Lowe's and Home Depot are sharing customer data with law enforcement | Hacker News Reader

Lowe's and Home Depot are sharing customer data with law enforcement

flowingdata.com

61 pointstways_surv23 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety#Person_lookup_too...

ICE and Palantir are definitely motivated to also get involved.

Social credit scores and pre-crime in America isn't far off.

This seems like fundamentally the information that is being shared is 'this vehicle entered the parking lot'. That information is also accessible by looking at the parking lot with your human eyes.

Definitely not a great trend for police to be collecting more surveillance data but it's also not 'social credit score' hysteria worthy.

If you've seen what ICE has done so far, and the "promises" made by the current regime, it's all valid to worry about unless you fall into the protected class of being a White Multi-Generational-Resident Evangelical Male.

That's not hyperbole, that's their goal and they're saying the quiet parts out loud now.

>That information is also accessible by looking at the parking lot with your human eyes.

There's a blindingly obvious and enormous difference between some random joe the doughnut-grubbing cop watching a Home Depot parking lot to see if certain cars enter it, and digital license plate surveillance data on all cars entering said lot being constantly mass-sent to some federal or corporate-federal database for correlation with reams of other data shared by these same companies and other sources.

Guess where the latter can indeed easily lead? To exactly what you dismiss.

This. After cell phone and internet carriers, retail financial providers, social media, data brokers, and AFRs and ALPRs from retail and commercial security systems will inevitably lead to for-profit intelligence fusion, especially when many $10B's of paramilitary/intelligence budget go shopping.

Why would there be a need or desire to bring such an arrangement to fruition if it was not meaningfully different from somebody watching individual cars/parking lots with their human eyes?

If there was a cop at every single parking lot, every single checkout lane, every single on ramp and offramp, watching everyone's front door at all times, it would obviously be a police state

This probably has to do with these retail outlets being one of the most highly targeted by organized crime.

https://abc7news.com/post/los-angeles-stolen-items-home-depo...

https://6abc.com/post/brothers-arrested-organized-retail-the...

https://katv.com/news/local/conway-couple-charged-in-2-milli...

If only ICE were targeting criminals and not the economic backbone of our society.

Improper entry by alien is a criminal offense [1]

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1325

I personally didn't give a rats ass how someone came to be in the US. I'm much more interested in whether they are assaulting and/or stealing from people.

The bureaucracy around immigration is insane. Most of our ancestors didn't have to do anything to come here except just show up. And that worked out excellently for the US. Now we are killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

I had dozens of family members that used to work in the construction industry. It was a path to the middle class. Instead, most of them had to retire early in poverty.

Though it’s local, it’s similar to outsourcing to another country. Something that is decried often here, when it affects us rather than someone else.

> And that worked out excellently for the US.

That worked out excellently for the US at a time when the US was more or less empty and the west had to be settled and the government was going out of its way to encourage people to come and tame the land. Unsurprisingly, centuries later the situation has changed significantly and it's now in our best interest to be slightly more selective and organized when it comes to bringing people into the country.

Regulating immigration is only going to get more important as more Americans are forced to move due to climate change/water shortages/desertification (already starting, about to get much much worse: https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/americans-m...) and as the country does its part to help accommodate the 1 billion climate refugees who won't be looking to immigrate because they want more money or better jobs, but because they literally won't have homes to go back to.

We need to be preparing ourselves for some hard times, being much more careful about the number of people we let in, giving more thought about where we're putting them all, and making sure that we're enabling them to be successful after their arrival. Regulating immigration is important. It can be done without being as evil and heartless as possible. It's important that we don't let the cruelty of the current administration cause a backlash which leads us away from common sense.

> It's important that we don't let the cruelty of the current administration cause a backlash which leads us away from common sense.

Unfortunately, that reaction is practically axiomatic. It's tough to tell progressives to temper their responses to the abject cruelty and wantonness of this administration when the administration itself has shown no restraint whatsoever. If they would stop talking about alligators eating detainees, there's a chance of having a rational adult conversation around common ground on immigration.

Much of the west is still empty. The idea that this country is full is manufactured scarcity from restrictive zoning laws that did not exist when this country grew hand over fist just fine off immigrant labor in the 1910s.

> I personally didn't give a rats ass how someone came to be in the US. I'm much more interested in whether they are assaulting and/or stealing from people.

Okay, so you want selective enforcement [1] of laws?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement

>Most of our ancestors didn't have to do anything to come here except just show up

my ancestors were war-refugees that were given asylum officially from the U.S. on my mothers side due to the atrocities committed by their former state, and my father's side had literally hundreds of members associated closely with the Western Expansion of the U.S.

To say they just showed up is so incredibly naive, and IMO it does a lot to paint the picture of current immigrants shallowly and without impact.

These people before us built this country.

These new people didn't 'just show up', either.

The point still stands that people who committed "illegal entry" are the backbone of our society.

This whole immigration crackdown is about racism, not law and order. They would go after the employers of these immigrant if they actually wanted to stop it. Notice how they are considering giving farmers a break for employing "illegals", because they know how dependent our food supply is on them.

> The point still stands that people who committed "illegal entry" are the backbone of our society.

If the "backbone of our society" is a heavily exploited and abused underclass of people being just a step above slave labor then I think this system needs to be changed rather than preserved. The sooner our society is forced to improve itself the more secure our nation and our food supply will be.

I agree 100%. The point though is that Trump and friends aren't doing this with the food supply or security in mind. This is pure authoritarianism and red meat for his racist base.

Aren't most overstaying their visa rather than improperly entering?

Visas are quite scarce for poor people, across the world.

Though these aren't really cases where having some cameras in the parking lot and sharing with the FBI are going to identify the crime that's happening.

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