alt Hacker NewsThat's why it doesn't make sense to ban governments from doing things while still allowing private companies. Either it is illegal to surveil the public for everyone, or the government can always do it indirectly with the same effect.
I don't think the deal described here is even that egregious. It's basically a labeled data scrape. Any entity capable of training these LLMs are able to do this.
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Or that the government isn't allowed to purchase anything they'd normally need a warrant for?
What would such a ban look like?
A private company can surely link its own cameras and data to create a private use database of undesirables. I’m certain that Walmart and friends do exactly this already. It’s the large scale version of the Polaroids behind the counter.
The difference is that a government can take personal liberty away from people in the most direct way. A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row. (Hopefully anyway.) So we put a higher standard on government.
That said, I do believe there ought to be more restrictions on private use of these technologies.