This is what so sad about tech, it gives those in power unprecedented abilities to control the population. Essentially heading back to slavery through technology with no way out for the slaves anymore.
> Software engineers need to take social responsibility for what they create.
They won't. 99% of people hate to take responsibilities and will never take any voluntarily without being well-paid for this or believing success is guaranteed. Expecting them to is ignoring a fact, may we like it or not. And they are not broken, it's not their job. Taking responsibilities is a job of politicians we elect yet they want power over everything.
In the EU, however, a reasonable part of politicians seems doing the job so we have GDPR and Google/Facebook/etc fined billions every now and then. But they could certainly do better so we wouldn't have the fascist copyright reform.
Tell that to the Google. Their employees scoffed about working with the Pentagon and dropped the contract, but happily helped China build an authoritarian social-punishment system.
Then denied it ... and then more details kept coming out showing Google continued working on it, just more quietly.
Many Googlers have already left Google on ethical grounds, and many more likely will in the near future. There are multiple organized groups of employees trying to enact change internally, but some who previously did that have already recognized that as futile and left, so presumably more will eventually.
Google is already an extremely large company, and I think that many are only just now realizing the problems that they were contributing to. It may take a while for employee actions (both protests and resignations) to have a visible impact due to it's size, but I think they're making progress.
As per my thoughts I expounded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19548485 I think that Google's available talent pool is shrinking. Many very talented engineers have left, and many new potential engineers would not want to work there. Sure, there are still plenty who do, but I would say their options are narrowing over time.
>I think that Google's available talent pool is shrinking. Many very talented engineers have left, and many new potential engineers would not want to work there. Sure, there are still plenty who do, but I would say their options are narrowing over time.
I think you overestimate how skilled you need to be to work at Google. Google has famously put people through enormous hoops to work there, regardless of the complexity the engineering the new hire will work on.
Organizations like NSA also have a negative reputation, but find plenty of people to hire. They just look outside Stanford,CMU, etc.
I suspect that as the people who don't have to work there stop applying, Google will widen it's parameters to snare in the people who have to work there.
(I've met many a person at Defcon who did a stint in the intel community because they saw it as the only path to a high paying job if you don't have an elite upbringing and don't want to directly kill people.)
You seem to think that technical ability and ethics are somehow related. That's a sad misconception which leads to all kinds of bad results. There are many people with very high ability that have an ethical framework which would make them feel right at home in dictatorial regimes. They probably wouldn't even notice it. "I'm just doing my job" is alive and popular.
No, I don't think they're related at all. But if some percentage of high ability users have ethical concerns, it reduces the overall pool of high ability individuals available to them, while more ethical companies have their pick from the entire pool.
>You seem to think that technical ability and ethics are somehow related. That's a sad misconception which leads to all kinds of bad results.
Sure, but I also think if you have enough money to retire early, you're less likely to do something you don't agree with. Many people don't have that luxury.
>Sure, any employer can always choose to lower their standards, but wouldn't you argue then, that the quality of their output is also likely to suffer?
No. As I previously stated Google puts people through enormous hoops to work there. That has no bearing on the quality of the worker.
For example, it's been noted that past a certain IQ, there is diminishing returns - eg, past ~130 IQ you're no more likely to win a Nobel Prize.
I think the real threat is that Google "lowers" it's standards and output remains the same. This would threaten the business models of "elite" schools who pretend to have a monopoly on talent.
> Many Googlers have already left Google on ethical grounds, and many more likely will in the near future.
Leaving Google is not enough already, it will manage on its own (because it already has the power and because because so many gifted people still just dream to work at Google). But creating and promoting numerous better alternatives to Google may help.
Pretty sure Google wasn't working on a social punishment system (ie the Chinese "credit score" that's based on social factors), but a censored search engine, which is still pretty shitty but not nearly as bad as what you claim, unless I missed some big piece of news and am myself mistaken
Dragonfly allegedly is designed to associate searches with a user's phone number, which can be tied to their identity. Since China would have access to this system, it's likely searches for banned topics would be able to impact your social credit, or potentially get you disappeared in the middle of the night.
BTW although having searches on political topics banned explicitly tracked doesn't sound too scary from a pragmatic point of view I doubt they will stop at this point. They probably will analyse whole search histories of people to produce their social portraits so a person interested in whatever unorthodox kind stuff can get penalized too.
I don't think new feats in society are accomplished by holding groups of individuals to task and making each one play by the rules. We need new ideas and new government structures to fight the tide or get ahead of it and inspire people with smart and informed leadership. Shaming ambiguous highly paid developers doesn't do anything, because you are criticizing a job role, a "slot" in society, when you think you are criticizing a person. If you get one software engineer to "take responsibility," another will simply step into place and gladly accept the high paying salary to code without ethics.
The whole point of importing H1Bs from areas with questionable past ethical standards in economical distress (India, China, ex-Soviet union, EEU etc.) was for some managers to have a workforce that could do dirty jobs a regular US/WEU citizen would refuse to do (and do it cheaply ofc). You can still observe it even in FANG that is specifically poaching people from EEU for dirty work (e.g. building internal censorship tools led by Ukrainian/Romanian/non-US devs).
"You can still observe it even in FANG that is specifically poaching people from EEU for dirty work (e.g. building internal censorship tools led by Ukrainian/Romanian/non-US devs)."
Alright, I meant Eastern (members of) European Union (EEU) vs Western (members of) European Union (WEU). You could see it sometimes abbreviated that way. Didn't occur to me it denotes Eurasian union (I thought that one was largely defunct anyway?).
The "Ukrainian" portion was related to "ex-Soviet Union" I mentioned there (cough) ;-) No need to be so academic here lol
With Eurasian union I thought that Ukraine basically killed it and since then Kazakhstan is trying to get rid of cyrilic and Lukashenko is all in to be either the Russian boss and Putin successor or moving Belarus towards EU, so the original Eurasian union idea is toast. At least from my outsider perspective (never visited any ex-Soviet Union countries, just knew some people from there, both pro and anti-western ones).
I do agree we need government regulation[1], but as perhaps a bit of defense in depth, I absolutely think we need to be instilling engineers with ethics. Would your point make any sense if we were talking about doctors, instead of engineers? We teach "first, do no harm" from day one in that field, and we wouldn't assume for any act a doctor would refuse to do, one that would is readily available. We need the same for software engineers. We need to teach people that their mere paycheck job could incite a genocide on the other side of the world.
