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Comment by loteck | Hacker News Reader

The incidental and systemic benefits of the recordings are exciting to people and celebrated with stories. The hazards of this constant "pollution" of data — how it is slowly changing our society, our economy, our humanity — is harder to quantify or build opposition to.

It's a bit like climate change. Slow, invisible poison.

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Law simply needs to internalize encryption. Your cameras are your property and only with consent of owner are they available to authorities.

Public cameras should only be decrypted for evidence to support litigation of crimes, not for police to search for violay, because the current gigantic book of laws has an implicit assumption of a difficulty to enforce.

If suddenly police could use AI to fully prosecute all violations of law then we have all the laws necessary for worse than totalitarian existence.

Every mile you drove in a car will be 10 violations of law. Laugh loud? Violation disturbance of peace. Stand looking at your email too long? Loitering. Cross a park? Dozens of environmental violations.

This is already in the US Constitution. 4th Amendment.

Sure by some interpretations. Unfortunately the current SCOTUS doesn’t see it that way, they think webcams and electronic surveillance should be in the constitution or authorities can do anything. If there isn’t a law or constitutional text to the effect then it doesn’t exist to them. So we have to approach this from actually getting a law passed.

TFA is about camera footage obtained via warrant (thus following due process). Do you think evidence should not be obtainable via warrant?

> Unfortunately the current SCOTUS doesn’t see it that way, they think webcams and electronic surveillance should be in the constitution or authorities can do anything.

Citation needed.

> and celebrated with stories.

Are you sure those are organic?

I've definitely heard organic stories from people who got favorable insurance/legal outcomes after a traffic accident because they were using a dashcam. Generally, if you're not doing anything wrong, it is a good idea to record whatever you're doing, because it's proof that you're not doing anything wrong (police departments use this to great effect; they love bodycams in 99% of cases, and simply turn them off when they're about to do something that they wouldn't want to have a bodycam for). The negatives are second-order effects that only come about when everyone is doing it.

I’m sure the vast majority of them are. Occam’s razor version: fear sells. If you can appeal to the clutching pearls part of the psyche then you can win over people to the idea of constant surveillance as necessary because of the current “wave of crime”. No matter how much crime is down or how many rights have to be taken away for “public safety”. Most reporters are just trying to put food on the table and outside of freedom of the press they couldn’t care less.

s/poison/vitamin/ and you'll be happier.

Double plus good idea, fine chap!

I mean, yes, we'd like to replace poison with vitamins, but that requires some serious changes.

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