Bulk of these cameras are actually installed at the behest of the control freaks sitting on HOAs. They are the real target audience for these cameras because they love the power trip over other people. It seems if you don't get enough attention as a child, you will just grow up to become a control freak.
We talked about them in my neighborhood mainly because of package theft. If I ever thought there was a real chance of enforcement action, I’d be in favor.
You would rather infringe on the privacy of your community and invite a company known for indiscriminate multi-pronged dragnet surveillance (plates/faces/bluetooth beacons/etc.), with a nation-wide blanket coverage network that has already been provably abused by police on multiple occasions, all because of a handful of petty package theft cases?
I drive too even though there is a risk of death. The juice is worth the squeeze.
Except even armed with positive identification, the police won’t do anything. Laws with enforcement are worth nothing. Stalking and whatever else has happened with the data is already illegal. But who gives a shit without enforcement.
If you acknowledge that police regularly fail to act on crimes even with positive ID, why on earth would you allow a private company to collect all that information just for them to ignore/misuse? How is dragnet surveillance a fix for inept/corrupt policing?
Police have been granted wildly more powerful capabilities and arms over the course of my lifetime, but from what I've seen, those haven't improved their ability to solve crimes or better serve their communities nearly enough to justify their erosion of civil liberties; in my estimation, it's been an opposite trajectory, with violent escalations by police increasing and community trust in police decreasing (nearly monotonically) across the country.
Read the linked article; does that seem like "absurdly small" amounts of abuse to you? Besides, when we're talking about a surveillance network so vast you can't avoid it anywhere in the country, the law of large numbers kicks in: there IS abuse, and there WILL be further abuse at some level. The extreme reach of such systems means they should absolutely be treated as 4th amendment violations; the authors of that amendment could never have conceived of such a panopticon and its impacts on individual privacy and autonomy.
Its just a lot (a lot lot lot) of people think that they have the right to own/control/manage all other people around them. Then, beyond that, there's this super pernicious idea that you're a kid until you're like 33 or something.
Meanwhile, my grandad lied about his age to go kill Nazis as a teenager. This infantalization of grown-ass people is distressing.
