Comment by jakelazaroff
3 years ago
We already have that tradeoff. It’s called a warrant. If the police get one, you are forced to give them access to your otherwise-private affects.
This is a step beyond that. Warrants are granted at the discretion of a judge, the bar is high, the scope is narrow and you (theoretically) have recourse if it’s abused. Here, the discretion is Google’s, the bar is nonexistent, the scope is unlimited and you have zero recourse if you think you’ve been wronged.
This wouldn’t be an issue if people trusted Google or the police. But they don’t, and it’s pretty easy to imagine ways in which this could be abused to harm people.
Let’s say you live in Texas and get abortion pills in the mail. If the police have a warrant to search your house for something unrelated, they (theoretically) can’t see the pills and decide to charge you with an unlawful abortion (unless they were “in plain view”, etc). But if Google gives police access to footage of your house extrajudicially, police can use anything they see as evidence against you. And make no mistake — things like that will happen as a result of this policy.
I think you're taking this way further than anyone actually involved would. IF what you're saying ever did even come close to occurring, we both know Google would shut it down quickly. Not just because it's horrible, but because it's also bad for business, and they've shown a propensity to protect data when it would be used as you hypothesize here.
Google is smart enough to know that "snitching" on its users is bad for business.
Think "track a burglar as he moves through a neighborhood" not "snoop (illegally) on the contents of people's mail".
"I think you're taking this way further than anyone actually involved would"
Just because you currently seem to have a "failure of imagination" does not mean that law enforcement, corrupt/facist/dystopian government officials or even unscrupulous employees within the tech sector itself will not absure their observational powers now or in the future.
Or maybe you just haven't been paying attention to the news for the last "n" decades.
I have a failure of actual data of problems occuring.
We all deal with "sky is falling" person on our development teams, and it's pointless doomsaying then as it's pointless doomsaying now.
When the bad things happens, we can react. Until then, let's try to stay reasonable.
> Think "track a burglar as he moves through a neighborhood" not "snoop (illegally) on the contents of people's mail".
It’s not illegal, though. Google is (presumably) fully legally in the clear to just hand over footage to police. That means that, if Google decides to hand over your footage to the police, anything on tape can be used as evidence against you. And Nest offers indoor security cameras, so your entire house could be fair game.
> Google is smart enough to know that "snitching" on its users is bad for business.
Is it bad for business? That’s not clear. Your whole argument is that this is fine so long as you think the likelihood of abuse is low. My guess is that it actually won’t hurt Google’s business at all, even as we start to discover police misusing this.
“It only happens to a handful of people! And anyway, they were [doing drugs/stealing/etc], so they deserved it. It’ll never happen to me!”
It's illegal to go through someone else's mail, and that was the hypothetical you proposed.
My argument is not that it's fine as long as the likelihood for abuse is low, my argument is that it's fine as long as there hasn't been any actual abuse. When something does happen, we can respond to it.
Until then, it's not reasonable to go through a bunch of worst-case scenarios.
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