I also dislike the "someone else will take their place" logic. While a large number of jobs are, indeed, trivially replaceable, many are not, and many developers have significantly above average skill. Some believe they act ethically, and some do not care. If we can remove those who wish to act ethically from working at unethical companies, we significantly shrink the job pool for them. They'll have less options, and likely have to fight harder and pay more to get them. This means that unethical companies may be paying more (i.e. lower profit margins) and be getting worse talent.
If we can get more of the most talented developers working at more ethical companies, the more ethical solutions will be better, and they will win in the market.
[1] I am a big proponent of GDPR and a desire for a US version of it. Though ultimately, particularly in terms of government surveillance, I feel we need a Constitutional Amendment defining a right to privacy. Something far more lasting and enshrined into our future legal framework that recognizes that privacy is a fundamental human right.
I just don't see how government regulation will stop those same governments from doing the things we are talking about here. Its not companies like Google coming up with social credit programs.
Just to play devil's advocate: Have you removed FAANG companies from your retirement portfolio? Including all indexes? Do you use zero FAANG products and/or services unless required by your job? ........ People need to take social responsibility for the companies they patron, support and benefit from. (It is really hard to be this black and white. Also, there are tons of evil companies like Nestle and Montesanto and ...)
Agreed. The narrative is frequently, "Tech company X's CEO was running secret, morally-questionable project. Rest of the company's engineers upset to find out about it."
So far that dissatisfaction has been mostly inert, unfortunately. But I like to think that the typical engineer's morals haven't been as corroded by money as the typical CEO, and that we'll eventually reach a breaking point where things will get so bad that the engineers will finally take a stand. Tech puts power in the hands of the few, but that tech can't be built without lots of engineers. The sooner they see past the utopian narratives peddled by their bosses and set aside their comfy lives, the better.
Engineers, like almost all employees, have to work for a living and will build whatever they have to build. Jobs are not easily replaceable for them to be able to take a stand. This means that even highly skilled and highly specialized engineers can't afford to have a problem working on censorship and surveillance tech, they probably find it exciting given all that cutting edge high performance packet processing or massive neural networks for face recognition. On top of that a bit of propaganda always helps to justify all this inhumane stuff, just like it helps to push lots of people to join the military. So, my point is, it can't come from individual employees taking responsibility, it doesn't work like that at all. Organized efforts won't stop any of it either, even if it succeed in one country, there are too many countries, some much more oppressive and brain washy than the others and make it practically impossible to have an influence.
> Engineers, like almost all employees, have to work for a living and will build whatever they have to build.
Right now software engineering is one of the most fertile job markets out there. In the right city you can walk out on the street and stub your toe on a new job, offering good pay and office perks. Maybe it won't always be that way, but being a programmer right now feels like being the prettiest girl at the ball. That's a good climate in which to quit your job out of principle.
> Organized efforts won't stop any of it either, even if it succeed in one country, there are too many countries, some much more oppressive and brain washy than the others and make it practically impossible to have an influence.
It sounds like you've just succumbed to general defeatism, which to me seems like a waste of time and energy.
> Right now software engineering is one of the most fertile job markets out there. In the right city you can walk out on the street and stub your toe on a new job, offering good pay and office perks.
It's not like that for almost anyone in the world.
I literally got offered a job once by some other customer in a Panda Express because I was wearing Google Glass. Whatever job he was offering, I am reasonably confident I wasn't qualified for it.
But you know they won't. There is a lot of money to be made in going along. Heck, I probably wouldn't refuse big money from google for a few years. Maybe after having enough money I would eventually turn into a freedom activist, but who knows?
I am from Germany and a lot of people did help. They were ordinary citizens before 1933, then they supported mass murder until 1945, then they became citizens of a democratic country. History has shown repeatedly that most people will follow brutal dictatorships and only a few will resist.
I don't know what I would do and neither do most of us without being in that situation.
And they haven't stopped, they just recently built the surveillance system for Duterte that would identify 'drug users' to allow them to be targeted for extra-judicial killings.
There's a quote by Polish nobelist Wiesława Szymborska:
"Tyle wiemy o sobie, ile nas sprawdzono"
Which translates roughly to:
"We only know as much about ourselves, as we've been tried"
During WW2 there was a lot of atrocities committed by people against their own. Not just Nazis against Poles or Jews, but Poles against Poles, Jews against Jews, Ukrainians against Ukrainians....etc etc. People who were given a choice to either hunt and kill their own, or have their families killed. Nazis frequently got the native population to do the most evil stuff(for the promise of being left alone in exchange), even documenting it on film and photos to show it back in Germany as "look at those barbarians killing each other".
Basically we don't know what we would do in case of extreme adversity until we actually face it. I personally wish with all my being that my test will never come.
Exactly. The people directly designing and coding these surveillance systems are: other software developers! Our peers in the profession. Many of whom probably read (and even post to) HN. If you know someone working on such a system and you disagree ethically, it’s kind of your business to get in their face and challenge them on it. And if you are such a person: The tech hiring market is still pretty strong and robust. There are thousands of other projects out there for you that don’t involve mass-surveilling innocent people. You have options!
I’ve quit jobs in the past over ethical concerns with the project. It is a valid reason, and it just takes courage.
2. I walk everyday by a large Bayer building, a company that sells chemicals that create cancer and sells chemicals that heal cancer. Hundreds of people enter the building every day and I think you just need to pay enough money, and you will always find people doing your work.
Tech is also a way we can all protect ourselves. The DIY cybernetics movement will one day become as necessary as the makers movement. Cody Wilson spoke up, and the political establishment went after him.
His sacrifice was not in vain. Today, you can print an assault rifle receiver or 9mm receiver. Everyone should learn how to assemble a weapon. Everyone should also learn how to break into a server, using Kali Linux. Government and corporate IT types are stooges. It is a Constitutional duty that we all share in, as a check against government and corporate Tyranny.
> Essentially heading back to slavery through technology with no way out for the slaves anymore.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Not with the many weapons circulating in the US.
Just look at what the French can do with basically stones and molotovs as weapons. No matter how brutal the French police act, the population is not afraid of telling their leadership how much they suck in terms that they can understand.
Now imagine a France Gilets Jaunes-level protest wave in the US, just with the demonstrators armed with AR15, proper bombs and a boatload of protective armor. That would be a bloodshed. Aside from "mowing down protesters" being very bad PR even for the most conservative media outlets, I doubt that the US government would risk something like that to happen.
