211–220 of 327 posts
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Eric Schmidt also said in a interview back when Google was starting up that they wanted to get Google right up to the "creepy line" but not cross it. This interview was also put in a documentary called "The Creepy Line." I'll see if I can find the interview though and link it to this comment. Edit: https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=mpmOL-MT5lQ
https://i.imgur.com/YSjsxB2.png
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>or a criminal being able to conceal their crimes? What if I made something that you like to do illegal? Now you are a criminal concealing their crimes. Now your tech works against you and you must comply. I absolutely agree with erring on the side of letting criminals get away with more if it means preserving privacy. No alibi safety net is worth trading away your privacy.
> What if I made something that you like to do illegal? Pointless red herring. For any law, we can find someone that doesn't like it. Building an argument about police powers from that is building on quicksand. Unless you mean to do away with law, and the concept of crime in general.
I noticed you didn't address my point around erring on the side of not infringing on privacy however. Does this mean that you agree?
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HN is pretty out of touch I think. When I talk to non HN crowd. * Apple's efforts around blocking CASM are applauded * Folks are GLAD that cops are using tech to catch criminals * Folks don't have a ton of trust that the regulations will help their lives, or block govt from doing things, but do imagine they will be annoying (more permission banners / cookies popups etc). It would be interesting to look at other count…
I dunno, I mostly agree with you, but I think lately, at least with my family and friends, the coronavirus political response has made many more people much more skeptical about centralized authority figures. The narrative that is commonly recounted is that it's obvious that the people in authority are either incredibly incompetent or crazily power-hungry, and both are leading many of my family and friends to questio…
Edit: I just realized my second question is somewhat US-centric so if you aren't from the US then I apologize, please disregard that comment.
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> What if I made something that you like to do illegal? Pointless red herring. For any law, we can find someone that doesn't like it. Building an argument about police powers from that is building on quicksand. Unless you mean to do away with law, and the concept of crime in general.
You missed the point of me saying that which was a response to your flippant "protecting criminals is bad" suggestion. Many crimes are only crimes not because the oppose some fundamental morality, but because some legislators felt like making them crimes. I noticed you didn't address my point around erring on the side of not infringing on privacy however. Does this mean that you agree?
That's not a valid argument. You don't get to pick and choose law. You either get the whole package, or nothing.
Police powers are completely orthogonal to this question.
The reason they are restricted by law is not so that law is more difficult to enforce. The barristers that have drafted all this precedent over the centuries did not do so with the goal of 'Man, wouldn't it be great if we made a copper's job difficult!"
The reason police powers are restricted by law is, as said earlier, to reduce the impact on how much police work should harass the innocent. The law doesn't recognize that there are parts of it that are arbitrary and optional. It either applies in its entirely, or doesn't.
As long as you focus on the harm to the criminal, you're framing your argument in an odd way. You're much better off building your argument in a way that focuses on harm to the innocent.
> I noticed you didn't address my point around erring on the side of not infringing on privacy however. Does this mean that you agree?
I didn't address it, because your argument lacks qualification, which makes it possible to take it to absurd conclusions.
If you believe privacy is an absolute good that cannot be infringed in any situation, then you get absurdity, like the police being unable to search an apartment that the neighbors have reported hearing gunshots from. (Because, heaven forbid, the occupants thereof may not be actually guilty of any crimes.)
If you don't believe that, then you're going to have to quantify your argument, with a basis for when you believe it is appropriate for the police to infringe on someone's privacy. You're then going to have to explain how its consistent with actual pre-digital legal precedent. You're then going to have to explain how your scaffolding leads to an outcome inconsistent with how policing is currently done in the digital world.
You've got a lot more work to do to make a coherent argument then simply saying "I believe privacy trumps solving crime," before I can respond to it.
We learned from the Snowden leaks that the US government constitutionally doesn't need a warrant to request any of this information if you are outside of the US if Google is holding the data domestically on servers in the US. And it makes so many of these requests Google has self-service systems for the US government to access accounts of non-US-persons directly.
This is probably happening all the time for non-Americans.
I remember that story about Zachary McCoy. This whole thing continues to get worse quick and will continue to get worse. I know people say we need legislation and regulation on data privacy and tech companies which we do. But before that gets taken seriously (at least in the US) it's going to take something real scandalous done by tech companies and actually affect the common folk where they actually start to care. R…
HN is pretty out of touch I think. When I talk to non HN crowd. * Apple's efforts around blocking CASM are applauded * Folks are GLAD that cops are using tech to catch criminals * Folks don't have a ton of trust that the regulations will help their lives, or block govt from doing things, but do imagine they will be annoying (more permission banners / cookies popups etc). It would be interesting to look at other count…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is pretty out of touch I think. When I talk to non HN crowd. * Apple's efforts around blocking CASM are applauded * Folks are GLAD that cops are using tech to catch criminals * Folks don't have a ton of trust that the regulations will help their lives, or block govt from doing things, but do imagine they will be annoying (more permission banners / cookies popups etc). It would be interesting to look at other count…
What fundamental problem do you have with cops using tech to catch criminals? Not talking about the abuse of innocents here, or warrantless intrusions into your data, just the core of what you're saying.
For example, imaging you have a suspect and want to trail them. The courts have established that you have no expectation of privacy when in a public area, so an officer can trail your car and watch where you go. You only have so many officers, and so there are implicit limits on how many people you can trail in person. But if instead of sending an officer to trail a suspect, you attach a GPS tracker to the suspect's car, suddenly that restriction is removed. Instead of spending weeks trailing a single suspect, you could attach dozens of trackers to dozens of cars, or you could request location data from a third party. The lower cost of breaking somebody's privacy allows it to be done more frequently, even if the explicit legal protections haven't changed.
The problem isn't the technology itself, but that protections of privacy and protections against unreasonable searches haven't advanced alongside the technology.
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What fundamental problem do you have with cops using tech to catch criminals? Not talking about the abuse of innocents here, or warrantless intrusions into your data, just the core of what you're saying.
I'll bite. The problem is asymmetry of information, and that the protections haven't advanced alongside the ease of collecting information. For example, imaging you have a suspect and want to trail them. The courts have established that you have no expectation of privacy when in a public area, so an officer can trail your car and watch where you go. You only have so many officers, and so there are implicit limits on…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is pretty out of touch I think. When I talk to non HN crowd. * Apple's efforts around blocking CASM are applauded * Folks are GLAD that cops are using tech to catch criminals * Folks don't have a ton of trust that the regulations will help their lives, or block govt from doing things, but do imagine they will be annoying (more permission banners / cookies popups etc). It would be interesting to look at other count…
I dunno, I mostly agree with you, but I think lately, at least with my family and friends, the coronavirus political response has made many more people much more skeptical about centralized authority figures. The narrative that is commonly recounted is that it's obvious that the people in authority are either incredibly incompetent or crazily power-hungry, and both are leading many of my family and friends to questio…
My concern, the HN crowd is yelling for more govt regulation, but the average person actually thinks Apple, not the govt, makes reasonable tradeoffs (security, privacy, CASM etc) and might actually trust folks like apple or google MORE than if for example the govt set up an email service.