That's part of my grievances against the urbanism of the U.S.A. When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy.
It's important to advocate for public places to be livable for everyone, not just drivers.
IMO these recordings should be kept by a third party, and cops should need to appeal to that third party to access it. Going before a judge to get a warrant would be preferred.
Why go through lawyer hurdles when you can just buy it perfectly legally?
Who is this directed at? The company wasn't started as a branch of government. What exactly are you proposing? That the government create its own network of cameras for surveillance? Have government-created solutions never been abused by law enforcement in the past?
A company like ID.me basically performs a function that any state government could do itself or through a contractor at lower cost and without the privacy issues of providing the data to third parties.
The law has failed us here - privacy attorneys basically focus on providing notification on a “take it or leave it” basis.
They almost certainly are willing to buy hordes of data off of google/facebook/etc.; it's useful data that they're already negotiating to get. Why, then, would they be want to put in the effort for a warrant on cctv footage when the suspect's google search and maps history they're alreaty getting contain the same info and more? At best, your creating a small amount of competition for data brokers, and I question if it's that much.
(not that you're not correct in that the more equal animals never face the same consequences less equal ones do).
Just because you're seeing the cases that create prosecutable paper trails doesn't mean anything about what fraction of that type of crime they are.
I am of the opinion that automatic gathering of the travel history of a plate should be locked behind judicial approval, and that the data should have a lifetime. But I'm 99.99% confident that the searches are at least logged because we got complaints, like, 1 month in.
I'm worried that YouPeople(TM) (i.e. the reader, HN, some unspecified future group, etc.) will vote in some jerks who will decide that people like me ought to be scrutinized to the full extent of the law. And your cheerleaders will say things like "they shouldn't have broken the law" when it was never possible, by design, to comply with all the laws all the time in the first place.
I mean, it's too little too late but likewise it's amazing to me that the same people who are trying to convince me that the current government is fascist is also at the same time still campaigning on behalf of the same government to disarm its citizens.
make it make sense!
First of all, you have a point - Trump is a great object lesson for why its probably not a great idea to have a huge, powerful, monolithic state and a commander in chief that can launch nuclear weapons. I don't think anyone would dispute that.
But most people see that the government as currently comported isn't going anywhere, even acknowledging the dedicated if incondite attempts of the current administration to "tame administrative bloat," as they might describe it. Thus your average "liberal" thinks first that government should be executed carefully by professional policy makers that respect the power of the state and second it should "take people's guns away."
But I will say that almost no liberal wants to totally disarm the public, anyway. That is a cartoon position which charitably could be attributed to loud voices on social media or something, but not a real policy position held by typical "libs". Most liberals just want guns to be properly regulated (perhaps even restricted to well regulated militias, to recall a phrase from somewhere). There might be some quibbling about precisely where the line between proper regulation and enabling oppression go, but I'd wager a majority of Americans are in favor of some version of the right to bear arms.
As evidence of this I proffer this pew research poll (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts...) which indicates that more than half of people who do not own guns could see themselves buying one in the future. 32% of people own guns in the U.S.
Why is that amazing? It doesn't really matter if civilians in the US are armed and trained and organized. If the US government decides to violently oppress people, the US government will win. Sure, it'll hurt more fighting against armed civilians, but they'll still win. The idea that the 2nd Amendment creates a populace full of people who could win an engagement against the US military is hilarious.
Not having pervasive surveillance is one layer. Due process that gives huge veto power to whatever the minority on the issue is is another. Being able to decide you'll take an enforcer with you rather than spend life in prison (and the pause and increased resource expenditure and scrutiny that causes the enforcers) is another layer.
I agree with you on the judicial approval and data expiration, but I don't think the systems should be active until those rules are enacted.
From Justice Sotomayor's concurring opinion in US v. Jones:
'“cases involving even short-term monitoring … require particular attention” because the “Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future …. GPS monitoring is cheap … proceeds surreptitiously, [and] it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: ‘limited police resources and community hostility.'” Id. at *11. Justice Sotomayor expressed concerns that the Government’s use of such technology might chill “associational and expressive freedoms,”'
https://epic.org/documents/united-states-v-jones/
I don't think the universal surveillance we have today is even recognizably similar to a citizen being concerned about a surreptitious GPS tracker.