Other countries with an unarmed population not used to protests that go beyond holding up signs like Germany, however, they're a different game. And it shows. Our politicians implement one authoritarian measure after another and the only thing people went on to the streets to protest is Article 13.
This often goes missed when gun owners are criticised for saying that guns are useful in a revolt. The point isn't to win against a tyrannical government, it's to force said regime's hand into a position where they either give up or commit an atrocity that hastens their demise and weakens their mandate.
Vietnam and Iraq are two standout examples of weapons being useful to resist a powerful occupier. They never actually defeated the US, they were just a huge pain in the ass until the US finally gave up and left.
On the other hand, people of color are currently living in a world of extremely corrupt police (see https://www.baltimoresun.com/year-in-review/bs-md-yir-baltim...) and general danger, and these cameras will help keep the police and other criminals accountable.
How naive. We may not lose battles that were won a long time ago (so the state may not be as racist as it were) but don't believe that the next battle will be easier to win with so much power in the hands of the few.
This blog post is highly misleading and inaccurate. Access to the video is very limited and subject to strict protocols for use in investigations. And the audio recording capacity isn’t live because the City has no use for it.
The SD Reader isn’t a very trustworthy source. Here’s the U-T’s extensive piece on the topic:
I frankly do not care how limited access is, or if parts of the hardware are disabled. I do not trust governments to act transparently.
There are a few telling things in the article you link to that make it clear that the government values expediency over protecting citizens' rights.
The first notable one is the process: a police officer has to submit a request to view video records... but to whom? It looks like just to their superiors? If they actually cared about protecting people's rights, the request should have to be made to a court, in the same way a warrant needs to be requested.
The city points out that the audio recorders aren't active because they don't have a use case for the audio. They claim that they would engage the public before activating them, but... is that really true? And regardless, I would not want that activated, ever. Any use case audio recordings of public spaces could possibly have... I do not want that. Having the hardware there and ready is just too tantalizing to public officials.
I've been thinking about moving to SD at some point, but this kind of thing really gives me pause.
I do care about nuanced use cases, so I’m grateful to upthread posting a source that’s reporting in a tone that contrasts with the pitchfork-waving of the original post. I wouldn’t move back to SD regardless, but that’s not due to the smart lights!
“Too tantalizing to public officials”? Please explain. The city is run by nine elected members of the council. For what possible purpose would they wish to have audio recordings of street traffic?
When they have purchased machinery with microphones and set out policy and procedure like the following: ‘The policy adds that "audio from the City's intelligent streetlight sensors may be accessed exclusively for law enforcement purposes with the Police Department as the custodian and departmental owner of these records."’
That means they are planning to use audio recordings.
This is clearly not about recording audio of vehicle traffic, but about recording conversations between the same citizens they're visually monitoring.
Plus, they were very quick to pull the trigger and install these without asking. Clearly asking people who would do such a thing to "exercise self control" in regard to enabling yet another degree of surveillance seems like an exercise in futility.
It’s classified the same as other confidential information. There was a senior detective fired because she mishandled the same class of info on a case, so yeah there are serious consequences for breaking these rules. It’s not at all like corporate policies.
anything short of criminal charges is "no enforcement mechanism"? You do realize that if you're a POST-certified peace officer and terminated for cause (1) you lose your pension and (2) are utterly unemployable by any other law enforcement agency. That means you're in your mid-50s and can't find a job in the field you've worked in for a few decades, and probably can't get hired as a security guard because lack of POST certification means you can't carry a gun on the job.
It's quite a harsh punishment for accessing records inappropriately.
Every person in these towns that have this violation of basic rights, should be demanding the takedown immediately but they won't. Again and again the people of this country fall for the "trust us. We are her to help you." lie that our government sells. If they do care, many people are in a state of disagreement and division so much that they won't work together out of spite if it means working with another ideology.
America, land of the free and home of the obedient and fearful. Seeing this, I can't help but feel like we have gone too far to have any return to what privacy we did have.
I actually read through that entire document out of curiosity. As far as I can tell it only applies to audio recording (and telegraphs, and cable TV, and a couple other misc items, but not video from what I see). Also, there's the bit right at the top:
> Therefore, it is not the intent of the Legislature to place greater restraints on the use of listening devices and techniques by law enforcement agencies than existed prior to the effective date of this chapter.
I'm not sure how large or small that loophole is according to the courts.
-----
Then as I was glancing through it, I noticed that this is the law that makes CA a two party consent state:
§632(a)
> without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication
§632(d)
> evidence obtained as a result of eavesdropping upon or recording a confidential communication in violation of this section is not admissible
So that sucks.
§633.5
> do not prohibit one party to a confidential communication from recording the communication for the purpose of obtaining evidence reasonably believed to relate to the commission by another party to the communication of the crime of
But at least it's slightly better as of... 2018. It only took them until 2018 to add that. FFS.
-----
This one was a pleasant surprise though:
§637.7
> No person or entity in this state shall use an electronic tracking device to determine the location or movement of a person.
> So is it a misdemeanor to track your child via their cellphone in CA?
It's worth looking at the whole section:
CA Penal Code § 637.7 (2017)
(a) No person or entity in this state shall use an
electronic tracking device to determine the location or
movement of a person.
(b) This section shall not apply when the registered
owner, lessor, or lessee of a vehicle has consented to
the use of the electronic tracking device with respect
to that vehicle.
(c) This section shall not apply to the lawful use of an
electronic tracking device by a law enforcement agency.
(d) As used in this section, “electronic tracking
device” means any device attached to a vehicle or other
movable thing that reveals its location or movement by
the transmission of electronic signals.
(e) A violation of this section is a misdemeanor.
(f) A violation of this section by a person, business,
firm, company, association, partnership, or corporation
licensed under Division 3 (commencing with Section 5000)
of the Business and Professions Code shall constitute
grounds for revocation of the license issued to that
person, business, firm, company, association,
partnership, or corporation, pursuant to the provisions
that provide for the revocation of the license as set
forth in Division 3 (commencing with Section 5000) of
the Business and Professions Code.
I guess it depends on how you define "vehicle or other movable thing". Children are technically things and they are technically movable, so if the child didn't consent to being tracked, I guess it's technically illegal (and since a child probably does not fit the definition of "vehicle", it's not sufficient for the "owner, lessor, or lessee" of a child - i.e. a parent or guardian - to provide that consent).
However, IIRC there are a lot of cases where a parent's consent is considered to be equivalent to the child consenting, and this might be one of them; as long as the parent consents to the child being tracked, it'd be legal in such a case.
