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cmiles8today at 3:46 PM1 replyview on HN

They will generally deny you access, but they will access it freely themselves despite this being data collected on public streets. That’s the disparity at issue. However there’s no law from you putting up your own camera, pointing it at a public street and publishing the details of every car that drives past and highlighting any interesting once’s, like the mayor, police chief, etc.

I suspect when there’s been a few cases of that sort of thing happening the attitude of local politicians towards these cameras will change quite quickly.

I generally thing this data is a good thing, provided it’s locked behind solid 4th amendment protections.


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dave78today at 4:00 PM

> That’s the disparity at issue. However there’s no law from you putting up your own camera, pointing it at a public street and publishing the details of every car that drives past and highlighting any interesting once’s, like the mayor, police chief, etc.

Yes, and I keep thinking an organized, crowd-sourced effort like people do for capturing ADSB data or weather stations would be tempting. Setting up the hardware would be a little more involved though (mostly because of needing to locate it near the street). Cost is probably not even much worse than an ADSB monitor now.

Something like this is probably inevitable, either as a grassroots effort or via something like Amazon's Ring network. Short term it could prompt officials into action, but I fear long term it would be bad for society - laws might be written to prohibit it, but those would have side effects of limiting other things (like the aforementioned ADSB monitoring network).

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