Although I agree with your sentiment on data privacy, I don't know where you live but in the United States this is a gross [and potentially dangerous] overgeneralization of a million+ hard-working officers who committed their lives to your safety in spite of regularly encountering life-threatening situations.
The Supreme Court explicitly ruled in Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005) that police have no constitutional duty to protect citizens from harm, effectively nullifying the "committed their lives to your safety" claim.
These "million+ hard-working officers" actively maintain the corrupt system by refusing to hold their colleagues accountable. The "few bad apples" theory falls apart when entire departments and unions systematically protect officers who abuse their power.
American police have earned their reputation through decades of documented misconduct, militarization, and resistance to meaningful reform. The institution works exactly as designed.
It only came to light after much struggle from people searching for missing family members. Basically people in police or jail custody who died were dumped in there under a blanket assumption that no family had claimed them, but no attempts to notify or find family members was made.
https://jacksonadvocateonline.com/crump-wants-inquiry-of-215...
> The Supreme Court explicitly ruled in Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005) that police have no constitutional duty to protect citizens from harm
If a duty isn't constitutional then it doesn't exist?
If, as an individual citizen, I'm aware of a serious crime being committed, I have an obligation to report it. If a "good" police officer has knowledge of crimes committed by "bad" police officers and they don't report it, then they are no longer a "good" police officer.
Your analogy is a false equivalence.
A non-criminal black person has no control or responsibility over a random criminal black person.
A police officer absolutely can speak up, speak out, and blow the whistle when one of their fellow officers does awful things. But most will just keep their mouths shut and help (actively or passively) with whatever coverup the institution decides is appropriate.
We're not talking about guilt by association, here. We're talking about guilt by failing to speak up; their silence makes them complicit.
Exactly. It's not like we can kick people out of a race like it's a profession. Though I think that would make a very useful feature in a comedy plot.
The "just meet some nice cops" argument is precisely how institutions avoid accountability for systemic problems. Individuals, and how nice they might be, are irrelevant when discussing institutional failures.
What statistics, what well documented patterns? You mean biased selection of footage from Reddit?
"Well-documented patterns of abuse" are not statistics! But, if I'm mistaken and they are, please let me know what percentage of police officers engage in abuse of power in their career. I'd love to see those kinds of statistics!
I'm not sure that sort of thing is something you can tie up neatly into a bow and present as some set of statistics. But it's a phenomenon that's very real.
Tons of people have seen things they can't explain, and are convinced that ghosts and the supernatural exist. Those phenomena are "very real" to those folks, too.
To be clear, I agree that police abusing their power is a "real phenomenon", in the sense that it certainly happens. But until you can provide ample evidence that these behaviors are thing a significant minority of police officers take part in, then your generalizing them to all police officers is just about as "real" as ghosts.
They seem to be doing pretty well career-wise, too, so it seems that this is not an uncommon sentiment there.
Actually most people never complete the statement. It seems to be entirely accurate.
"One bad apple can spoil the barrel / bunch."
The bunch has been definitely been spoiled.
And the "circling the wagons" phenomenon you mention is exactly an example of this. The so-called "good cops" rarely speak up when their colleagues are doing horrible things. It's disgusting. Those who are silent are complicit.
Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have repeatedly held that police have no duty to provide protection to citizens in general.
If police were committing their lives to our safety, why would they use their limited funding pursuing court cases to affirm the opposite?
Did you know, in the US it is possible to be overqualified to be a cop, if you are too smart? The system wants jackbooted thugs, rather than intelligent policing.
If corrupt sheriff Moe Carpaio is accepting bribes or selling drugs out of the evidence locker, Moe needs to hire juniors who are less likely to blow the whistle. Much of that involves in trapping them into the perpetuating cycle of crime, and that's easier when they don't have lots of other employment options.
Tough fucking luck.
