What about my neighbor's Ring doorbell, pointed at my front door from across the street?
I don't know about you and your neighbor. But my neighbor (a black man, fyi) was very happy that my Nest camera's field of view was just barely wide enough to include his door and window, and recorded video of the dude who climbed through his window and stole his kid's MacBook. A couple days after that, my neighbor got a camera of his own. I'm happy that he did so; my camera made his home safer, and his makes mine sa…
The camera was there but the crime still happened so it didn’t make anything safer when it was most dangerous. Was the dude ID’d and arrested?
I don't know about you and your neighbor. But my neighbor (a black man, fyi) was very happy that my Nest camera's field of view was just barely wide enough to include his door and window, and recorded video of the dude who climbed through his window and stole his kid's MacBook. A couple days after that, my neighbor got a camera of his own. I'm happy that he did so; my camera made his home safer, and his makes mine sa…
The point is, he didn't opt in to being surveilled by Amazon. That it had a positive outcome is irrelevant to the point. It's a strange anecdata. What's the difference between what you wrote and responding to someone who is in favor on limits of publicly brandishing guns with: I don't know about your neighbor. But my neighbor (a black man, fyi) was very happy that I sat on my porch with a loaded shotgun every evening…
To be a bit of a pedant, one’s porch wouldn’t be public, would it?
The point is, he didn't opt in to being surveilled by Amazon. That it had a positive outcome is irrelevant to the point. It's a strange anecdata. What's the difference between what you wrote and responding to someone who is in favor on limits of publicly brandishing guns with: I don't know about your neighbor. But my neighbor (a black man, fyi) was very happy that I sat on my porch with a loaded shotgun every evening…
The difference is that your example is made-up while mine is true, recent, and (I believe) representative of normal people's attitudes. Normal people love cameras because normal people much prefer being surveilled by Amazon (or, in most cases, by Amazon's cheaper and less secure Chinese competitors in the camera business) vs. having their home broken into and their pawnable electronics stolen.
Shotgun on the porch isn't exactly made up, it has happened before.
The Joe Horn shooting controversy occurred on November 14, 2007, in Pasadena, Texas, United States, when local resident Joe Horn shot and killed two burglars outside his neighbor's home.
I don't know about you and your neighbor. But my neighbor (a black man, fyi) was very happy that my Nest camera's field of view was just barely wide enough to include his door and window, and recorded video of the dude who climbed through his window and stole his kid's MacBook. A couple days after that, my neighbor got a camera of his own. I'm happy that he did so; my camera made his home safer, and his makes mine sa…
The camera was there but the crime still happened so it didn’t make anything safer when it was most dangerous. Was the dude ID’d and arrested?
As far as I know, the dude has not been arrested. Thanks to the video though, the probability of the burglar eventually being arrested is at least slightly higher than zero.
If there were an Amazon Prison option, I wonder how many people would choose it. Need to serve time? Skip the cell and stay home with a robust suite of real-time behavior analytics to ensure compliance. Conversations are processed locally and scanned for restricted subjects with advanced AI. A special Amazon Prison store offers a full suite of approved products with automatic payments, accessible with Alexa, and cust…
I hope this doesn't get flagged, although I thought to flag it about a quarter of the way in. Essentially the thesis is that people opting into personal surveillance are changing norms, changes that will be misused by state and employer power against people who don't opt in. Hidden below all of this is the normalization of surveillance that consistently targets marginalized communities. The difference between a smart…
I haven't read the article but I think the outrage is misplaced. There are people forced to wear a Islamic head dress. The solution is not to ban Islamic head dress. There are people forced into sex slavery and prostitution. The solution isn't to ban prostitution. There are people who are forced into an abortion. The solution is not to ban abortion. The solution to abuse cannot be curtailing of rights.
I agree and disagree. As I see it, the solution is to use privacy preserving techniques. Federated learning would be a nice start but isn't good enough. Homomorphic learning would be the acceptable solution here as we could then preserve privacy and get the benefits (corporations would still profit from the data too). I'm honestly surprised that there's no big push for this by companies like Meta, Google, or Apple. You want to say you actually care about privacy? Put your money where your mouth is.
I do honestly expect the first ad style company that is fully homomorphic will upset the balance that we have now.
If there were an Amazon Prison option, I wonder how many people would choose it. Need to serve time? Skip the cell and stay home with a robust suite of real-time behavior analytics to ensure compliance. Conversations are processed locally and scanned for restricted subjects with advanced AI. A special Amazon Prison store offers a full suite of approved products with automatic payments, accessible with Alexa, and cust…
How would this be meaningfully different than house arrest? Not that it's a terrible idea but we already have exactly this except that the reason you would use Amazon is simply becsuse you had to as there's no other services with similar reliability. House arrest would probably be better for the government too since the 'prisoner' is paying personal rates rather than whatever Amazon might charge the government for the "service". The only advantage to prison is that it gurantees lodging during the forced homestead which is significant because, contrary to the rosy image painted by portrayals of these people as victims of the system, most of these people are screwups who arent going to have the rent money to keep living where they reside if you bar them from leaving home. The practical implementation would be likely be to just issue section 8 style rent vouchers and contract with gig services and ghost kitchens to ensure you're not liable for starving people to death. After all, Amazon already does the things you've described for the most part anyway. It would probably be much cheaper than real jail. The main other expense that comes to mind is the utility bills and an insurance plan for when the 'prisoners' inevitably vandalize the home you've obligated into keeping them.
Interestingly the state has an incentive to take this approach too: it's much cheaper. If you can monitor & enforce confinement without actually building any prisons, you don't need to budget for prisons, you don't need to operate prisons (or contract out to them), and you can avoid the political blowback of the prison/industrial complex. The limiting case for this is the Matrix or Metaverse, where everybody voluntar…
This is just called house arrest. It’s not really prison or punishment if I’m comfortable at home.
It's still punishment to not be allowed to leave your home. Not as uncomfortable as prison, obviously. But this gets into whether the main goal of prison is to cause physical discomfort as punishment or to protect society. When you look at the routine nature of beatings and rape in prisons, whether or not you are okay with people receiving that as punishment you have to admit that those aren't the punishments prescribed by law. The law doesn't say that a prison must make the prisoner suffer physically (in fact, it mostly says the opposite, but that's generally ignored). And one man's punishment is another's delight. There are criminals who thrive all too well in prison at the expense of others less well connected. For them, being locked at home might be the greater punishment.
I hope this doesn't get flagged, although I thought to flag it about a quarter of the way in. Essentially the thesis is that people opting into personal surveillance are changing norms, changes that will be misused by state and employer power against people who don't opt in. Hidden below all of this is the normalization of surveillance that consistently targets marginalized communities. The difference between a smart…
This is definitely a point the author could have touched on more. How will environments without this purported widespread adoption of surveillance technologies react to an increase of these 'luxury surveillance' items? Will they also gradually accept more (government-imposed) surveillance into their lives? Maybe even demand it? Or is acceptance of surveillance culturally biased?
I think the thesis is that positive consent of less-privacy leads to less-privacy for people who have less power of consent, possibly because the expectation of privacy is a social construct of the more powerful and influential.
To respond to your thought-question about adoption of surv-tech in places where it isn't common: Taken outside a privacy context, in many small towns locking the doors to one's car or house is not a norm. I grew up that way. When I visited my big city cousins the emphasis on locking doors struck me as odd. If one lives in such fear then one has a larger problem than locking a door or not.