now a mobile CCTV system in these delivery droids. In this case, the footage was offered to substantiate a criminal accusation, but there is appetite for automating this.

Case in point: I've worked for two employers that implemented ALPR at parking lot security gates. One of them did feed license plate data to local police; the idea was that we didn't want anyone with an active warrant (or known trespassers) entering the premises. The cops aren't monitoring shit on their own-- all the surveillance "they" do is outsourced to our employers.

I'm also not sure that people should be counting on regular, non-robotic delivery drivers to keep their mouths shut if they see any crimes.

Yes, that's very reasonable in this case.

What a world where this is treated as wild. No wonder CA has gone to shit.

Agreed. This article does raise some reasonable privacy questions tangentially related, but the core of article is "someone tried to steal an object with cameras, those cameras recorded the incident and were given to the cops."

I've recently enjoyed several of 404media's articles but this is a miss.

I've been thinking a lot about the Yglesias thing of "America is under-policed and over-imprisoned." These sort of incidents map nicely to that - we shouldn't be jailing these perpetrators for a decade, but we should be catching them in the act and punishing them swiftly.

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