Police extensively abuse their power, and even the so-called "good" cops rarely speak up against their fellow officers when they do awful things. It's not prejudice to state established facts and patterns of behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
Consider that the guys entire management chain was involved in the attempt to forcibly institutionalize him, and numerous rank and file police officers as well. And not a single one of them spoke in his defense.
Based on this anecdote, what would you say the ratio of good vs bad cops is in NYPD?
If you don't understand why, consider that crime rates are known to be higher among the black population in the US but generalizing that to "black people are known to be abusive, violent thugs" would be equally wrong and hateful. You can make a point about the potential for abuse without name-calling an entire group of people like that.
cops are not a race. cops have extremely high levels of problematic behavior across all ages, races, etc. it's a good thing to call out the problematic nature of cops as a group since they have a literal monopoly on violence and are massively unaccountable for the use of that violence.
the argument "you can't call black people violent, therefore you also can't call cops violent" makes absolutely no sense to me
The same goes for the difference between "Police departments in the US have y% higher rate of excessive use of force than other countries" and "police are violent thugs".
No black person chooses to be born black. Casting judgement on any individual black person for the actions of other black people is unethical for that reason.
Every single cop chose to be there, chooses to continue being a cop every day despite constant and repeated examples of blatant corruption, bad behavior, literal thuggery, planting evidence, and the Good Ol' Boys network endemic to the institution. They are culpable for that choice. Continuing to be a cop in this environment (specifically where there is zero chance to "reform it from the inside" due to structural problems). Ask any ex-cop why they left. The system is completely broken and designed to empower cops to be thugs without consequence.
"Good cops" don't stay cops because they get bullied by literal cop gangs to either become a bad cop and do thuggery or to get the fuck out. There are no Good cops.
Casting judgement on any individual for the actions of other individuals who share characteristics with them is generally unethical, period. The individual's ability to choose the particular identifying characteristics shouldn't be relevant.
I'm pretty sure you don't want to be making the argument that it's ethical to judge people based on elements of their identity, so long as those elements have been selected by that person's choice!
That's a strange argument to make. If the chosen identity element is associated with negative characteristics, then it stands to reason that it's, well, reasonable to judge them based on those characteristics.
If it quacks, it's probably a duck. If it wears a police uniform it probably a) does bad stuff, b) enables cover-ups of that bad stuff, or c) lacks the courage to speak out against the bad stuff. This isn't because of their identity, it's because this is a characteristic that is widely documented to be incredibly common among cops.
People can choose to not adopt identity elements that have bad reputations. People can't choose not to be black.
Someone who chooses to wear heavy makeup and revealing clothing while standing on the street waiting for their Uber can be fairly judged to be a prostitute?
I don't think this is the argument you're making, but this is how the standard you are setting can be applied.
I don't think the element of choice in identity elements makes a difference either way. I think you should just avoid overgeneralizing, period.
Instead of, you know, inventing reasons why is fine to overgeneralize when you want to, but not when you don't want others to.
> If it wears a police uniform it probably a) does bad stuff, b) enables cover-ups of that bad stuff, or c) lacks the courage to speak out against the bad stuff.
"Probably"? Based on what prevalence rate? What percentage of police officers engage in each of these behaviors? You're making a wild assumption here, likely with nothing more than your own anecdotal understanding of these issues.
I think it's more likely you just have a media diet that is high in examples of these behaviors happening, but without the context that explains exactly how often they're actually happening.
I'm not denying that these things happen, and happen frequently! But there are a lot of police officers in the US alone, and even 1% of them doing each of these things is a large number of absolute cases. But a rate of 1% isn't sufficient to generalize to the entire population. At a rate of 10%, I would probably still refrain from extrapolating to the whole, but would start to question individual interactions, and would start to be sympathetic to this kind of generalization.
But due to the lack of evidence around prevalence of bad behavior, I'm skeptical of anyone who generalizes to this degree, especially given the poor quality of information anecdotally collected from the Internet.
> People can choose to not adopt identity elements that have bad reputations. People can't choose not to be black.
If people never adopt identity elements that have bad reputations, how can those reputations ever be improved? If you want the quality of policing to improve, the last thing your want to do is convince everyone who wants to make a difference that they shouldn't even try. If you want policing to improve, you should be encouraging the best people you know to join up and to force out the bad behavior through reform.
