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Comment by izendejas | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely curious: why don't you want to be recorded at malls et al?

What's the difference between such surveillance and a security guard wondering around looking for suspicious activity and/or protecting shoppers/businesses?

Surely, it can be abused, but it can also help protect "suspicious" individuals from being profiled/targeted maliciously by such security guard, for example.

What if you were hit an intersection and said cameras helped to identify the individual who hit you and then ran, would that change your mind?

I don't think surveillance is the problem as much as who does it and the laws they implement.

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> What's the difference between such surveillance and a security guard wondering around looking for suspicious activity and/or protecting shoppers/businesses?

Scale and awareness?

Scale, because if you ask that guard, who was buying what with whom, 742 days ago, chances are that guard won't be able to answer in any meaningful way. A database might (if eg: indexed on biometrics).

Awareness, because we come to ignore cameras, while if someone is actually there, looking at you, you are aware of being watched. (And also aware when their back is turned, so you can sneak a kiss from your mistress, or whatever you're not comfortable doing "on the permanent record" -- but might not be wrong).

The difference is "recording". Or, more specifically, recording and never deleting the recording.

I guess it isn't so much the surveillance itself that bothers me, its three things: 1) the idea that technology now allows surveillance to be ubiquitous, 2) that the security guard's observations don't attempt to identify me and observations don't "persist" across multiple visits/venues, and 3)that all the surveillance data is archived forever - ready to be abused/sold/profited-from whenever somebody thins of a way to make a buck out of it (or, more paranoid/cynically, invents new retroactive laws then goes looking for past indiscretions…)

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