Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

You peeking out your curtains at me is fine. It doesn’t scale.

Everyone doing it 24/7 via their cameras and running it through AI analysis and providing it to the cops for $$$ is not.





What if I run my own cameras, my own local models, and my own analysis? All from the privacy of my own home... Is that okay?

What if I recruit a few friends around my town to do the same, and we share data and findings? Is that also fine?

What if I pay a bunch of people I don't know to collect this data for me, but do all the analysis myself?

Where do you draw the line? Being able to concretely define a line here is something I've seen privacy proponents be utterly incapable of doing. Yet it's important to do so, because on one end of the spectrum is a set of protected liberties, and on the other is authoritarian dystopia. If you can't define some point at which freedom stops being freedom, you leave the door wide open to the kind of bullshit arguments we see any time "privacy in public" comes up: 100% feels, and 0% logic.


Yeah, it's an interesting question to me too.

Because it seems clear to me that if an individual was to surveil and build up a dossier on any random stranger as much as an entity like Facebook or Google does that this would be considered stalking.

I've never been able to quite figure out why incorporating and doing it to basically everyone some how makes it legal. I think the secret ingredient is money but I'm not exactly sure how that works.


> Where do you draw the line? Being able to concretely define a line here is something I've seen privacy proponents be utterly incapable of doing.

There are many things in life where the exact location of the line isn't clear, but quite a few cases are clearly over said line.

As examples: Fraud, threats, child abuse/neglect, obscenity.


Sure, and I agree with these examples, in general.

How does this apply to the topic at hand, though? I think you're straying too far into hypotheticals, perhaps?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: