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Comment by paimapi | Hacker News Reader

I once interviewed for a trucking logistics SAAS vendor who installed cameras every X number of miles along every major highway/interstate to track shipments of freight. their moat was that physical surveillance network that they had already installed, cameras which scanned (like Flock) not just license plates but decals, looked for signals of driver awareness, new scuffs/dents/marks, collected EMF emissions to see if certain safety and satellite features were on, etc

now they said they didn't sell their data to LEOs but their founders also literally used to work for the CIA (it was bragged about in the initial interviews)

I wouldn't be surprised if companies of that kind are a dime-a-dozen

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The more I hear about how surveillance-at-scale like this is so common the more I think we need systemic privacy legislation to make that kind of monitoring impossible, but I don't know how you'd get it through the American legislature.

This, combined with grocery stores coallating your purchases by loyalty program or credit card number, Spotify tracking everything you listen to, smart TVs tracking what you watch... What information _isn't_ available on a random citizen?

Combine this with a seemingly constant stream of data breaches on SSNs or photo IDs, it feels impossible to meaningfully protect my own privacy at this point.

one of the things I cover a lot in the security trainings I do for movement spaces is something I don't hear a lot about in the privacy space atm - and that's active counter surveillance

you start small with things like data poisoning, intentional signal creation, etc. that looks like mistagging geos on social media, clipping your favorite BLE tracking device to your indoor/outdoor cat that you also borrow for your own keys, scripts/macros that will randomly click-through ads, etc

another idea I had was just using those magnetic bumper stickers to confuse things like Flock cameras in combination with IR/reflective bumper covers since those services tend to profile cars based on a lot more than just the plate - wish this was something I could test but alas, an insider with an ethical backbone has yet to leak their source code

You know that might work a little if, and only when people follow through. Unless trained as spies, and even they fail on occasion, people will lapse. As a feel good option, yeah, go for it. In reality I don’t think it does much. They have too many cross references for you to overcome.

right, it has to be a bit of a mass movement that can possibly work out if we get enough tooling popularized. also I don't think you need perfect coverage all the time - the way I see it, an intelligence analyst even paired with an LLM has only so many hours in a day to make analyses and generate reports. a dozen people in the same organizing group creating junk data on the regular leads to exponential increases in time/effort/validation work. and that increased workload means less capacity overall for other folks with fun extracurricular activities, and so on.

that Charlie Day conspiracy board meme comes to mind lol

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