alt Hacker NewsA license plate is already publicly displayed information (and is in most jurisdictions not private property), and you're operating in a public space.
I know it's unpopular but I went from not supporting these sorts of systems to embracing them after seeing the positive effects in China.
For crimes that depend on anonymity, theft, assault, hit-and-runs, vandalism, illegal parking, etc., surveillance changes the calculation because the offender expects a higher or even a near certain chance of being identified/caught in China. I think this is a good thing. I also see no issue with someone breaking the law and receiving a ticket almost immediately.
With all systems, it comes down to the design. What sort of oversight is there, how long is footage stored, can it be used for specific crimes or expanded later, and are there mechanisms to correct false identification.
Done right, these systems work well. I would be happy to live in a society where street crime is rare enough that I can leave personal property anywhere, like a bike, without constantly worrying about theft. I think many fears about these systems come from dystopian science fiction and assume the worst possible implementation, rather than recognizing that technology can be designed with strong safeguards.
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> I know it's unpopular but I went from not supporting these sorts of systems to embracing them after seeing the positive effects in China.
Any police state can absolutely achieve a low rate of crime: both those crimes that even those of us that embrace individual rights want to see stopped but also those crimes that us liberal types would consider exercise of rights.... but are definitely crimes in China.
The problem is, you can't stop the real, mutually agreed crime with tools like this without endangering the elimination of legitimate individual rights.
In more liberal societies, this means we have real barriers for evidence collection and usage which absolutely let some universally recognized bad guys get away... because those barriers help ensure that the law doesn't become a tool against the merely politically inconvenient opposition members who properly should be able to speak out against the powerful.
If you had a perfectly objective government filled with dispassionate people dedicated to their legitimate role of protecting the rights of the citizenry... perhaps there wouldn't be any issue. But when you have people that decide to turn their opponents into criminals only because of their opposition or questionable loyalty.... No thank you... you can stay in China if that's the kind of society you're willing to accept.
The idea that these are needed, and deployed to address a crime problem is false. For example, Irvine, CA has been one of the safest large cites in the US for decades.
Why did they need flock?
Yeah China is not dystopian at all! They don’t keep millions of people in open air prisons, they don’t keep track of people’s compliance with the government, they don’t support brutal dictatorships, and they definitely don’t pass any laws that would enable them to use their surveillance technology to suppress democratic behavior!
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit_system
https://www.csis.org/analysis/old-friends-new-calculations-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hong_Kong_national_securi...
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Couldn't you make the same arguments for basically all other due process or privacy protections? I think I can accurately summarize your statement here to:
Mass Surveillance deters crime and makes the job of law enforcement easier. I'm happy to live with Mass Surveillance because I don't think the drawbacks of having it aren't that bad, there are some benefits to me, and I trust institutions to implement safeguards.
Now replace Mass Surveillance with any of the following, and I think the your argument is the same: