I am not American, but in my extremely dangerous country we have many privately-operated cameras and I don’t know a single person who is against them. We also have strict privacy laws.
So I was disappointed by what felt like very weak arguments in the article. Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused. The solution is to fix the abuse problem.
I’d like to hear stronger arguments against these devices, so that I’m better informed locally.
> Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused.
This isn't your life pro tip to get you some additional 20% discount on the next McDonald's order, or some ethical kind of abuse that gets you your needed treatment, because the healthcare system is just too nonexistent to care, though.
Any criticism against the use of surveillance technology needs to resort to the rhetoric of COULD, because any other choice of words would put the final nail in any surveillance companies' coffin, with evidence from either whistleblowers or circumvented security issues.
It's certainly hard to look behind the curtains - fair, but in a world where the top companies are selling advertisements by accumulating and correlating large-scale tracking information from every person on earth, regardless whether they're users of the products or not, it should be much harder to shrug off such a possibility as dystopian nonsense than to see it as the fucked up reality (circumvention of fundamental rights included) that it is.
No, the solution is to fix the societal issues leading people to resort to crime. Surveillance cameras are not a solution, they are a band-aid placed several steps away from the wound.
This doesn’t solve the problem either, which is that of the Confused Deputy [1]. An arbitrary piece of code I’m downloading shouldn’t be able to run as Ryan by default with access to everything Ryan has.
We need to revitalize research into capabilities-based security on consumer OSs, which AFAIK is the only thing that solves this problem. (Web browsers - literally user “agents” - solve this problem with capabilities too: webapps get explicit access to resources, no ambient authority to files, etc.)
Solving this problem will only become more pressing as we have more agents acting on our behalf.
I’ve never seen code that is downloaded run itself. Why not be the change you want to see in the world and run sudo or spawn your browser in a jail. Or download as another user.
7) ChatGPT wouldn’t let me generate a fake high bank account balance screenshot (was meant to be a response to all the “vibe coding can make anybody rich now” posts I saw on X)
8) ChatGPT wouldn’t let me generate a script to crack a password (even though I suspected I knew all but 2 characters in a 16 character password, which makes it highly unlikely I’m randomly trying to hack something)
The stupidest part of this is I could easily do these things myself, I just wanted to save a few minutes.
Approximately half of the people with schizophrenia don’t believe they are ill, which is why they refuse treatment (see: anosognosia). It is a very strange illness.
I suspect this is the case with many mental health conditions / neurodiverse conditions; after all, people grow up with them and if their environment is not affected or making observations (e.g. people are told or convinced that what their brains do or tell them is abnormal), why would they doubt themselves?
But this is a narrow path to walk, because if you see something and someone tries to convince you it's not there, who is right?
This is why some mental health conditions are pretty terrifying, because doubting your own mind is terrifying.
