RE: Amazon Ring Doorbell Camera to Build Watchlist of “Suspicious” Neighbors for Police
The only thing wrong with this technology is the people that are selling it, and how they're selling it. This is one of the most empowering technologies that exist: automated sentries that enable one to secure one's life and property.
This replaces, or can with nominal community security services, the standing army that today imposes institutional force on communities. As soon as open source software that enables communities to not provide surveillance to Amazon is available, greater freedom and power will be available to communities to effect their security.
That Amazon and government are seeking to use this against those communities is typical of police and fascist states, and something I hope is soon obsolete as this security technology isn't parasitized by oppressive institutions, but can be safely used by folks to secure their lives and property.
Thanks!
Such system would not work on a neighbourhood level, nor is it integrated in the camera. It only makes sense on a centralized data base source, most likely run by a federal agency. Also, information by civilians who "believe" they see a suspicious person is useless, unless they observe a actual crime in progress.
I assume, the data set would consist of everybody who has been in conflict with the law before. That can than easily sorted into different classes, like property, drug, violence related ect. And of course, also political, if desired.
I don't know if you ever came across the Video game "Watchdogs"? In that, there is exactly a system like that: ctOS, that makes the city so much safer and efficient - and everybody on the street transparent.
You seem to assume that communities cannot cooperate beyond their confines, and this obviates highly effective solutions to the challenges you pose. The eventuation of DLTs facilitates trivial data sharing voluntarily between communities, and highly encourages such cooperation.
Trust in centrally controlled institutions like Amazon or the USG is at an all time low as factual data regarding crimes at every scale is increasingly available. The less local the institution, the more such criminal effects discourage susceptibility to it, and the benefits of voluntary cooperation between highly localized communities are of potentially existential import.
I note that institutional power is being dramatically increased by consolidation of jurisdictions, which potentially decreases the cost of intersocietal competition potentially completely, while at the same time tech advance across industries is ubiquitously increasing decentralization. There will be diversity in adoption and it is provable that individuals and communities will profit most and more going forward by decentralizing institutional power. As a result intrasocietal competition will strongly favor decentralized communities, even as global societal consolidation is effected which strongly favors centralization.
Absent extinction, it is inevitable that institutional power will be rendered obsolete. The question is how dangerous that transition will be. I note the proposed global population of ~one billion indicates that centralized institutions expect the coming contest to result in the genocide of ~7 billion people.
You further neglect that common criminals rarely commit crimes beyond their local jurisdiction, which strongly empowers regional surveillance communities to functionally reduce criminal depredations even if only provided local data.
Well, the thing is, institutions like Amazon or the government don't need your trust. All they have to do, is make the people believe that they benefit from their doing.
Step one is to scare the people, something that is in progress with the help of the media for many years. Step two is to offer a solution, a method to improve safety.
Then people will love it - they will even pay for it, as they already do with Alexa.
The decentralised approach is a silly idea for several reasons. Mainly, because the data set that is needed already exists in the institutions. Whats the point of building it from scratch, based on questionable observations of amateur vigilantes? The other thing is: if you do something that involves the internet, there is no decentralisation. The infrastucture you are using is most like owned by - Amazon. Or Google. If they want, they can access it all.
You say that most criminals operate on a local base. That may be true - now.
With a automated local neighbourhood watch in place, they will soon figure out that its a better idea to travel a bit to pull off something. At least if they still have some functioning brain cells. Therefore it only makes sense to make such a system nationwide. If not even international, at one point.
I dont know if you heard about it, there was the idea of putting cameras on cars online, to create a similar system, or at least be part of a bigger one.
A Tesla today has already 6 or 8 cameras, that observe the whole surrounding of the car. This serves for the autonomous driving and as rear view "mirrors". No doubt this will be standart in all cars fairly soon.
The idea was, to keep them running all the time and upload the footage, in order to catch people who steal or damage the car.
Can you imagine what this would lead to one day? There would be not a single square foot that is unobserved anymore, at least inside towns.
And the people will love it.
You point our yourself that institutions such as Amazon are untrustworthy, and depending on criminals to provide your security is foolish in the extreme, far beyond silly.
While you ignorantly mock free people providing their own security, and neglect to consider how crime has been fostered and increased by orders of magnitude since the wide introduction of police forces that force individuals to depend on them for their security, you completely ignore that freedom is the creation of the free - not a service provided by overlords.
It is self defeating and absolutely irrational to delegate our personal security. This has never worked, and never will, because criminals corrupt institutions inevitably, and history is replete with examples demonstrating this. Remember the words of Ben Franklin who points out that trading freedom for security inevitably results in the loss of both.
Regarding surveillance cameras becoming ubiquitous, that genie will not return to the lamp. The choice we have today is not whether there will be surveillance cameras everywhere, but whether they are owned by us or not. Not possessing this technology leaves it to criminals and overlords to deploy for their own purposes, and while they may say they'll keep us safe, they are proven liars, and will use their possessions to aggrandize themselves.
In the final analysis, each of us is inherently responsible to exercise our sovereign authority to defend our lives, communities, and property, and failing to personally do so will grant our lives, communities, and property to those that seize them when delegated that authority.
Sheeple will be enslaved to overlords because they are evolved to eusociality. Psychopaths will seek power for themselves by enslaving who they can. Free people will make their freedom, and decentralization is the elimination of centralization that enables parasitism to empower overlords.
While there are some valid points in what you say, it has little to do with what is reality already today.
And yes, corporations (like Amazon, Apple, Google ect.) cannot be trusted, since they always put their agenda (making money) before anything else. That doesn't mean, that they are unable to provide a useful service - if it serves to achieve their goals, as I said. The same goes for the government.
Sure there is a lot of reason to be concerned, regarding personal freedom, privacy and such things.
However, we don't live in the 18th century anymore, and ideas and concepts of personal freedom from that time just don't work any longer.
Anyway, I prefer to work with what is, not with what I wish things to be. Whatever is coming, you and I won't change it.
Individuals just like you and are today and absolutely will.
The fact that you existing makes you both responsible and to have authority for effecting, your personal security has not changed one bit. Neither has the fact that you have no authority to delegate that personal responsibility to anyone else changed. All the other rights that derive from this inherent sovereignty are neither altered in the slightest.
I have already changed the world you live in, though you may not know it. I recommend expanding your concept of the nature of living things, which you are one, and recall that the unbroken chain of living cells that connects you to that original cell from which all life stems will never change, which makes you no less responsible for continuing that chain than for eating dinner your personal self.
Basic principles proven without exception to pertain to men ten thousand years ago and to men today continue to effect our sovereignty, no less than the responsiblity of beavers, mice, and birds for thier personal safety, and reveal why that safety must remain thier own purview. No delegation of it, no claim of responsibility for it, supercedes or invalidates it.
This is what is, and what will continue to existentially impact surveillance and police states in particular.