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Comment by pugworthy | Hacker News Reader

Sure, an impressive bit of tech, but the potential for misuse is immense.

To mock their user reviews...

> “Graylark helped me find the person I'm stalking in under 20 minutes. This tool is unbelievable — a true game-changer for those with restraining orders like me who just want to get back at them for that court order."

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It will never not be misused. These types of apps should be illegal

Do you think criminalizing an activity will stop criminals from highly lucrative criminal activity without going to North Korea levels of societal control?

Yes. Blackmailing exists since the dawn of humanity (probably). It doesn't mean that we should make it easier.

I mean, yes, generally, for most things.

This mentality is kind of dumb, no offense. We have a bunch of laws. You could just as easily use your argument to say murder should be legal, or rape, and certainly people have.

Laws do, actually, work, for the most part. No they're not perfect, but they don't need to be.

Legalizing capital crimes would barely make them increase in prevalence. The state punishes people for those things mostly so that other people don't.

Laws are basically codified morals, but shitty because they need to be written to be some semblance of objectivity. You typically get stupid results when you try and surgically codify niche things or try and legislate controversial things.

I'd much rather live in a world with LLM image location stalking than one where people just punt everything to the state.

> Laws do, actually, work, for the most part.

"No-one charged in 9 out of 10 crimes" https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-44884113

I'm not disagreeing, but that article reeks of "we counted all the petty BS we don't even try to solve to make the numbers look bad to justify asking for more resources"

no, it's not, those things are illegal but cars and trains are not illegal even though you can use them to run over people. Knives, same thing. Alcohol is not illegal even though you can use them to get people too drunk to resist you.

Criminalizing everything that could be used to do bad things is an extreme position. Instead of jumping right to "ban it" you should probably first have a discussion where you consider whether (A) that ban will make any difference to its availability to most people who are criminally-minded anyway and (B) whether it has positive benefits to the law-abiding.

And what legitimate purpose are we balancing against the negative purposes in this circumstance?

I don't think there's a legitimate purpose for this. I do think no legislature is capable of outlawing this in a way that's both enforceable with some degree of impartiality (i.e. does not provide plausible deniability for a prosecutor to drag a legitimate service through a courtroom for political reasons) and incurs acceptable collateral damages (e.g. doesn't outlaw unrelated stuff that's fine).

On most sane societies guns are illegal, drugs are illegal and blackmailing is illegal

1. They’re not talking about any lucrative activity — the primary worry is longterm sexual harassment via stalking.

2. Why outlaw bombs if criminals have obtained them anyway? You’re just arguing against he concept of laws at this point.

3. A type of app is not synonymous with “an activity”

>1. They’re not talking about any lucrative activity — the primary worry is longterm sexual harassment via stalking.

There's potential for far more, and far more lucrative corporate and state harassment here. Think like low effort red light camera mail ticket but for the general case.

"We see that someone has posted a picture of X at your location. Here is a copy. This is a violation of a) your leas b) the zoning code, please pay us $1000, if you would like to appeal please fill out the attached form and include the $500 appeal fee and if you lose the fine will be $2000. Reminder: you agreed to this in subsection ABC of <your lease|the zoning code>"

... therefore what, exactly?

> the potential for misuse is immense.

Who do you think is "sponsoring" this ? /s

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