People cannot choose to be black, but they can choose to make an effort to destroy the negative stereotypes associated with their race.
You seem to be arguing that generalizations are always externally imposed and immutable, neither of which is true. Your argument is actively damaging to any efforts to improve the perceptions of both groups.
I really cannot be bothered to respond to the rest of this because you’re starting from a place of not being familiar enough with this topic at all for this to be a meaningful exchange. I really hope you make time to educate yourself better on this topic and do so with an open mind and compassion
I phrased what I said much more precisely than this. I said nothing about gender dysphoria, and was instead specifically talking about a therapy one might choose to undergo as treatment. Medical treatments should always be a choice, right?
But no, instead you decide to completely misrepresent what I said, and used then use that single misrepresentation as basis to dismiss my entire argument.
You claim to want a meaningful exchange, but this is how you choose to do it? This makes me skeptical you're interested in "meaningful exchange" in the first place.
Being black is not a choice...
I maintain that this sort of vitriolic language is unacceptable no matter what group it's targeting, unless your goal is to start a flame war (or a real war) rather than actually solve problems.
I do think it's a bit strong to say police are all violent, abusive thugs.
But there are many police officers who share unfortunate characteristics with violent, abusive thugs, and nearly all of their fellow supposedly-good officers are unwilling to call them out and enforce any sort of consequences for being violent, abusive thugs. That's nearly as bad, in my book.
So maybe let's stop policing (heh) people's specific language, and instead talk about the actual issues.
And my concern isn't with the language used, but the casually hateful attitude being expressed. It's not constructive, and probably actively harmful to just be casually demonizing your neighbors like that.
I think bringing race into it conflates separate issues. On the other hand, I really like the "cartel members" vs "[opposing political party]" example! It feels like these obviously shouldn't be equally bad, but explaining why is harder than I expected...
That's true, it should be qualified “within a subculture of violent thuggery, in organizations which lack any unifying focus other than the application of force, and which both protect them from and are themselves insulated from effective accountability for abuses.”
Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in order to demonize an entire group of people.
If you want to talk about systemic issues in our policing system, then talk about those issues. Calling people groups derogatory names isn't constructive.
And honestly, given the struggles police forces in the US are having with staffing, it does appear that cops are becoming increasingly marginalized. Especially since the primary driver behind the decline in recruitment seems to be the risk of social stigmatization.
and who's fault is that?
I suspect people who overgeneralize in order to demonize an entire population have a hand in this.
You didn't answer my question, either.
I think police as a job, as it currently exists, absolutely should be socially stigmatized. They have the ability to clean up their act, and show that they are worthy of the power and authority we give them, but they choose not to.
Except if it was you in charge, of course?
Like I asked you in a different reply: what's the prevalence rate of these bad behaviors? "Full of people" seems to imply that you think it's a majority? I can confidently state that you cannot back this up with evidence, because it appears the only evidence you have is anecdotal, and likely anecdotes you actively select for in order to feed your confirmation bias.
I'll note that you didn't answer my question, either. Coordinated deflection like this is not a sign that you have a well-formed argument
here's where people go "oh but there's 800,000+ uniformed law enforcement in the US, and you have 100 videos, big whoop". How many videos would it take? We've only been able to really easily record the police doing misconduct for 15-20 years, depending on how you parse "easily record." So how many videos would it take? And of those videos, how many would i have to listen to someone say "the victim of police misconduct should have just [...]"?
How many lawsuits against cities and departments would you need to read before it made a dent?
You know what, fuck that. You still haven't answered my earlier question:
> Why is being a "marginalized group" relevant?
We can come back to this tangent once you've answered that question. I'm getting tired of all the deflection
What i don't get is why cops need white knights
You were replying to someone who stated this, I believe:
> Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in order to demonize an entire group of people.
To which you responded:
> Cops aren't a marginalized group.
Why does being a marginalized group matter in this context? Why does not being a "marginalized group" mean it's okay to overgeneralize and/or demonize? What is a "marginalized group" in this context? Why is one not allowed to overgeneralize and demonize a marginal group, but one is allowed to for groups that do not hold this status?
