Comment by jakelazaroff
3 years ago
> 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.
My hypothetical is that if your mail is in the footage Google turns over to the police sans warrant, they can use it as evidence against you. That’s not “going through someone else’s mail”.
All I’ll say is that I’d prefer to stop the thing that will very clearly harm someone before that actually happens, not pretend we haven’t seen a million times before what happens when you give police more power.
And I'm grateful people like you aren't actually able to implement pre-crime divisions!
It sounds arrogant, to me, to be so sure you know what the outcome will be of a given situation, considering all of the necessary ingredients for that outcome have existed for some time and what you claim is "inevitable" has still not happened.
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