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Comment by MeImCounting | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a good thing. I would not trust US police to hold themselves to literally any standard of ethics as far as automation of this sort is concerned. I can easily see departments ignoring the outputs that dont fit into their agenda while running running with the outputs they do like.

I would like to see more companies restricting what contracts theyll take based on ethics.

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Unfortunately that’s not what’s happening here. The police still have access to this information and tooling. They just have a different license agreement and access point that allows Microsoft to extract more tax dollars.

There is probably an actual reason for it other than corporate greed. I'm guessing they have to silo the data separately on their cloud and that costs more. It's the same reason healthcare applications often cost more to host, they can't intermingle data in cloud instances and have to insure that it's only hosted in the US and what not. I imagine having to deal with legal procedures ensures a lot of additional time/money compared to other customers.

Oh I would certainly bet there's a lot of reasons it costs more money too. I'm just being reductivist and pessimist about it!

AI is a giant liability shield. You can blatantly steal shit and profit of it. Of course enforcement agencies are going to have a field day with it. Announcements like this are just a pretense that they aren’t already counting the money.

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