The more meta question is: Why is overgeneralizing in order to demonize a group of people acceptable in any circumstance? I don't think it is, because once you start carving out exceptions, all you end up doing is just justifying and reinforcing your own biases.
>>>> Maybe a bit better, but you're still overgeneralizing in order to demonize an entire group of people.
>>> cops aren't a marginalized group
>> why does this matter
> There's a difference between punching down on marginalized groups, compared to speaking against / badly about authority figures.
hope this clears it up.
I still have these questions: What is a marginalized group, and why is that important? Why does being an "authority figure" mean it's okay to overgeneralize?
You're declaring these to be important factors in whether or not it's "okay" to overgeneralize specifically for the purposes of demonizing an entire population. I'm arguing that generalizing like this is never acceptable. In fact, I'm arguing that doing this is actively harmful to the goal you ostensibly are serving by demonizing this group in particular (unless you have ulterior motives, I suppose).
You have yet to explain why it's acceptable, and what makes it acceptable. Further, you should explain why overgeneralizing like this is useful, and how it actually furthers your goal.
Actually, I'm not sure what your goal is, other than to spread hate?
I'm super skeptical that this is actually true. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't, and you're just projecting your own positions on "HN of five years ago".
Surely that's the problem to resolve? We could make it as ethically unacceptable for the police to look up irrelevant private records as it is for someone in the medical profession to do so, and fire people for misuse of these tools (indeed, in my country police officers do get fired for this sort of thing).
Always, before making generalising statements like this, ask yourself: Would I think it's okay if the word was replaced with another, in this case, say "blacks"? And then you'll probably see that you shouldn't talk like that.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2782848/#R49
So now do you think it's okay to say "Blacks are known to be violent thugs" because it's "objectively true" according to some data? Just stop...
> Once socioeconomic status was considered, the results failed to indicate racial differences between the offending but not arrested drivers and the arrested drivers.
As far as I've seen, there is not a similar explanatory factor with the statistic I've cited.
I don't think this is an "omitted variable bias" thing. This is a "confirmation bias" thing on your part.
So... There's a correlation between lower socioeconomic status and violent crime? I don't think that's surprising. What it does not do is explain why those demographics are overrepresented in either category.
I also am highly skeptical of "every paper", unless you're specifically going out of your way to only read the ones that confirm your bias.
That is what "$GROUP is a bunch of violent thugs" implies: that members of that group are intrinsically more likely to be violent and thuggish than other type of people, specifically because of the trait that $GROUP embodies. That statement does not hold true for black people, but I believe it does for police.
It's important to understand the root causes of things. Black people commit more crimes, because black people are overrepresented when it comes to lower socioeconomic status, because of century-spanning systemic racism and the reduced opportunities that brings.
Police tend to be more violent and thuggish because the profession selects for people who want to have (and inevitably abuse) power over others, and because it's systemically set up as an institution to enable that behavior and not hold members accountable for it.
I would hope from those two descriptions it's reasonable to say that one group's failings come from a sympathetic cause that is often out of their control, and the other group's failings are intentional and by design.
But we cannot say that it's not intrinsic, either! All we can tell is that there's a correlation between "being black" and "being poor". Like the person I was responding to pointed out: there's the potential for a hidden variable that connects these two things. Alternatively, one causes the other. Given the available evidence, it does not seem clear that the arrow of causality points in either direction.
This is the point that you're missing. You assume that "being poor" causes people to be "more violent", when it's equally plausible that being "more violent" causes people to be "more poor".
And if being "more violent" is something that is intrinsic to certain demographic groups, then the latter interpretation would fully explain the overrepresentation in both lower socioeconomic classes and in rates of violent crime.
I fully agree that there has been systemic racism that contributes to lower socioeconomic status for some racial demographics. However, I refuse to accept that as the only explanation for those same demographics being highly overrepresented in violent crime statistics. This is not a simple problem with a two-dimensional answer. The "systemic racism" argument may be necessary, but it is not sufficient, because it attempts to remove any kind of agency those same demographics have over their own behavior, culture, and identity.