Agreed in general, but the thing is... children can't generally enter contracts or otherwise "consent" to most things in a legal context. True that parents can be stand-ins sometimes, but I'm not at all clear on what the limits for that are.
I too was initially confused by the "or other movable thing" part, but I'm pretty sure the the cell phone itself qualifies as a movable thing in this context.
Great point: let’s have an honest and fact-based discussion. This blog post isn’t that. Turn up at a council meeting and tell the elected politicians that you don’t want to be spied on. Make the police defend their use of the footage. Convince others to agree with you. That’s democracy and at this level of government it works pretty well.
"Benevolent dictatorships" only last until the term of the politician is over. The successors didn't make any promises to not use the surveillance system to the fullest extent possible and therefore at least one of them will.
This is, mind you, the exact reason why I tend to be averse to the notion that we should habitually make exceptions to things like freedom of speech/expression, freedom of religion, "states' rights", etc.; they always sound great when your party is the one in power, but when (not if) that changes, you've now handed your opposition the means to more heavily oppress you.
You have it backwards. The Union Tribune is known to shill for the establishment and has been called "not a credible source of information". The San Diego Reader is local, independent and has a good reputation for honesty.
Source: I've lived in San Diego for the last 50 years.
The Reader is independent and the UT is corporate-owned, but on the other hand, the Reader is not really much of a news outlet. Its role in the local ecosystem is kind of halfway between PennySaver and Reader's Digest. They're not dishonest, but they're not shelling out for top-notch reporters either.
The Reader doesn't shell out, but it doesn't pressure writers to dumb down their work to 9th-grade reading level either. So it's a haven for work like this:
No, there aren’t. This is a few hundred cameras and it’s mostly downtown. San Diego is the eighth largest city in the US and this is a tiny fraction of the city. Evaluate it on the merits, but be clear about what’s really going on.
This is inaccurate. Only a small fraction are live. And it would take a lot more than 3,000 cameras to be "city wide" in SD. It's a really large city in geographic terms.
>> No, there aren’t. This is a few hundred cameras and it’s mostly downtown.
Wrong. I've seen these from Pacific Beach to Imperial Beach. That is around 40 miles from North to South. They are _everywhere_. You can spot them by the black antennas sticking out the bottom of the light fixture.
SD Reader was, in my opinion, more honest and willing to do municipal reporting requiring attention to detail than the Scripps/Tronc-owned UT, which was often a vehicle for whatever local real-estate magnates wanted to be in print.
The Union-Tribune is owned by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong now, along with the Los Angeles Times. The reporting has been a little better lately, at least in the Times.
Yes, people expect privacy when moving through their day in public, even though they may not expect it in an particular location. If they didn't expect that, stalking wouldn't be a concern.
This assumes that your morals are the same as whoever is behind the camera. You don't know that, which compromises the integrity of any moral value knowledge of being watched would have given.
> Access to the video is very limited and subject to strict protocols for use in investigations. And the audio recording capacity isn’t live because the City has no use for it.
How did placing this kind of trust in our government work when we last tried it (patriot act & fisa)?
"Access to the video is very limited and subject to strict protocols for use in investigations. And the audio recording capacity isn’t live because the City has no use for it."
This is a good and instructive example of statements that contain no information.
If access to the video were liberal and careless, it would be described as "very limited and subject to strict protocols". If, on the contrary, access to the video was very limited and subject to strict protocols ...
You get the idea. Zero weight should be given to assurances that would be given out regardless of the actual state of affairs.
A good heuristic is to ignore these communications and concentrate only on actions, but in this case where there may not be concrete evidence of misbehavior, we need to rely on a different heuristic: potential risks and worst case outcomes.
> In short, CityIQ transforms a city's lighting infrastructure into an all-knowing, data intelligence network. -- https://www.currentbyge.com/cities
"Hey, cities, want to install our Panopticon?"
At least BriefCam took the time to encode their site in PR-speak:
> BriefCam is the industry’s leading provider of Video Synopsis® solutions for rapid video review and search, real-time alerting and quantitative video insights. -- https://www.briefcam.com/company/about/
Since the introduction of cameras used at intersections to penalize stop light violators (made famous by a former mayor who ran a red light while getting a blow job from his mistress), San Diego has always been experimenting with surveillance technology especially thereafter. Those intersection cameras have been minimized from county wide implementation at its height.
Being a border city and a major military hub for the Navy and Marines, surveillance technology being developed by businesses here have been a response to these types of organizations' needs and challenges.
I could see backlash as this surveillance tech permeates the county and extreme edge cases are brought to the surface to be used as weapons for curbing implementation.
It's not just border cities. I came back from a business trip to Memphis and were shocked to see blue lights blinking on top of street light poles [0] almost everywhere specially in poorer areas, they are cameras recording audio and video 24/7 installed by the city to deter potential crime.
>"Being a border city and a major military hub for the Navy and Marines, surveillance technology being developed by businesses here have been a response to these types of organizations' needs and challenges."
The border already has border security and military bases already have existing security. What specific "needs" and "challenges" does San Diego currently have that are not fulfilled by those existing systems and requires the deployment of all pervasive surveillance throughout the entire city?
Fun fact: Intersection cameras have been proven to cause more accidents, as more people slam on their brakes to avoid a ticket then coast through the light.
That sounds exactly like an urban myth along the same lines as 'seatbelts kill more people than they save'. Has it ever been proved?
Worth also noting that rear-end crashes are generally less dangerous than t-bones. For similar reasons, roundabouts can be preferable to standard crossroads even if they result in a higher number of collisions.
"That sounds exactly like an urban myth along the same lines as 'seatbelts kill more people than they save'. Has it ever been proved?"
I hope you will look further into this - you may be interested to learn (I was) that a nearly perfect intervention for red lights being "run" is to lengthen the yellow signal.
It costs nothing and works as well, or better, than red light cameras - and with none of the artificial, unexpected driving behaviors that can cause rear-end accidents.
Yellows have been shortened on purpose to raise revenues from tickets. If cities cared about accidents and congestion, we'd have less lights and more traffic circles, but that means less tickets and more thought and effort than lowering the yellow light time.
See https://www.motorists.org/issues/red-light-cameras/increase-... for various sources showing that red light cameras increase the number of accidents. Within The Netherlands there is a restriction on where such cameras can be placed due to this effect; basically the number of current accidents has to be pretty high.
