All the coverage lately on things like Flock and other privacy-reducing panopticon startups always softball the topic so hard.
"As long as its being used by police professionally..." is an insane stance to keep on this.
In the West we regularly point to China's surveillance state, as some horrific human rights abuse. Yet when it happens at home we don't use that same level of vitriol. Which is it? China uses authoritarian surveillance? Because then we have government-corporate cooperation here for the same authoritarian surveillance.
If it's okay for officer Opie to have access to enough data to stalk and harass any woman that refuses him, then we're no better. No amount of "right hands" can make this level of surveillance okay.
You see similar levels of hypocrisy leveled at the capacity for Chinese EVs to surveil consumers, but not at Tesla, when we know that Tesla employees had access to sex tapes of their customers in their cars. As long as itβs western capital or western police doing the surveillance, it must be permissible, right? /s
We should be clamping down on all surveillance, and this is not a problem that has a technological solution. Quite the reverse, actually.
"As long as its being used by police professionally..." is an insane stance to keep on this.
In the West we regularly point to China's surveillance state, as some horrific human rights abuse. Yet when it happens at home we don't use that same level of vitriol. Which is it? China uses authoritarian surveillance? Because then we have government-corporate cooperation here for the same authoritarian surveillance.
If it's okay for officer Opie to have access to enough data to stalk and harass any woman that refuses him, then we're no better. No amount of "right hands" can make this level of surveillance okay.