This is both wildly disempowering and enabling. You're essentially excusing every individual in that demographic from the consequences of their violent criminal actions by putting the blame entirely outside their control, which is bullshit.
Alice: "the Nazis are abusive, violent thugs!"
Bob: "Cool it! It wouldn't be okay to call the Jews abusive, violent thugs so it's not okay to call the Nazis that!"
You can ban cops from doing it, I guess, but I think someone will record all public spaces quite soon. I don't love it either...
This requires the assumption that your location and your car's location are always one and the same.
If you care about your privacy consider leaving the vehicle with tracking numbers on it at home sometimes. It's not just cops that have ALPRs and you cannot prevent this technology from existing.
Or did you have a different mode of travel in mind that compares favorably to wheeled transportation on public streets?
It's fascinating how, to me, my comment was very clearly "don't use a car if you care about privacy" but that interpretation didn't even occur to you. Car dependency runs deep.
Technology allows surveillance at scale, and that attacks privacy in a new and deeply unintuitive direction.
In the pre-information era, people still didn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, in that everything they did could be noted. However, that notice was far from automatic, and people were only remembered if they were memorable. That could happen from doing something or appearing out of the ordinary, or it could happen from specific interest (e.g. being followed).
Nowadays, the surveillance is automatic, and hard drives don't forget. The technology allows aggregators to answer retrospective questions about the target's ordinary behaviour. People now need be concerned about how their actions today will be viewed weeks, months, or years from now if they later attract scrutiny.
This technology is here today for cars and license plates, but it's only a matter of scale before it's applied to pedestrians with face, gait, or other individual recognition modalities. We don't have the social scripts to properly deal with it.
Take a speeding ticket, for example. If the fine is $400, it's created with the knowledge that it'll only be triggered occasionally, and it's created as a deterrent. If I speed 50 times and get caught one time, I pay $400. If you setup a bunch of speed cameras all over town, the fine should go down to have the same impact.
Throw in red light camera setups where they reduce the yellow lights to dangerous levels for everyone in order to collect more fees despite longer yellow light times being one of the most effective ways to prevent collisions in intersections.
https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-to-y...
Fingerprinting gets into unlike-at-scale.
At this point, we're not just talking about license plates but obvious tracking.
Technology also allows for influencing the world at scale, and that attacks a lot of assumptions about what is "public" and "private" in new and deeply unintuitive directions, as well.
A car can be identified by its plates, while a pedestrian can be identified by their face or other features. Perhaps not today by some legal or technical difficulty, but the infrastructure to do so is in place.
There is a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places. One might not reasonably expect that one's photograph should not be taken in public, but one may reasonably expect not to have one's every move recorded, profiled, indefinitely stored and shared with various third parties, or to have one's every conversation on the phone or with other people recorded with sophisticated cameras or sensors, and for that to be attached to one's detailed profile.
What is described is a surveillance state, which anyone who values some degree of personal freedom will reasonably object to. The installment of sophisticated cameras capable of tracking one's movement throughout an entire country provides the means for such surveillance state, and should be strongly objected by anyone who values one's personal freedom.
Those in favor of such installment for the facilitation of criminal persecution should at the very least require strong guarantees about its usage, such as storage limits and regular public audits of such implementation, closed circuits instead of publicly networked solutions, etc, and strongly oppose any arrangements that do not fulfill stringent privacy requirements. Unfortunately I am yet to see any real person advocate for this with any real political strength.
If the police reach the data before it's deleted after they know it may have evidence of a crime that's ok (realistically this is rare, but I can imagine it happening with paired cameras that measure speed over a long distance of road. You could also get lucky where a false positive image happened to capture a different crime), but we shouldn't be storing surveillance data that tracks everyone's movements on the off chance that it has evidence of a crime. The harm outweighs the use at that point.
e.g. cameras at an intersection that had an accident: It probably would take 'a day or two' at least for such a request to get to the camera operators to request they send a copy.
I'd also personally prefer speed cameras that are not point-in-time records. This just encourages police to put them where they know people are more likely to violate the law, like at the bottom of hills, where there's not really a danger, but it generates more revenue.
