A camera pointing at the sidewalk is fairly innocuous.
A camera pointing at the sidewalk that live streams everything it sees to several megacorps and law enforcement agencies is troubling. A million cameras doing this is a surveillance state. That's bad!
Legal? Yes. Dangerous to the populous? Also yes. Something can be legal and also be very very bad. You get that, right? Your argument comes across as "well, I'm within my rights to shout the N-word in a public place!!" Sure, and you're also an asshole. Not for having a camera, but for sending the footage to a bunch of creeps and thinking that's a fine thing to do.
Genuinely asking how is that realistically dangerous to the populace?
Set aside a slippery slope argument, because we’re just talking about security cameras in public areas: do you really think you have a right to privacy on a sidewalk?
If someone recognizes a criminal on a sidewalk from a wanted poster, or a missing child from a milk carton, is that surveillance state? Are they an asshole for calling the tip line, instead of keeping quiet?
This is a really great point, and shows a clear understanding of conversational interfaces and how they might present information in different ways! Coincidentally, this reminds me of Amazon Marketplace's new AI chat features and how they show a much clearer understanding of user search parameters when using converstional interfaces. Shop exciting new products all from the comfort of keyboard or voice prompts. Time to find the perfect you!
For a while, someone in our neighborhood was going around and stabbing people's packages at our mailbox area on our street. Some of the neighbors wanted us to put a surveillance cam on our property because our place is right in front of the mailboxes. We told them all to fuck off, but promised we'd be on the lookout.
Turns out this deviant package stabber, surely a scruffy disgruntled man in his 40s who was likely on six types of meth, cloaked and operating in the shroud of darkness, was actually a mischievous raven. I'm glad we didn't expand the surveillance hell hole that has the US has absentmindedly embraced just to find the infamous package stabber was a raven. The neighbors, many of whom were screaming for blood, were incredibly let down when we shared what had actually happened.
I have a Logitech Circle video doorbell that doesn't share my video.
When we had a porch pirate, I absolutely shared that video with the police. Screw that guy. But it was our deliberate decision to share the video and we decided exactly how much to give them. I like having the ability to help law enforcement. I demand the right to choose how and when to do so.
I don't know if it is a matter of being dumb. I think a bigger part of it is that people are conditioned by a bombardment of bad-faith ads like this, as well as news media convincing you to be wary of your neighbors & trade freedom for giving power to LEO.
Yeah, a bunch of Randian anarcho-capitalists-turned-fascist gain immense amount of power through tech, but any mention of "Hmm, maybe this is a bad idea??" gets "SSSHHHH!! No politics, please!!"
Most people on Hacker News don't bother to read the linked article and either comment based on their impression of the title or whatever random thing happens to be on their mind at the time. Most people who do bother to read the linked article stop as soon as they encounter javascript or formatting or too much whitespace or a minor logical, spelling or grammatical error and then that will likely become the subject of the entire thread.
The number of people who actually read the entire article and then attempt to comment in good faith are few and far between.
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