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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

I think we need to understand and accept that this stuff is inevitable as the technology gets cheaper. If the cops don’t do it themselves, private industry will do it for them and sell it or hand the data over as a “public service.” The only way out of this is to make an affirmative series of laws that make the construction of anything resembling a tracking database illegal and heavily-fined, but we’re not there. Even privacy-friendly Europe isn’t close to putting those restrictions on its police.

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No private industry will do anything without it being profitable. Handing it over as a public service would mean they are making money with that data in other ways. What would be those other ways? I can't think of anything that's not dystopian hell, so maybe to make that not legal???

The answer is that these databases are hugely valuable for targeted advertising and marketing, and if they’re relatively cheap to build then that makes everything even easier. Law enforcement gets access because in most countries the law allows them to make data requests to existing companies, and “we aren’t going to help the cops solve a murder” is bad PR when you’ve already collected the relevant data.

"let me put this vending machine in your store, you get a cut"

"let me put this camera in your store, you get $XX/month and security"

Just do that in stores in high traffic areas. Now you've got a big dataset. Overlap with location data to put a name to the face. Scifi has long seen this eg big brother eg minority reports

Sufficient tax breaks would likely do it.

This has already happened, and the police and others pay for access.

The police and government are also how they get permission, at least in London, so using law to prevent this ... doesn't seem like it'll be possible.

Although it does seem relevant. Given that these models run easily on phones 2 generations old (that's what they use in pubs, and if they use it in pubs, they use it everywhere), how will you stop it, even if you do get a law against it?

https://www.flocksafety.com/devices/flock-nova

https://www.flocksafety.com/articles/flock-safety-secures-ma...

Maybe the company contacts the people they've identified at a crime scene and offer them anonymity for a price. The police then only get details of the identified people who haven't paid.

VCs and PE will fund anything, especially if someone like Peter Thiel tells them that Palantir will make trillions of dollars selling this information to their bestest buddies in all the governments that they own.

The Inland Revenue Dept in NZ sold the data on its citizens to Facebook. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/532905/ird-to-stop-shari...

I think random hobbyists would get into this pretty soon, as the cost approaches zero.

There is no (good) way to stop things that are that easy to do.

You can do this with a raspi and a cheap security camera using open source software.

It is effectively already free.

I’m sort of curious why people haven’t already done this, when user fed tracking networks for planes and boats exist. Presumably the much more clear invasion of privacy is a part of it.

It's really only interesting if you have access to camera footage from lots of places, as well as some means to tie faces back to their identities. Every social media company has this already, and probably loads of downstream parties are getting some version of it as well.

You make it punishable with heavy fines and long prison sentences as a deterant.

The War On Drugs has done that for half a century.

Apples and oranges I think.

Drugs are deeply rooted in culture and humans are drawn to altered states of consciousness.

Modern surveillance tech isn’t rooted in the same biological or cultural factors, and enforcing laws about its use seems unlikely to suffer from the same issues brought on by the war on drugs.

People want drugs and it taps into the them on a basic and biological level. Surveillance and lack of privacy has no such addictive traits, except perhaps for cops, exhibitionists, and fascist government types.

First, in the US this type of thing violates the fourth amendment as the Institute for Justice will prove in court with ALPRs. It could be set up such that it does not, but for whatever reason these companies are greedy and make it broad rather than narrow in scope.

Second, I just won't patronize your establishment, shopping center, or municipality if you do. I'd like to go to the UK, but because of this policy I will not. Menlo Park pushed back against ALPRs: I'll go there. I went to a different ski shop because the one closest to me has an ALPR. And so on.

Genuine question, what's wrong with ALPR? (Coming from someone in the UK)

So, this may be different in the UK, but in the US a large majority of travel occurs in private cars, so omnipresence of ALPRs is close to collecting data on everybody and knowing what everybody is doing at all times.

One might assume from a game-theoretical perspective that this is no different from living in a village where essentially everyone knows everyone’s business, and the knowledge that that knowledge is mutual prevents people from acting badly with the information that they have. However, in the situation where a small minority of people have knowledge about everyone else, and not vice versa, this can give that minority unearned power over everyone else.

