Comment by goda90
20 days ago
If someone points out that the system you're building can be abused, and you don't stop and come up with a solid plan to prevent abuse then you're just building the system for abuse.
20 days ago
If someone points out that the system you're building can be abused, and you don't stop and come up with a solid plan to prevent abuse then you're just building the system for abuse.
It's practically impossible to build a system that "can't be abused". If you set the bar there, then you can block any policy forever by simply enumerating increasingly unlikely ways for it to be abused. It's like a child's version of politics.
I could go into my car right now and plow through a bunch of people. I'm still allowed to own a car. We've made the actual harmful act illegal, not the thing that theoretically made it possible.
At the same time, we do not allow people to have nuclear bombs.
As everything in life, it's a trade-off, but a good trade-off can only be found if people are fully aware of the consequences. It seems to me, people regularly underestimate the negative consequences of data collection (or realize that these consequences will not affect them, but others).
> It's practically impossible to build a system that "can't be abused"
For ALPRs? I’d make queries public with a short delay, including with a unique identifier for the cop initiating the query. Data automatically deleted within an interval.
And then you feel comfortable guaranteeing that it could never be abused?
The issue is being brought up by the state auditor. This article is literally what would happen anyway if your pet policy was enacted. The police would ignore your little policy, and the standard would have to write an article about the abuse. Hopefully that article would drive public opinion enough for change to happen.
This is the system working.
5 replies →
> I’d make queries public with a short delay…
Won't that likely victimize people who are presumed innocent of crimes until convicted?
3 replies →
There is zero "solid plan" you can produce that prevents a popular thing in a democratic country from happening. Like, sure, there are supposed to be some amount of base rules to prevent you from gulaging people as soon as you get a 51% vote share, but if you have enough popularity for long enough, as designed, you can change those rules and eventually do whatever you want.
You can bet the shit the Nazis did wasn't "allowed" by the Weimar Republic's constitution, but that didn't matter one bit as soon as the brownshirts murdered enough people. Hitler wasn't even that popular at any point. The holocaust didn't happen because Germany didn't have enough "don't do holocausts" rules, it happened because millions of Germans just let it, because they didn't want to die under a brownshirt's boot.
Meanwhile we've had tens of examples of full blown genocides that did not use any database at all. It has never seemed to actually stop a genocide.
The answer, as always, is that it takes hard work to defend your rights, and you can never ignore your government, and you should stop trying to ignore your government. You cannot "defang" a government. If enough people are working to build an authoritarian shithole state, they will get it, and no paper will stop them, because "having enough people who want something" is literally what a government is.
We have thousands and thousands of years of history showing that if you want rights you have to fight for them.
>If someone points out that the system you're building can be abused
Any system of authority can be abused. No paper can fix that. The only thing that can fix that is a popular, credible threat to the people trying to abuse it.