I'd want speed cameras that are miles apart... and the determination that you get a speeding ticket is that you traveled several miles at high speed.
That's what SPECS does:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECS_(speed_camera)
There are similar systems in other countries. Here in Belgium we have "trajectcontrole".
Judging by the number of accidents I've seen at the bottom of hills, I'm skeptical of your statement that "there's not really a danger" there.
I don't think posting up at the bottom of a hill is a revenue-generating thing, it's simply an exercise of going to where the crime happens. In this case, it's at the bottom of a hill that makes it easier for drivers to reach excessive speeds and thus are an increased danger to everyone else on the road.
This is exactly where you want to deter people from behaving dangerously, and where you want to punish the people who fail to pay enough attention to avoid getting a ticket in such an obvious scenario.
what data is collected, how/where it's stored
...also if it is sold to anybody, or handed to.
I don’t think there’s privacy in the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card world either.
("the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card " => Google sent me to "List of public transport smart cards" so I assume you're refering to some branded public transit system)
On Trip Advisor some people say cards can become deactivated if not used for years, but staff in a ticket office can reactivate them.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets...
Actually there’s no tap off IIRC (unlike the Dutch chipkaarts) but still, I would assume the modern station where you enter is a veritable panopticon of CCTV, RF signal interception, etc
So we can say that while the extremes of this argument are either total surveillance or no surveillance at all, we can instead opt for a more balanced approach. We can recognize that guaranteeing privacy in public or when using a publicly provided service is silly, but also that some forms of automation and data mining elevate simple observations into a level of surveillance that we are not comfortable with.
You can watch me in public and you can even record things like my license plate number if you like.
When you start following me around to all my destinations and making a detailed log of everything I do you are stalking me. That would be a crime if you did it physically. Why should it be different if you are doing it digitally?
Should be police be able to walk behind you down the street everywhere you go just waiting for infractions? What's the difference?
The reason states shouldn't be given every power over their citizens just villy nilly is because power in a free society is given by the citizens. And if the state can target those indiscriminately without due process that is no longer the case.
So it can make sense to withold certain powers from the state, even if with trustworthy leadership and actors these powers would be useful to keep the people in the state safe. And that is because untrustworthy leadership can come around at any point and then you don't want to give them an operational surveillance structure that would have given any authoritarian in history the shivers.
This means that you have a lot to be grateful for, but your perspective is privileged and may not take into account that not every life is like yours. You don't feel the chains of oppression until you need to break them. I would recommend considering what kind of person might not benefit from mass surveillance in this current political climate where students are disappearing just for protesting against a religious genocide.
You could definitely argue that surveillance is inevitable as a technology; but the government is supposed to serve its people, and without strong guarantees of established freedoms and protection from the negative effects of mass surveillance, the people should not allow the government to engage in such surveillance. Especially not the dragnet style of surveillance that is common today, and especially in the wake of modern analysis tools where prejudice can be automated.
But in general, corporate and state-sponsored surveillance of students and protestors goes back many decades, and we have seen enough witch hunts over things like Communism, Vietnam protestors, psychedelic users, etc. that we simply cannot allow our local, state and federal governments in their current shape to wield mass surveillance, because they will not do it ethically.
You shouldn't have an expectation of anonymity, like you say.
Scale can change the fundamental nature of a thing: walking down the street while being pissed as your government is one thing, but if you get 1000 friends to do it with you it's a march.
Now, what is reasonably expected in public is less than what is reasonably expected in private, but it certainly isn’t zero privacy.
It is true that one might expect, if they are driving around, that someone might see them. But is it expected that they might sometimes be followed? Is it expected that they are always followed? Is it expected that everyone is followed and those locations are cataloged indefinitely for anyone to FOIA? These are all very different questions.
It’s one thing for a subject of an active investigation to be tailed by a cop. It is an entirely different thing for the entire population of Roanoke to pass through what are essentially checkpoints logging your location a dozen or more times in a day.
Whereas a camera is a cheap deterrent.
yes - we all voted for this so here it is. /s
... except no one did vote for it. So why do we have it?