Comment by ortusdux
3 days ago
https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/automated-...
A friend entertained the idea of a startup focused on a social dashcam site, where users can upload clips of bad drivers tagged with their license plate number, and smart dashcams can alert to bad drivers in real time. They got as far as asking a lawyer before it fell apart.
Yikes. This smells a bit like Stasi-style surveillance. Unofficially encouraged by authorities. Rewards or social pressure or ideology turned a significant % of East Germans into Inoffizieller Mitarbeiters ("unofficial collaborators" or informants). Bad drivers today. And then ...
The point of the stasi collaborators was to undermine the targets personal relationships and isolate them because of the fear that they might be an informant.
Publicly posting the behavior or unaffiliated parties is nothing like the stasi.
Regardless of the official point of Stasi collaborators, what they did was contribute to millions of government surveillance files on fellow citizens. The similarity to a social network of public surveillance is the unpaid, unvetted, untrained manner, of collection with questionable motivation, be it social or political or simply anger.
Interestingly, the contributors may also be profiling themselves as able to and willing to surveil fellow citizens, should the opportunity arise.
1 reply →
I'm glad they did the research on this lol I thought about this a decade ago when I was doing a lot of driving and always thought it'd be something I'd explore. Good to know it's against the law