Fun fact. Anticipated behavior is less likely to cause harm, whatever it is. If someone anticipates that you'll fire a gun at them, they'll have a much better reaction than someone who has a gun fired at them without that anticipation.
In California it is legal to be in an intersection on red as long as you entered it on green or yellow. The slam-on-the-brakes effect should at least be smaller than in states where being in the intersection on red for any reason is an offense.
5G and it’s need to remake all the light and utility poles in the city will bring the cameras and microphones. It’s a compelling use case to a government, regardless of privacy implications.
Microphones are used in a lot of places to figure out and triangulate the location of a gunshot. Cameras can track cars and people automatically.
Not sure what to do about it though. Maybe multisig with community leaders and police with a court available as an override? Just spitballing. Everything has a negative unintended consequence.
>Microphones are used in a lot of places to figure out and triangulate the location of a gunshot.
Apparently, those don't work too well.
Spotshotter works in principle, but police departments are getting as low as 50% false positive rates, and can't really do anything if they do get reports of gunshots anyway - they turn up and the shooter is gone.
You'd hope that would lead to more public investment in education and services in those areas to alliviate crime and make them safer, but somehow I doubt that's what happened...
More? At what point will they look at all the money being spent and the blood being spilled and maybe consider investing in public schools doesn't magically get rid of an infestation of gang violence.
At what point will they look at all the money being spent and the blood being spilled and maybe consider investing in public schools doesn't magically get rid of an infestation of gang violence.
If your question is "When do you decide to stop spending and give up on people?", then I think the only civilised answer is "Never".
If my city ever decided to implement surveillance on that scale, vandalism is clearly on the table. Just try to sabotage the network first. Would help you not get caught, at least for a while.
In essence: Increase the rate of criminality. They were asking for it.
What do you have to hide?
Okay, bad joke, April 1 is over.
In seriousness: please don't do that (yet). If you care deep enough to do all that, why don't you join the local government, the local media, start your own local media, become a counter-movement that doesn't go against the law?
Yes, destruction of government property is a crime, but widespread deployment of surveillance dragnet is a far more clear and present danger to everyone.
It's one of those rare cases through which the government, by doing something, has made the place less "safe" for what? A bit of security? Boulderdash! If anything it's yet another test case on how far total public space information dominance can be pushed. It's a social engineering ploy that needed to stay in the pages of a book of speculative fiction.
He describes an extrapolation of our world's recent history, one in which "reality" is captured for posterity by omnipresent cameras. Citizens record the details of each day by taking written notes of encounters, in addition to stamping pages of their day book with "conversation stamps". These stamps establish the presence of a person in the company of another, thus allowing "reality" to be pieced together later on. In short, citizens of the Golden State consider reality precious, and go to great lengths in order to record & preserve the events of each day, however minute they may seem.
Ben Winters is a great author, one of my favorite sci-fi craftsmen. He had me hooked throughout the novel, in no small part because I kept alternating between two emotional extremes. On one hand, I was abhorred by such systemic invasion of privacy. At the same time I saw obvious benefits that stemmed from systemic, society-fracturing lies having been banished from the Golden State universe.
As someone who has OCD related to this ("Citizens record the details of each day by taking written notes of encounters" could almost describe me), I'd be interested to know if he addresses the downsides that could result from this. You become more worried about capturing the moment, so you can't live _in_ the moment. It's almost self-defeating -- because you are worried that if you have this interaction, you will forget to make a record of it, you end up not having the interaction at all (you limit interactions to things that will fit in short term memory). Regardless of how highly you value reality, you end up missing out on it, losing the very thing you valued in the first place.
I'm familiar with the feelings you describe, but the Golden State's citizens appear to be unconcerned with this. The book's timeline is preceded by unspecified terrible events which have destroyed the old world. These events are said to have been triggered by lies, and it's this terror of repeating past mistakes that keeps citizens in line.
The most shocking thing is that this could happen apparently without any public discussion or awareness.
There is simply not enough crime in most US areas to justify this.
This should only be allowed in hyper-specific scenarios wherein there is an evident need: airports, borders, very high crime areas, international conferences, maybe around Capitol Hill and White House etc..
It's just a matter of time until we have country-wide full surveillance. It will be the perfect tool for anyone who wants to create a dictatorship. The thought police and the telescreens in 1984 will look primitive and weak in comparison. I think there is no way around it.
Add to that drones to keep the population under control and there is huge danger we'll have a pretty bleak future.
This sort of defeatism isn't helpful. Surveillance technology doesn't sprout up from nothingness; it's built on a culture and a political/economic environment which can be changed.
US Congress doesn't represent US citizens. 84% of the time, the congress person that wins in that district raised the most money. Corporations and the wealthy provide that money to get congress people who represent THEM, not US citizens.
US Congress doesn't represent US citizens. So nothing changes if moneyed interests want US citizens to live under surveillance.
Your logic doesn't leave room for the possibility that there is a correlation between electability and ability to raise funds. I.e. the candidate most likely to win raises more funds and not vice versa.
the whole notion of 'electability' is a ruse created by democrats to push voters towards politicians that agree more with the corporate wing of the party than any issues people care about. if electability was actually a thing, trump would not have won.
>Your logic doesn't leave room for the possibility that there is a correlation between electability and ability to raise funds. I.e. the candidate most likely to win raises more funds and not vice versa.
That's circular logic. "They must be the most qualified, because they raised the most money and the person who gets elected is the one who raised the most money".
In a functioning democracy there should be a cliff where, no matter how much you spent, you cannot simply buy the election.
They were talking about Congress not the presidency, and the presidency is not popular vote. The electoral college is specifically designed to be different
Well the idea is that having more money means you can get your message out more. The money has to be spent to be useful. It isn't just the person who "has" the most (though you could also use Trump as an example to that).
But Trump's team did a good job at getting in the media. Any news station you turned on there was more talk about Trump than Hillary.
This is one of the problems with money in politics. As money becomes more important in winning elections, politicians' interests align more with the "moneyed interests" rather than the voters or even the public.
The house of representatives should serve as a bulwark against "moneyed interests", but even they are being targeted and bought by money. What good is democracy if a small group of people buy all the politicians?
There's currently a "small donor boom" on the Democratic side (possibly Republicans too, I'm unsure). Super PACs etc are fading in importance, in this cycle at least.
Yeah, they say that every election cycle. Remember Ron Paul? Bernie Sanders? Remember the "small donors" for Obama? Nobody remembered them and neither did Obama. Super PACs are growing. Not sure where you got the idea that they are fading. Super PACs are only a few years old and they have tons of room to grow.
