Surveillance apologists like to make the argument that “in public you have no expectation of privacy.” But what they don’t seem to understand is that having centralized networks of cameras (and especially ones hooked up to things like facial recognition databases) creates a whole new third level that goes beyond merely “in public” and instead becomes a panopticon.
“In public” a person might remember seeing you at a certain time and location, but that doesn’t mean they can trace back your whole location history along with that of everyone who was ever near you at some point along it and feed it into a computer looking for suspicious patterns. When somebody tries to follow you closely enough to do that, we call it “stalking” and it’s a crime.
But somehow once thing “X” becomes “X, but with a computer” lawmakers think it’s magic or some shit and previously-criminal stuff suddenly becomes A-OK! So now everybody is being criminally stalked by Ring (i.e. Amazon), Nest (i.e. Google), etc., and too many people are too computer-illiterate to even begin to grasp what a massive problem that is.
The reason it doesn’t seem like a problem isn’t just ignorance, but also form factor. If someone were to start putting stickers that look like staring eyes on ring cameras, it might drive the point home more viscerally.
Surveillance apologists like to make the argument that “in public you have no expectation of privacy.” But what they don’t seem to understand is that having centralized networks of cameras (and especially ones hooked up to things like facial recognition databases) creates a whole new third level that goes beyond merely “in public” and instead becomes a panopticon.
“In public” a person might remember seeing you at a certain time and location, but that doesn’t mean they can trace back your whole location history along with that of everyone who was ever near you at some point along it and feed it into a computer looking for suspicious patterns. When somebody tries to follow you closely enough to do that, we call it “stalking” and it’s a crime.
But somehow once thing “X” becomes “X, but with a computer” lawmakers think it’s magic or some shit and previously-criminal stuff suddenly becomes A-OK! So now everybody is being criminally stalked by Ring (i.e. Amazon), Nest (i.e. Google), etc., and too many people are too computer-illiterate to even begin to grasp what a massive problem that is.
Flock “Safety”
The reason it doesn’t seem like a problem isn’t just ignorance, but also form factor. If someone were to start putting stickers that look like staring eyes on ring cameras, it might drive the point home more viscerally.