More like 30 years ago when I got my first webcam and have been deeply considering today's exact scenario, along with many alternatives ever since.
Had nothing to do with any regulations though, actually didn't want to give anybody any ideas either way.
There were so many better things to do back then, and now even more variety of opportunities although not every "ecosystem" turns out to be a net positive if you're not careful.
It’s very hard to regulate outcomes when the component steps are legal. Not saying we shouldn’t try, just saying that path is well-trodden and rarely works. See: media consolidation, etc
IMO it is much more practical to regulate and penalize the activity of using such a network than to preempt its creation. Heck, BitTorrent can be seen as a surveillance network. But intent and usage make it obvious it’s not.
We can absolutely say that, for instance, taking pictures in public is legal but surveilling is not. We could say that recording public spaces systematically, for the purposes of surveillance, is not permitted. That does not require us to say that individuals cannot record in a public place. We can even say that individuals or companies are not allowed to collude to effectively turn individual recordings into systematic public surveillance (e.g. you can't build a product that searches everyone's personal videos of spaces and turns them into a spotty surveillance network).
What makes mass surveillance systems such as Flock, Ring, etc., incredibly objectionable isn't really the cameras. It's the databases they feed into that allow for the unprecedented invasion into our daily lives. That's also true for non-camera surveillance systems. The concentration and correlation of individually innocuous information adds up to an egregious assault on us all. That's the part that needs heavy restriction and regulation.
The GDPR is far from perfect, but it does cover this. It talks about acquiring and storing information that can be used to identify people. It doesn't specify what counts, so now that face recognition is pretty, it automatically applies to images.
It also talks about uses cases where such things are allowed to be recorded, and forbids all others.
> IMO it is much more practical to regulate and penalize the activity of using such a network than to preempt its creation.
Hard disagree. If such a network is created, foreign adversaries (or domestic ones that don't abide by the laws) can hack them. Has happened quite a number of times.
1. There is a huge difference between my neighbors accidentally seeing me leaving my place, vs an anonymous person 7 months later, being able to statistically analyze when I leave my place in the morning, and when I return in the evening, even getting a list of the places I stayed over night on the days where I did not return in the evening.
2. see above
3. The downsides are enormous as well - Want to know who went to that protest last night? Query your local palantir console. Who met with your former wive within the last 2 weeks? Flock will give you answers.
4. The problem is scale (in the number of people who can observe me, the time frame I can be observed over and the length of time over which that information is available)
I cannot reply to everyone but still want to defend the above post (apart from a patronising tone so apologises for that)
The most common response here is “but in the future some other government could do X”. And yes. This was also a major reason for opposition to the orignal “Peelers” in 1800s - a civilian police force. The police today are able to commit many egregious violations but they are mostly held back by laws, and social expectations. It’s not perfect but it beats police in non democratic countries by a mile.
“ Who met with your former wive within the last 2 weeks?”
Yes that’s something we have seen police officer and politicians doing - it’s almost always illegal then and should continue to be so.
I think this is about trust in institutions- it’s a problem.
We need sensible laws, a social acceptability of privacy violations just below corrupt cops. The scale is great but so is ability to monitor who monitors us.
Why create an instrument that has a limited upside, but a downside that can lead into totalitarianism, in the first place? If it does not exist, I don't need to trust anyone, hence there won't be a problem.
Institutions can go evil, as seen in any friendly dictatorship all over the world in the last 100+ year.
Keeping the police on the legal side of things seems to be challenging (ICE killings? Asset forfeiture? Police brutality?), better to make it harder for them to do something illegal in the first place.
I am still waiting on a working answer to the question of "who watches the watchmen", so far, this has never really worked (NSA/Snowden?). What has worked quite well was limiting the institutions up-front.
Why have a different category that sounds like "unserious" to german people? I can see people in procurement departments say "oh no, we don't deal with UG".
Ok, so first of all, the UG was only introduced in 2008 - which even for some of us middle-aged people is more "it's relatively new" than "GmbH has existed decades before I was born".
Second, not that I claim to be any representative, but this "UG is weird, unknown, not serious"... I have personally not heard that for about 10 years, so yeah, absolutely true when it was new.
Third, it's still relatively rare I'd say. You stumble over one every couple of months or years, in my experience mostly online shops without their own manufacturing (but maybe that is where I am looking) - if you just look at what tradespeople have on their vans: Nope, never. Always GmbH or GbR/single person.
But I have no insight into procurement departments.
You’ll find that many people don’t have 25k€ to invest in initial capital of a business, but that are perfectly capable of running a business regardless. 5k€ is fair for plenty of endeavours, and more should be required for riskier businesses.
People seeing a GmbH as more serious is just a cultural aspect, I’d say.
First, you can trivially store years of nuclear fuel, which you can't with fossil fuels.
Maybe this is already complete, but at one point of lot of it was from decommissioning nuclear weapons, so it wasn't "we need them for fuel", it was "lets make use of this waste material and provide a financial disincentive for nuclear proliferation".
Finally, the West has plenty of sources for Uranium, and given plants already have years of fuel onsite, it is never a pressing problem.
You missed the "mainstream" qualifier from the parent. I am afraid nothing you described here could be considered mainstream, although I'd like to see these things becoming mainstream.
California's law apparently only applied to B2C, but there was an FTC rule that applied to B2B as well which has been paused by a federal appeals court while they consider if the FTC followed the law in making the rule.
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