This isn't defeatism. I just think there is a wave coming that's really hard to stop and I don't see anything in the current political structure that's willing to stop it.
The ‘builders’ are better described as ‘profiteers’.
The panopticon is being requested and purchased by municipalities, which are predominantly governed by those from the baby boomer generation. Start-up 101. Build what the Users want.
Young blindly build Facebook like apps, old build a CCTV network.
Everything feels scary, try walking around at 2 a.m. and not feeling it. People are tired of it.
I don't think that all the surveillance will work. You always find the most amount of sketchy people around police stations. The cameras will make things worse. Good people will flee to other neighborhoods, were they are not being watched.
Because everyone might own a gun? I live in a fairly large German city and I am not aware of any no go areas there at night or day. Some areas of Berlin and Hamburg might have them but generally we are pretty safe here.
Good question. Younger people in general seem to be less fearful, presumably for reasons human nature (as your mobility, visual and mental acuity etc decrease the world simply becomes more dangerous, though most threats are things like bathtubs).
Also though the kids at the moment seem to understand better the risk/reward benefits of some technologies and have a better idea what actual risks they take. You see this in voting patterns.
> City and state level political change is very malleable.
Corporations have already figured this out, e.g. ALEC [1] writes laws, then gets sympathetic minions to enact them, but city politics still operate on a human scale in many places. I'd bet that a motivated campaign could reverse this move in San Diego, or at least figure out who pushed for it. I don't think there was massive popular support for cameras in streetlights.
Frankly because it would be extremely unpopular. Even in the right wing places, where there is a correlation to less favorable views of marijuana, there's a high correlation to belief that states rights should trump federal rights. Really they believe that the fed should be minimal and things mostly run by the states.
But won't be. GWB expanded the state's powers with the Patriot Act, Obama signed an extension and then a new version of the act when parts expired. When both sides are pro-surveillance and Americans refuse to change the system or support 3rd parties, what change can there be?
The two-party system is a direct result of FPTP election forms.
First past the post receives a lot of criticism for
restricting options to vote for due to the idea of vote
splitting and strategic voting. This leads elections to
run into the commonly referred to "Lesser of two evils"
dilemma and ends with a 2-party system in place. With 42%
of Americans saying they identify as independent and 60%
of Americans saying the need for a new party is apparent,
it would suggest that the FPTP voting system is failing
democracy, failing Americans, and failing America.
HN has this dogma where they won't add any more markup even if it's reasonable. I guess they don't want every comment turning into a fancy formatted mess with different font sizes and lists, but blockquotes are a necessity. > is used a lot, and it always looks bad, particularly for multi-line quotes. HN won't add proper blockquote rendering for ">", so people try to mimic it, badly, using indented <pre>/unflowed text (which HN bizarrely implemented even though they didn't implement indented flowed text). Don't blame people, blame HN.
It’s up to us to stop this. Me and many others took time off work to tell our transit agency, BART, not to implement a draconian police state, including facial recognition cameras. BART wound up becoming one of the first (if not first) transit agencies in the US to implement a privacy policy instead [0].
Work still remains though, one BART employee told the press they were considering fake gun turrets that would drop down from the ceiling on suspected criminals. Work still remains to make American culture see the dangers of a police state as more than a punch line [1]
It’s not funny when you consider that BART police have shot and killed at least three unarmed people in the last few years, not to mention they’ve even engaged in fatal “friendly fire” of their own... This is easily one of the most violent transit police departments.
So then replacing their guns with toy turrets seems pretty smart. And still funny.
I tried to search for some actual national statistics it couldn’t readily find anything. My suspicion is that some of those BART stations are extremely dangerous environments that put police in very tricky situations.
There have also admittedly been a few very high profile accidental shootings.
There's probably too many security holes inherent in modern technology to get that sort of one-party equilibrium. You'll have the governments who paid for the surveillance tech, the companies that installed backdoors in products they manufactured, the suppliers that installed backdoors in the components of those products, rival nation states, various hacker collectives, and the criminals they sold exploits to all jockeying for power in a cat & mouse game of information warfare.
It'll probably end in a war of some sort, as power struggles usually do, but a chaotic don't-know-who-your-enemies-are war like Syria rather than the Great Power contests of WW2. Then after the war we'll likely see the survival of technologies that don't require large-scale maintenance (like solar, batteries or mechanical/thermal storage, electric motors, market economies, flexible micro-manufacturing, computers, and drones) over those that do (like the electric grid, large corporations, state-wide surveillance, broadcast networks, large standing armies, etc.).
Technology makes full surveillance easy, and usefulness of surveillance in preventing small crimes, regulating traffic, etc. makes fighting against it hard.
Maybe instead of fighting with technology we should find ways preventing it's misuse: more open governments, electronic voting for individual laws, more surveillance over finances of elected officials.
Everyone's already walking around with a device that can hear everything they hear, and see much of what they see, track location, etc. They even bring these devices into their private spaces.
This info may be owned by Google or Apple, but fascism is about control, not ownership. No warrant required for LEO to see that data.
The government putting devices on lights that are owned by the government, in public places - that's small potatoes in comparison.
Hahaha. You already have it. Covert interception. FAANG. Snowden "blew the whistle" on only a tiny fraction. You already exceeded 1984's monitoring.
Dictatorship forms okay without it.
More overt surveillance is a civil maintainer. Taiwan has camera surveillance everywhere and solves above 90% crime.
It used to surprise me how in denial people can be about their own localities' surveillance. Now I think that makes sense as a consequence of the surveillance mostly being covert.
I'm kinda expecting vehicle cameras to be conscripted into this surveillance penchant on the back of road safety in some future autonomous vehicle standard.
But if you want to see 1984 play out - look at parenting and children today compared to children growing up in 1984. Many freedoms removed directly and indirectly by laws on the back of child safety.
Honestly, we need to discuss how to stop it. Everyone goes around trading opinions and complaining, but this is an entrepreneurship community. We need to talk about solutions.
No. Surveillance is something that easily sold with "think of the children" or under the pretense of national security, most people don't understand or comprehend the issue to care; It is a fight for public opinion and educating them of the risk, but it is not a profitable venture nor an easy one when big brother can shut you up before you can finish your breakfast.
What?! Its the standard surveillance technique of security forces worldwide - tracking the movements of a suspect. I'm convinced somebody is trolling here, and it isn't me.
