Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

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I could probably be convinced that some sort of panopticon license plate reader network could be a net positive for society IF it had the necessary and demonstrably infallible audit and oversight systems - especially with respect to the 4th amendment in the United States (i.e. search warrants).

But honestly, law enforcement is the least of my concerns because the industrial surveillance complex has shown time and again that the commercial entities are the ones with the never ending thirst for squeezing ever more profit from every person they can. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth? What's to stop them Flock from selling data to any and all comers?

The possibilities are literally endless:

  * Perfect price discrimination. Parking garages, stores, car washes, fast food places perfectly adjusting price based on what you can afford (based on where you've been).
  * Car insurance shadow telematics. You don't want a GPS-tracker installed on your ODB? Fine. They'll still know where you drive and how fast.
  * Clinic-visit based healthcare inference. "Looks like this guy has been going to a cancer clinic. NO HIRE."
  * "Where has your spouse been?"

In an age where your TV is spying on you and your fucking refrigerator is showing you ads, do you really think Flock doesn't already have thousands of ideas on how to monetize commercial surveillance data in the post law enforcement phase?

> To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth?

To me, this was always the armored gauntlet underneath the velvet glove of any private entity with strong technical locks, Apple included.

The best you can reliably say about any private entity is that they're treating their users well at the moment.

Ultimately, profit always trumps user alignment.

Smaller companies are far less likely to, as their owner is happy with their profit and actually likes running the company.

One a company goes public though, or has significant external input (VC etc), things start on the slippery slope.

>. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth?

>The possibilities are literally endless:

Zero chance of any of those examples happening when they already have contractual relationships with municipalities they can leverage. They can simply just extend their services to civil enforcement. Follow the concrete trucks and the contractor vans and everything else around with the cameras and drones and then fine everyone for everything. "You were seen wheeling a water heater out of Home Depot. You got a permit for that". "It sure looks like you bought a lot of Henny last time you were in tax free NH, are you sure none of that wound up in your brother's restaurant."

There's already screenshots of "Your 80k registered truck was seen on a road not open to this traffic with no corresponding overweight permit, pay up" mail violations floating around (I have not vetted them).

And unlike price discrimination, the useful idiots will cheer, because the victims will have on paper broken the rules and can be construed as <checks list of buzzwords> "scofflaws", "antisocial" and "not paying their fair share" even if they have done nothing morally wrong.

It exists to give an information asymmetry enabling a maximally extractive market at the cost of inefficiency.

It's the sort of thing that could only exist beneficially in some sort of communist system where deal with crime in some sort of fair way and where access to the information on these networks was regulated and equally available and the non crime information could be used to instead feed a command economy.

It may surprise many that we don't live in that world.

Elison and Oracle are a big threat, they have an obsession with holding as much data as possible, for every single US citizen they can get their hands on, and it is no coincidence they not only sell electoral targeting demographic data, but also are trying to install dystopian level servers under the whitehouse.

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