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Comment by m4ck_ | Hacker News Reader

Doxxing is bad of course but does "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" apply here? Or is that only for us working folk?

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I would typically agree with the statement, but I have a lot of trouble giving a flying shit about the people literally selling Doxxing-As-A-Service getting doxxed in return.

Question for me is "Will something you can do free now, be suspicious in the future?" Like voting, or taking your kids to a private school, or going to an EFF meeting?

As long as you feel fine having the government know absolutely everything you do, then keep supporting surveillance. I personally have nothing to fear, but I hate the idea that I am being surveilled by a private company.

Flock had some prompts (/queries or something like that) leak and apparently something as innocuous as visiting multiple gas stations after hours within a short period of time could have it's system mark you as an armed robbery suspect.

I think we all have to fear police responding violently because Flock's sycophantic AI system told them with 100% confidence that we're the bad guy.

The fundamental issue here is the same one that led inevitably to Google's corruption: profit motive.

Flock's customers are data consumers.

Flock has every financial incentive to knowingly over-represent the reliability of their predictive analytics and actively conceal any issues with it.

If legally empowered and often armed end users are taking those representations at face value... well, there's the fundamental problem with Flock's business model.

Companies. The system used to be somewhat fragmented, but it is slowly starting to coalesce.

doxxing is about pseudonymous internet accounts, not people who are very public with their real name and lobbying the government.

this is whitepages reverse lookup

if he was just a guy chatting on the internet about cameras, sure, it would be doxxing, but he isnt. paparazzi have existed sonce forever

Paprazzi take effort and money. It's laughable to say "because paparazzi exists, we should give up all our rights".

No one took away private detectives or paprazzi. But if you replace both with a 24/7 never resting and no additional money tracking system, everyone will be tracked. It's litterally the business model because the mass tracking of americans without a warrant is what makes these companies money, not the hardware.

I don't think they were arguing for flock, they were excusing doxxing the CEO, because if you're famous, you can't really get doxxed

Reminds me of the "if you don't want people to know, you probably shouldn't be doing it" comment from Eric Schmidt, the Google executive.

It was hilarious and well deserved when people immediately started digging up his dirt in response and exposing stuff like extramarital affairs to the point he had to deploy lawyers. Even before that quote, journalists were using Google itself to search and discover his personal information, and Google's response was to blacklist the journalists. Funny how angry these billionaires get when their privacy gets violated, huh.

It's extremely obnoxious that these big tech executives subject us to surveillance only to turn around and buy back their privacy with their wealth. They should have exactly zero privacy. Doxxing? It's called sousveillance.

Do you believe anyone with a surveillance camera should have the owners name and address published if in any way a “public” area is recorded?

I suppose we can start with all Blink, Ring and Nest Cams. Then we will continue with dash cam owners.

You are equating installing personal security camera(s) to knowingly selling extra-judiciary mass-surveillance hardware and software to law enforcement. What's the point you're trying to make with this, exactly?

1. Installing a yard camera.

2. Building a mass surveillance dragnet and purpose-built tracking software and marketing it heavily to random local authorities.

Yep, totally the same thing...

I don't. But I do think the CEO of a company who sells spying as a service to cops should have a taste of his own medicine.

So much for privacy should be a human right lol.

Privacy absolutely should be a human right. But currently it isn't, and part of why is there is lots of money to be made with surveillance on ordinary people. And things will not change unless the people who exploit the privacy of other for monetary gain feel the effects of their privacy being violated.

Like the CEO of Flock.

Human rights are routinely revoked from those that impede on the rights of others. This is the premise that underpins prisons. Privacy being a human right still holds true.

From which I conclude that prisons are wrong, but also if I don't like someone I can revoke his rights and push him downstairs.

What is the morally correct approach to dealing with murderers?

Maybe it should be one. Until it is, I'm all for giving the powerful the same consideration they give me.

It sounds like you think Flock is just another home camera system, but it’s not and you could read up on that.

I think the point is these home systems are controlled centrally and can be used the same way flock can. I personally removed ring and installed my own system that doesnt export video out of concern with the governments lack of checks and balances anymore.

You should read up on police use of the cameras I mentioned

Scale matters. The “well technically an army of tens of millions of cops could achieve the same thing” argument is thoroughly unconvincing.

If they are sharing the footage with a dragnet, tracking people across the country, and giving access to unaccountable cops with a history of abusing that data?

Yes.

If they are using it to see when their amazon package got delivered, or for bog standard security purposes?

No.

Are you asking if a public registry of where you're being observed by security cameras is a good thing? Sure. I wouldn't mind that.

I have no issue banning ring and nest cams, actually. They hand the data to cops too

Context matters. Without it, very foolish things can be said.

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