Define 'crimes' is the issue. Once it is in place, it only takes a slight change to the law, or a Government acting extra-judicially, to become a problem.
If you create a massive surveillance system for "good" purposes that doesn't mean someone can't later use it for nefarious purposes. One (rather primitive by modern standards) example is that Poland required people to list if they were Jewish for their national census, and then the Nazis used that list to round up and account for Jews in the holocaust.
Since the US routinely violates the constitution in the name of fighting "terrorism", I don't want to government to have arbitrarily strong and specific surveillance in case they later expand the definition of what it means to be a terrorist.
Who you think the "next Nazis" are is debatable. I think it's easier to just prevent the situation happening altogether. We don't need arbitrarily powerful surveillance to function as a society
It really don't think there is when it gets to "Nazi" level bad. But that isn't really a debate worth having.
>I think it's easier to just prevent the situation happening altogether.
Why is surveillance the line you are drawing? We are all fucked if the US government goes the route of the Nazis. Having the ability to tap into some extra municipal surveillance cameras isn't going to make or brake their control.
>We don't need arbitrarily powerful surveillance to function as a society
Sure, but no one is yet proposing arbitrarily powerful surveillance. You are going slippery slope here. Low level surveillance has value just like the Polish government having an accurate picture of their citizenry has value. The question is whether the present value of the information is outweighed by the remote possibility that the information can be abused by a corrupt power. That remote possibility alone shouldn't be the deciding factor or else we should be against any form of governmental power including having a military any more powerful than a local militia.
Yea, lets just figure out what sort of ideology leads to that.
Then lets make a list somehow of people who are of that ideology or likely to fall to it.
Then we just ought to round em all up, maybe put them in camps where they can be reeducated on why they're wrong...and ones who are uncooperative could be put to work, and...oh shit we're the next nazis, woops!
Are you really going with the "the anti-Nazis are the real Nazis" trope? There are a few steps along the way between "let's try to stop Nazis" and "let's throw them in concentration camps".
Let me tell you something: No matter what you do, evil always finds a way. And when it does, do you really want to live with the regret that you could have done more, but chose not to for fear of some imaginary future evil?
We can estimate the severity of the negative consequences of mass surveillance and censorship across the entire country or globe and compare that to the smaller number of isolated, but perhaps more severe cases of evil. We can then choose which we predict will be the better state to live in.
Here in America we do that with guns. We do that with cars. We do that with natural gas accessible in the house. We do that with electrical lines that may sometimes get damaged and kill someone.
The answer is yes, we can say that the cost of mass surveillance and censorship is too high to pay for a little safety. If that means that someone I love is killed, or my home is broken into, then so be it. It will be tragic. It will hurt. But at least we will be free.
Hold on a minute. Today's society has vastly more surveillance than the society of say fifty years ago. Cameras are everywhere - in our phones, on buildings, on dashboards, on policemen. How has this affected our democracy?
I'd argue that so far, the cameras are working in our favor. Police abuse gets caught on tape and prosecuted. Political corruption is harder to hide. A white supremacist who murders someone with their car and speeds off is caught. The Saudis get busted murdering a journalist.
I'm not sure we can honestly estimate the negative consequences of mass surveillance. Certainly not if we lump every camera in to that category; I wouldn't want a camera in my living room, but I sure would like a camera pointed at my parked car. Streetlights? If it stopped my car from being broken into for the fourth time, I'd be pretty ok with it.
Here in the US, it's not for want of camera technology that we are not living in a police state. If anything, the cameras are helping keep our social institutions honest.
Maybe this will be viewed as too anti-social, but has anyone considered doing laser based attacks on these? Lasers seem to be able to damage camera sensors fairly easily and permanently and as they operate in the visible light range should be hard to block. Could make a system like this prohibitively expensive to operate.
This could work great mounted to a drone, to operate without being tracked by the remaining surveillance cameras.
The problem is that the stakes are quite high, and a gradually creeping occupation doesn't lend itself to a flashpoint of popular opinion saying enough is enough.
This might be a great nonmurder application for an assassination-market style thing though.
So, you don't do that... You start in the burbs. Out on the periphery. "Huh ... camera 20179 doesn't work. Put in a trouble ticket." Trouble ticket goes to the bottom of the stack. Too far away for anyone to bother driving too. Eventually they see a pile of these at the bottom of the stack. If you're lucky, they decide to take a pass on option years for the project because they massively under-budgeted the maintenance side of the contract.
Even with super HD video evidence, the police aren't going to spend thousands of dollars tracking down who stole your worthless phone unless you're someone of influence. And, if the footage is theirs, they're not even going to bother releasing it so you can get some kind of social justice, because that cost them time and money too.
To be fair, the people of San Diego voted their government in. So in my view, they got what they deserved.
I'm not sitting on a high horse or anything. I mean hey, I'm from Wisconsin. We're literally the nation's corruption measuring stick. But we voted our politicians in, so we deserve what's happening to us.
I'm just holding San Diego to the same standard. If you hadn't voted them in, this wouldn't be happening to you. Best advice I can give you? Vote in some new guys who will pass new measures to get rid of the cameras.
The idea that people deserve what politicians do to them because voting has occurred is a smug easy answer, but it's ultimately just baseless victim blaming.
Exactly right. Keep electing the same people, same party, who always campaign on issues that they never actually solve, while they solidify and expand their power.
>who always campaign on issues that they never actually solve, while they solidify and expand their power...
Pretty much describes every party though, that's the issue. Wisconsin got screwed over by conservatives, SD got screwed over by liberals. Just have to try to find an honest politician. (Of course, that in and of itself is at once a quixotic and sisyphean task.)
What about those who abstained from voting? The hole in the 'consent of the governed', 'you got what you asked for' mythology is that there is no way to withdraw your consent.
Imagine giving inmates the 'freedom' to vote for their warden. The outcome of such an election would have no bearing on the morality of their imprisonment.
Courts and legislatures could stop it or regulate its use. The heart of the legal question is what aspects of domestic surveillance might be seen to violate 4th amendment protections. Thus far, "the right of people to be secure in their persons" has not been interpreted by courts in a manner that would constrain or limit surveillance in public places or the use of catch-all checkpoints. That could change with the right test cases, particularly if harms can be established.
I think the test cases would hinge upon the difference between a specific individual not having an expectation of privacy in public, versus the public in general. It's always been possible to follow an individual around and keep him under surveillance. It's never been possible to keep everybody under surveillance all at the same time.
