241–250 of 532 posts
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I hope you let him know about Amazon's stellar privacy?
Or that they are in cahoots with "The Government" and will gladly share any and all data through back channels because AWS has very freaking lucrative contracts with them.
My next door neighbor (we share a wall) had their bicycles stolen twice, so they installed Ring (floodlight) cameras in both the backyard and the front porch. After a year, the cameras have yielded no added security, or caught any "bad guys" as far as I can tell and from what they told me. What I realized, is they use it to keep track of their kids, funny cat videos that trigger the recording, and most importantly, a…
I live in a block-long grouping of condos in Brooklyn. Every so often the management company sends out exterminators and one day as I was talking to him he pointed to these environmental monitors installed on a lamppost on our block. He says “what’s with that, the government spying on us?” and I explained it’s just some environmental data collectors, but pointed to my neighbor’s Ring and mentioned “although that thin…
People often care about these sorts of high level, idealistic concerns like "privacy" and "freedom" right until you offer them the smallest "concrete" benefit. Look at 23andme. Hey, can we take your blood, analyze your DNA, and send it to the police? No? What if we also told you what percentage Western European you are, would that convince you to pay us for the service?
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The camera may be acting as a deterrent (if they didn't have any additional thefts) without it being obvious. I never would give a neighbor a hard time about a camera pointing at a publicly visible spot on my property- just into windows and other semi-private locations. That includes both audio and video. I ascribe to the "it's legal for journalists to go through your trash, so if you want privacy, shred your trash f…
Your trash analogy doesn’t hold up because trash becomes “public” once it’s on the street which isn’t part of your property. “Publicly visible spot on my property” is a meaningless phrase; it’s still my property, and I’m legally (here at least) allowed to raise an objection to the recording of it. I can’t and wouldn’t object to someone recoding the sidewalk in front of my house. I can, and absolutely will, object to…
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Where, pray tell, does the fulfillment center receive them from? Shipping happens regardless (I know my local hardware store doesn't make vacuum cleaners), but the waste of individual boxes and delivery for every single item on demand is obscene. You're right that it's just as nice in cities, if not nicer. But that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it not a maladaptation within our economic system.
> Where, pray tell, does the fulfillment center receive them from? Shipping happens regardless (I know my local hardware store doesn't make vacuum cleaners), Yes, the steps before are very similar to fulfillment centers vs. to distribution centers servicing retail and to individual retail stores (not quite the same-- you need somewhat more fulfillment centers). It's just the last step from the fulfillment center to y…
Right. It's that last step I'm criticizing. But even the former deserves some amount of attention, given the scale and proliferation of disposable consumption that Amazon has encouraged.
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None of these things really bother/worry me. This is mainly a threshold argument- a thing that was hard got easier, but didn't fundamentally change what is possible for a dedicated adversary.
How is that not fundamentally different? 1) Human stands there and watches your property. A description of what happened on your property is subject to whether or not people believe this human, and the fallibility of human memory. This human cannot be there 24/7, and must -- at minimum -- break to sleep, acquire food, and use the bathroom. In reality, they'll have many other demands on their time that mean they can't…
> “If there is the infrastructure, if there is the channel by which police can request footage without a warrant or consent of the user, under what circumstances they get it is out of our control. I worry that because it’s decided by the police and by somebody at Ring, there will be temptation to use that for increasingly less urgent situations.” Many people (I would argue anybody with common sense) predicted Ring wo…
My view on this is that we're not going back and it would be silly to try to do so. Once you have the technology to record, track, and ultimately apprehend criminals, simply not doing so in the name of ideological purity becomes increasingly obscene. What we need are courts that understand the technology, prosecutors who fear censure for overreach, and fair laws about standards of access to the data. It's here to sta…
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> You're right that it's just as nice in cities, if not nicer. But that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it not a maladaptation within our economic system. Also, please note... a frequent mistake in economics is to conflate positive statements ("Ordering online causes additional emissions and use of cardboard and packaging products") with normative statements ("it is wrong to waste cardboard and emit carbon…
> Hume showed us you can't get to the normative statement through positive observations. Hume and I disagree :-) The original comment was a normative one: I think our current scheme is wrong , in a moral sense. I think it's also wrong in an economic sense, but that's just a cherry on top.
If we had, say, 1000x the resources that could be used without too adverse of consequences, would it still be wrong in your eyes?
Or are you saying that you don't believe that the resource use is justified within our current constraints?
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> Where, pray tell, does the fulfillment center receive them from? Shipping happens regardless (I know my local hardware store doesn't make vacuum cleaners), Yes, the steps before are very similar to fulfillment centers vs. to distribution centers servicing retail and to individual retail stores (not quite the same-- you need somewhat more fulfillment centers). It's just the last step from the fulfillment center to y…
> It's just the last step from the fulfillment center to your house that are different. Right. It's that last step I'm criticizing. But even the former deserves some amount of attention, given the scale and proliferation of disposable consumption that Amazon has encouraged.
OK, then mentioning across the globe was not core to your argument (and thus I picked at it).
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I live across from a school; hundreds of people see my house exterior for days. I wouldn't apply a different rule to a security camera. I understand some folks have different privacy standards than me. I'm not asking you to follow my privacy rules, as they are a bit more open about public spaces than many people enjoy. If somebody wanted me to not point my camera at their driveway, a legal threat would be the absolut…
> I understand some folks have different privacy standards than me. I'm not asking you to follow my privacy rules, as they are a bit more open about public spaces than many people enjoy. Private spaces that are publicly visible do not automatically become public spaces, though.
If you tried pointing a camera over my fence into my backyard, then I start complaining.
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> I never would give a neighbor a hard time about a camera pointing at a publicly visible spot on my property In Germany people have successfully sued their neighbours for that and I fully agree with the courts. Filming others without consent is invasive.
I live across from a school; hundreds of people see my house exterior for days. I wouldn't apply a different rule to a security camera. I understand some folks have different privacy standards than me. I'm not asking you to follow my privacy rules, as they are a bit more open about public spaces than many people enjoy. If somebody wanted me to not point my camera at their driveway, a legal threat would be the absolut…
I agree, just asking is always a sensible first step, as well as making proactively sure that your camera does not invade anyone's private space, but I can see how that can happen unintendedly.