Hacker News Reader

Comment by paimapi | Hacker News Reader

it's also possible that we're only seeing a few select departments fire their officers. there are no laws around this as far as I'm aware so enforcement is purely departmental policy. how many sheriff's offices and police departments do these audits and how many of them act on abuses?

you should need a warrant to monitor the products of mass surveillance and it should be as narrowly targeted towards a suspect as possible. or just not have any of the mass CCTV placements everywhere in the first place

View on HN

I think we may be agreeing?

I'm in favor of pushing for police departments (and really any governmental body with access to any kind of data) to have regulations around access to that data, access controls to restrict illegitimate access, and monitoring to detect improper access by people who do have legitimate access but don't follow the proper regulations.

I think you're correct that we don't tend to see the instances where improper usage occurs, tautologically because those entities aren't doing their homework on the above.

I think the point we disagree on is the idea that accountability by a singular department is an indication that it's sufficient for vendor to avoid regulatory action. in terms of privacy protections, the strategy should be defense in depth. I think about the audits that happen in health tech for eg on the software side, both at the request of regulatory agencies and their clients

any platform that enables people to be stalked, harassed, tracked, and so on should face the same level of scrutiny in the form of auditing and open access to internal policies around data sharing

You're correct that we disagree on that point. Flock is providing a tool; if we think the tool can be used in problematic ways, we ought to regulate users of the tool (in this case, government entities). This has the added benefit that the burdens on the government around their treatment of citizens have a higher bar for transparency and conduct than we place on private entities.

"it's not the gun, it's the person that holds it" is not a philosophy that's tracked with me given the probabilistic, population-wide outcomes. the same applies here - tools should build in strict data and privacy protections as part of their UX. you lower the probability of abuse wherever you can because you know a bad actor will find a way, regardless, but the point is to add enough friction that even the worst of the bad actors has a difficult time getting what they want

Reply on news.ycombinator.com