That’s a nice sentiment but in reality your vote doesn’t count because every politician and government puts these measures in at the first opportunity. You may think governments work for the people but that’s just theory.
It would, but I'm guessing they have a very cheap, ~$1 lens filter or glass sheet on those things.
Permanently damaging the camera sensor isn't so cheap or easy to replace. And as many lasers operate in the visible light spectrum you can't block it without worsening the image quality substantially.
I live in San Diego and frankly, I hate the new lights because they simply aren't as bright and there are fewer of them. I can't run outside after work during the winter because the streets are dark now.
I think there’s a statewide standard now on light pollution that mandates dimmer lights. Supposed to be safer, too, because the contrast with the shadows isn’t so great.
Headlamps can be dangerous because the shadows are in the same plane as your vision. I gave up using them for hiking because they didn't help me see drop-offs. You're better off with a light in your hand or on your waist.
After spending hundreds of hours hiking by headlamp, both on- and off-trail, I disagree. Sometimes it helps to hold your headlamp in your hand if you're running, but at a normal walking pace, it's not a big deal.
Ultratrail runner here. No-one in the ultra community uses handheld torches. We all use headtorches, and we run long distances at night through mountains
Does not change the fact that the light source is very close to the observer, and to make it worse higher than the observer. Both are quite bad for detecting the structure of the ground.
Torso would probably be good, any deeper and you get too much shadow in depressions or behind bumps, dosage matters.
But you lose head aiming into curves, so maybe somewhere in the jaw region might be interesting. You'd need an entirely new approach to fixing for sports that don't already have full face headgear, but the usual forehead position isn't exactly fashionable either (historically this position comes from mining I think, where the shadow/structure effect isn't wasted when it works on the ceiling instead of on the floor).
Life long resident and native born San Diegan here. This is not meant to be sarcastic or dismissive but this is the City of San Diego we're talking about. City of San Diego has a pretty good history of being completely incompetent. No matter what nefarious intent that you might think the City has, they are way to incompetent to do any of it. This type of system is only useful to non-idiots.
How does anyone who lives in San Diego get to see the live camera and data feeds? Surely a city in the US didn't create a public surveillance network that takes the information and makes it private.
"...when a request under provisions of state public records law was sent to the city on January 3 to obtain data generated by a single so-called smart streetlight installed on a Market Street light pole, the response was repeatedly delayed.
“The City has to conduct a search for records, examine records, consult with another agency, or compile data in order to determine whether it has disclosable records,” said a January 11 message.
“Pursuant to Cal. Government Code section 6253(c), the City needs to consult with multiple departments having substantial interest in the determination of the request or among two or more components of the department having substantial subject matter interest; such consultation shall be conducted with all practical speed. Therefore, the City is taking a 14-day extension in which to conduct this consultation. We will notify you on or before January 25 whether the City has disclosable records."
Come January 25, the city said it still wasn’t prepared to turn over the records.”
It depends on the state. In some states many government video feeds are considered public documents. The problem is that you're usually not allowed to tap in live, you have to file a paper request and then pay for duplication of the video.
In Houston, when Transtar (the local transportation management agency) first put up its network of traffic cameras it worked out a deal with one of the local TV stations (KPRC, I think) to provide it with exclusive access to the video.
The other stations pointed out that in Texas, Transtar video was considered public records, and so Transtar had to allow every TV station use them, as long as they ran fiber to the agency's headquarters to pick up the feeds. So KPRC's "exclusive" advantage evaporated within a month or two.
When cities/states rolled out wide license plate reader networks, wasn't the resulting data also shared with many government agencies, but not accessible by the public? I'm sure the justification for not allowing that data to be public is "well, if we let people access this data, surely it would be immediately abused." And I'm sure that's true. And it's also true that the data is immediately abused when shared only with government agencies.
I'm bummed that of all places on the internet, no one on HN has pointed out that the answer to your question is the city has an API you can query to obtain the public data collected by the sensors.
it is more frightening how quickly citizens of most countries willingly give up their privacy and freedoms to their government over the promise of a cookie or promise of keeping other people away from the same cookies.
politicians in the West excel at exploiting fear and jealously to obtain more authority, divide and conquer.
The US would only end up in dictatorship through court packing or a moral authority faction taking over; by moral I do not mean religious. pretty much look at countries where politicians declare a group of haves to be illegal or unjust and you get the idea.
> politicians in the West excel at exploiting fear and jealously to obtain more authority, divide and conquer.
I don't think that's a trait unique to politicians in the West, and in fact I'd say that Western politicians tend to exploit fear and jealousy less than those in the developing world. You've got ethnic cleansing going on in Myanmar, ethnic and religious conflict in Kashmir, and the extrajudicial killings of drug dealers and users in the Phillipines, to name a few instances.
If this has been created by government agencies, then the data should also be public. Once the data about what politicians are doing and saying becomes public, the program will end. :)
Request what? The surveillance system? No. That said many on HN where strong proponents of it when it was announced because it was marketed as providing data the city government could use to make improvements.
Cameras can be at every intersection all the time and can adapt in real-time to emerging traffic patterns (ie a ballgame ending and a stadium of people hitting the road at once) as well as traffic changes over time from environmental changes
A camera is cheaper and a camera can measure speed as well as slowdowns and stoppages that a tube simply can't do. A tube was the old way but if you're going to make a new device a camera makes more sense.
One of the rare times I would condone the destruction of property and make it expensive for the city to operate these things. The US government has 0 authority to monitor its citizens without a warrant.
ctOS from Watch_DOGS at its infancy... Should be fun soon!
I liked one scenario they had for self-driving car crashes and the dilemma who should be killed in the event of an unavoidable accident. Car quickly retrieved the social score of each probable victim from a ctOS database and optimized crash setup to do the lowest harm to subjects with highest social score. No more car occupant vs external person nor owner vs manufacturer legal responsibility dilemma. Sounds really prophetic. Can't wait to see it in action! /s
Which are you honestly more worried about? Someone abusing the system to know where you are when, or not having a system in place when some lawless asshole decides to start doing very nasty things to people and/or property?
Repeat after me: Ever single hierarchy has abuses.
Build a society that has more than one person, and I'll show you a society where someone takes advantage of something more than they probably should, either legally or ethically.
Excellent stuff. This is the future: universal surveillance with auto-detection of crime. It's going to be very nice. We can't fight dictatorships by disallowing this tech. We have to fight it elsewhere. This is a good thing.
