Amazon's 'neighborhood watch' turns police officers into 'Reddit moderators'
latimes.com
latimes.com
Someone should go write a scifi about a big tech company called Nile that uses consumer goods to gather data on political enemies and effectively weaponizes the populace against itself.
Now, you might say that things can't be made retroactively illegal, but selective enforcement can be done retroactively. The protagonist angers someone in power, and then finds that they are being summoned to court for jaywalking 357 times over the past year, getting their license revoked for 957 traffic infractions, illegal disposal of hazardous materials like lithium ion batteries in household garbage, etc. They are also a "subject of interest" in customs duty evasion, until they can account for every discrepancy in their last 46 airport x-ray bag scans. Apparently, they are also a serial loiterer, as confirmed by 588 separate security camera videos. They have been seen exchanging something with known drug users (the videos where it is clear they gave a homeless man $1 are quietly ignored).
If they were reddit moderators, they'd be kicking people out of neighborhoods and putting up billboards for diet pills and cryptocurrencies everywhere.
> Some experts worry that this kind of information may shift policing more toward quality-of-life issues and property theft rather than life-threatening crimes such as assault.
Property theft isn’t merely a “quality of life issue”. This seems to imply that policing shouldn’t be concerned with it, which is utter bullshit, they absolutely should be
Summary:
> The collaboration of the LAPD with Amazon’s Ring network and its Neighbors platform (designed for community members to share information about alleged crimes) inundates officers with information, much of which does not pertain to actual crimes, and it brings up issues about consumer privacy and the over-collection of data. The efficacy of this data in improving policing outcomes remains unclear.