In practice, it doesn’t feel great. I hope this answered your question.

Reconstruction of social networks via physical movement metadata.

At the fictional extreme, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43817664#43818003

No shortage of non-fictional steps along that path.

There are two key concerns:

1. Data is retained by a handful of companies. If it is leaked, you'll have a lot of information on people that is suddenly fair game for anyone including insurance companies, PI, home invaders.

2. In the US, I'm not concerned about local government as much as federal when it comes to the fourth amendment. Suppose you have a rogue potus. He sends the national guard in to Atlanta, Chicago, and Downingtown to take over the systems of these companies. Now you say, "well I'll just remove my license plate!" But these companies are cataloguing make, model, color, bumper stickers, dents; so you can take off your plate in a situation like that but they are going to still be able to track you with a high degree of certainty. People were shocked by South Korea declaring martial law -- we've become so spoiled taking these essential laws for granted. (Sorry I don't know enough about British law.)

If they don't send all license plate data to the internet there isn't an issue. But they do.

You have no expectation of privacy in public. How does ALPR violate the 4th amendment if it takes place in public?

I think it’s reasonable to refer to a query of a database as a “search” as in “searches and seizures”. In that context, the gathering of data should be okay if a given search of the data requires a warrant. Unfortunately, warrants are only required for ”seizing” the data, not “searching” what has already been seized. Given that, it is reasonable to refer to the collection of data as a privacy violation especially given the breadth and scale of such a collection.

The agreeable arguments I hear tend to make the case that the scale is the problem. There’s a huge qualitative difference between having a human officer tail a human suspect to track the latter’s movements in public because that person is suspected of having committed a crime versus tailing via automated machines everyone in the vicinity at all times for no reason other than “nobody said we can’t”.

> for no reason other than “nobody said we can’t”.

This is exactly the nature of law though. Everything is allowed unless prohibited. Do you believe you have an expectation of privacy in the public sphere? If not, how could you disagree with the legality of the collection and review of activities performed in public?

I don't want a total surveillance state either but I can't see a basis for disallowing recording in public standing on the 4th amendment for support.

So do you think it's okay to record someone else's kids in bathing suits at a lake for watching later?

Just trying to connect panoptic recording to something that tends to motivate visceral reactions from people.

Not everything needs to be recorded. In point of fact, I see more than enough room for a right to non-overt recall-ability being worth at least discussing if only because we have evolved our capabilities to pervasively monitor to such a scale that it is nigh-required we sit down and really discuss this. There'll be no more familiar a generation than ours for coming to terms with these technologies if only because we brought them this far. It's our responsibility to contain their excess.

> So do you think it's okay to record someone else's kids in bathing suits at a lake for watching later?

I may not like it, but it's their right. Just like I can't control their minds to not think about someone else's kids when they are alone with themselves. Same with speech I don't like.

You'd need to look at it from the lens of whether it constitutes a search.

IJ is the real deal. Check out their dossier of Supreme Court wins. It will be interesting to see what the eventual Supreme Court arguments and opinions are.

How do you find out if a particular ski shop has ALPR in their car park?

In that instance they had a one way entrance and exit, so I drove out the entrance. My policy now is to drive through an ALPR, mark it on OsmAnd, then go a different route.

Google street view is helpful, though these things are going up at an alarming rate. There's also a website that has a list, though it isn't maintained (e.g. there are hundreds of these near me but none are on that website).

I just found a tool for this:

https://deflock.me/ https://github.com/FoggedLens/deflock

Looks like there are quite a few such sites:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made%3Dsurveilla...

One of the inevitable consequences of the legal conceit that images belong to the person who owns the camera, not the person who owns the face.

People do have publicity rights for their image being used in some contexts such as an advertisement. But not sure what rights to your image would even look like in the context of random public photographs or video in general.

> private industry will do it for them and sell it

This is already how it works in many cities.

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