Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 205 posts

Re: The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’

#141

Post by sneak »

DennisP wrote: post #125
sneak wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m torn on this one; as a photographer and videographer I find the right to shoot or film anything I can see from a legal vantage point very near and dear to me. We should always be legally allowed to film public places. Europe’s legislative approach to this is wrong, I think, but I see the problem. Perhaps we need different societal norms.

If you want to walk by on the sidewalk and snap a couple pictures of my house, or even take a little video, I agree that's totally fine. But a surveillance camera that's there 24/7, uploading everything to Amazon's cloud, doesn't seem like the same sort of thing to me. In theory at least that can mean Amazon knows when I arrive and leave, all the time.

Several large corporations as well as the US federal government law enforcement agencies know when you arrive and leave, all the time.

A bunch of small/private companies do too, because your client IP on the background app refreshes from your phone changes from residential isp to mobile phone isp.

Amazon is the least of the worries on that front.

Re: The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’

#142

Post by FredPret »

pooper wrote: post #113
tomcam wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too must hear more about the Pooper platform

Sorry to disappoint but I'll never win any election. Inconsistency annoys me so I'll try to make my thoughts consistent. One thing I learned from HN is housing cannot be both a universal human right and a reliable asset for people to retire out of so I must choose the former. This by itself means I cannot win any meaningful political office, or if I do, I cannot imagine not being swiftly nerfed so I won't be able to…

I think to win, you have to find commonalities enough people share to get them to vote for you. You just have to find your tribe.

We should all be more politically active - look at what happens when only the idiots do it.

Re: The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’

#143

Post by swampthinker »

aj7 wrote: post #138
ewzimm wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had those “Pullman Towns” in mind. This type of system opens up obvious opportunities for exploitation, but so do our existing prison systems. If we ever did replace prisons, I think it would involve something like this. Since Amazon Prison is so close to life already, we might all benefit from thinking about how to solve its issues. As the legal system necessitates lawyers, a digital prison might need digital advo…

How about willfully admitting yourself into the Amazon prison, to build up prison credits. By so doing, you could commit small crimes with impunity, using your already earned credits to skip punishment. Hmm. The rich already commit large crimes, and skip punishment, using MONEY.

$5000 in AWS credits if you spend a month in Amazon Prime Prison™

Re: The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’

#144

Post by emptyparadise »

dpflan wrote: post #27
ewzimm wrote: post #5

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…

Maybe "Amazon Prism" (a "Prime" members' version of "prison") has a catchier ring to it...

Calling it Prism would be especially funny in a disdainful way, given a certain NSA program.

Re: The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’

#145

Post by belfalas »

ewzimm wrote: post #129
belfalas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest, but most likely someone at Amazon will read this and think to themselves: "you know...the for-profit private prison industry is ripe for disruption. This could be a good lead." Also, what you describe has been done before in history. In the 19th century in the US there were "Pullman Towns" - everything from A to Z owned by the Pullman company. "Get baptized in a Pullman church, go to a Pullman school, work…

I had those “Pullman Towns” in mind. This type of system opens up obvious opportunities for exploitation, but so do our existing prison systems. If we ever did replace prisons, I think it would involve something like this. Since Amazon Prison is so close to life already, we might all benefit from thinking about how to solve its issues. As the legal system necessitates lawyers, a digital prison might need digital advo…

> Maybe these could merge with security software to allow us to navigate whatever future prisons we build.

In my mind our goal should be to imagine a future in which the need for prisons becomes obviated.

Re: The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’

#146

Post by petesergeant »

ericmay wrote: post #41
nostrademons wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 not really prison or punishment if I’m comfortable at home

Strong disagree.

As many of us found out during Covid (depending on your country), being restricted from seeing loved ones and not being allowed to leave your house is absolutely punishment. House Arrest is much preferable to actual prison, but is still absolutely punishment. I went to a boarding school, and the strongest punishment you'd get before suspension/expulsion was "gating" - you had to stay in your room except for lessons and meals, and you had to report in to a teacher very regularly. It was a strong deterrent, 'cuz it sucked.

In almost any case where society is mad at someone, rather than scared of someone (re-offending), House Arrest would be cheaper, more humane, but still absolutely a punishment.

Re: The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’

#147

Post by mpalmer »

Roark66 wrote: post #121

People can enjoy the benefits of AI assistance without having their privacy violated. Running ML models on edge devices will become the norm whenever possible. Then we will allow such devices like Alexa to talk to web endpoints to get data, but not to submit any info the other way. I definitely can see a whole new niche of software called "privacy protection firewalls" that would sit on the network between "Alexa" an…

That's interesting. It's like the "edge" in edge computing/caching is sort of a fractal developing over time. An edge becoming more and more tightly looped and furled, while topologically, the network stays the same shape.

It's market forces that are causing the edge to fractalize, pushing the computing and storage hardware closer to the customer, but only to a point. It may take a different market and different forces to push the edge to its end state.

I think centralized compute and storage could very well end up ceding some ground to private, redundant, locally networked dedicated computing/storage substrates, which might take increasingly smaller and more exotic forms. What an interesting time that would be!

Re: The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’

#148

Post by anigbrowl »

Animats wrote: post #68
anigbrowl wrote: post #21

slightly off topic, but: Growing up in Detroit under the specter of the police unit STRESS—an acronym for “Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets” ...am I the only one heartily sick of propagandistic backronyms? The branding of public policy is a disturbing (and long-running) symptom of institutional capture. This example is particularly totalitarian, inflicting a reminder of STRESS on an entire community. Of course,…

The Detroit PD STRESS unit was disbanded after, through miscommunication and trigger-happiness, they got into a shootout with Wayne County sheriff's deputies.[1] [1] https://www.robertankony.com/blog/the-rochester-street-massa...

Normally some cop-on-cop mayhem is worth a grim chuckle, but that's quite a hair-raising account. Great find, thank you.

Re: The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’

#149

Post by heavyset_go »

yamtaddle wrote: post #36
slt2021 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then prison as a punishment will stop becoming a punishment and will reduce incentive to abide by laws

You think... the threat of abuse and assault by inmates and guards is something we should keep around on purpose ?

There are a lot of people that think like this, you won't be able to convince them that prisoners should be treated with dignity.

I've found that they are receptive of evidence when it comes to efficacy, recidivism, cost, etc. If you care about those things, our prison system makes no sense, it only makes sense if cruelty and maintaining a steady supply of forced labor are the only things they care about.

Re: The Rise of ‘Luxury Surveillance’

#150

Post by HWR_14 »

kritiko wrote: post #52
HWR_14 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To be very pedantic back, it's not public property but it is in public. Brandishing laws obviously differ from state to state, but the "public" part of brandishing means that people can see you.
Post reply on HN