Comment by kirykl

2 days ago

If the cameras are recoding public areas, isn’t it better the recorded footage stays public

I think so, but it is a loosely held opinion at this point. Fundamentally, I think it is a huge, asymmetric power grab by Flock and local police to install these systems. It only takes one officer looking up their local politician and finding them doing something that could even look like a bad deed (or to fake it in the era of AI videogen...) to enable blackmail and personal/professional gain.

If they're going to exist, it may be better for that to be spread among the public than to be left in the hands of the few.

This is pretty naive. What happens when you develop and extend such a system in a way that it can track who you interact with? What about social credit scores? You might go out to a social event with a very distinguished social credit score of 820 and get knocked down to 69 just because you were in proximity to Bob and Alice, who happen to be on some blacklists for their work in cryptography.

What you're staring at is the gateway tech that brings in a dystopian society. At first stuff like this is fairly benign, but slowly over time it ramps up into truly awful outcomes.

  • I mean public venues in the US use this stuff to kick out people that they don't like, or that work for firms that have been involved in lawsuits. That is no different than the start of a social credit score and it's happening already.

Would you want your partner or child stalked, raped, and murdered?

You don't even need to drop an air tag now, you can use the license plate reader to track them everywhere they go. There is no hiding.

  • At first I thought you were defending flock. Seems clear the cameras make it harder to commit crimes and easier to go after the offenders, despite all the side effects most people are upset about here.

    • How does a camera make it harder to commit a crime? If I bash your skull in on camera, did the camera make that more difficult? Would your family be less aggrieved?

    • It makes it easy for a random person to track anyone, regardless of which states they go to.

      It also makes it easy to say, track a person's movements to an abortion clinic if your state would like to prosecute that (this is happening).