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GE, Intel, and AT&T Are Putting Cameras and Sensors All Over San Diego (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Fortune report: General Electric will put cameras, microphones, and sensors on 3,200 street lights in San Diego this year, marking the first large-scale use of "smart city" tools GE says can help monitor traffic and pinpoint crime, but raising potential privacy concerns. Based on technology from GE's Current division, Intel and AT&T, the system will use sensing nodes on light poles to locate gunshots, estimate crowd sizes, check vehicle speeds and other tasks, GE and the city said on Wednesday. The city will provide the data to entrepreneurs and students to develop applications. Companies expect a growing market for such systems as cities seek better data to plan and run their operations. San Diego is a test of "Internet of things" technology that GE Current provides for commercial buildings and industrial sites.
and other tasks
That's the worry.
How soon before people wear masks outside, just do go about their business around town?
All we need now is for someone to build a computer system to analyze all the data, and call it The Machine
Probably end up being more like Samaritan...
By now your name and particulars have been fed into every laptop, desktop, mainframe and supermarket scanner that collectively make up the global information conspiracy, otherwise known as "The Beast."
it's in public. u don't have any expectation of privacy
Historically true, but if we're headed for a world where everything we do and everything we say in public (at least outside and within the city limits) is on file for all time on a server somewhere that's been pre-analyzed and indexed using using facial recognition and voice recognition... we might want to consider revising that rule of thumb a bit.
u don't have any expectation of privacy
I can't believe you hold an expectation that people give a shit about privacy anymore, regardless of location.
I think I'll follow you everywhere you go (as long as you're in "public"), live-streaming your actions from my phone, since you have no expectation of privacy. I will also follow your vehicle, noting when you turn into the wrong lane, don't signal the proper distance in advance of your action, roll stop signs, exceed the speed limit by 1 MPH, etc. You don't mind, right? I think I'll call you Truman.
There's no law saying I can't wander around public spaces wearing a high-power infrared LED that's blinking out Bobby Tables in Morse code.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Like all new technology it will be used for good and evil. "The city will provide the data to entrepreneurs and students to develop applications." Have to have faith in the majority of people to use the technology for good and to punish those that use it for evil. However, if the information is in the hands of just a few then there won't be effective oversight and it will be used for evil. What they need to do is level the playing field and provide the data as close to real time as is technically possible to anyone that wants it. Not selectively, not piecemeal, not months later... real time.
There is an expectation that you are not being monitored by the police state, up until this point. Technology is invasive the moment it becomes pervasive. I have no ability to OPT out of state surveillance, and the state has no expectation that they can monitor me without a court order. I would consider this a violation of 4th Amendment "Unreasonable" search ....
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Go for it, don't be surprised when you get arrested for stalking.
Perhaps, but maybe we should.
I look forward to taking advantage of hacking the devices with ease from my phone.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
Go for it, don't be surprised when you get arrested for stalking.
I think that was the AC's point.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Fascism seems to be eternally descending on conservative states, but landing in liberally controlled areas.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Unless they're surprisingly secure in the fist place, and have a trusted path for emergency re-imaging, they're going to be amazingly attractive to anyone wanting to experiment with rooting industrial-IOT hardware.
davecb@spamcop.net
I can't do shit to stop this fast slide into facism, so I might as well open a shop that sells brown shirts and those fake 'looks like Charlie Chaplain mustaches but they sure aint!' dealies. Sieg Heil, and Come Again!
Apple and Google beat them to it.
Thing is, there needs to be sensible privacy legislation in place *before* these systems roll out. Otherwise, the potential for abuse is insane. Kettling on steroids, to name just one. Microphones on every lamp post, whoa...
More unjustified naivete.
Let's not pretend we don't know how things work, as if there weren't mountains of human history demonstrating what will happen.
There is no amount of legislation which will remove the "potential for abuse". Legislation doesn't magically make the data go away. If the data is collected, it has a gravity of its own, and just like a new planet that gravity will over time pull the other parts of legal system out of their current orbit and result in something different. Information is power. You can't create a giant bank account of Information and expect it to never be stolen, embezzled, compromised, distorted, or used for political gain.
IF the data is there, it WILL be abused. Absolute 100% certainty.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
San Diego is heavily Republican, you idiot.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The next thing will be facial recognition.
This is a very good point.
But then the 1996 Telecom Act quietly changed the ownership of metadata from the subscriber to service providers. And many of these service providers have moved all their customer information offshore (try to call customer service without being connected to Rajiv). So that raw data is available (and has been used) to do link analysis, the results of which are for sale. Adversaries can figure out who works with or for whom. And where they are at any given time using this analysis applied to cell phone records as well as land lines..
Given that the government (and specifically the DoD) hasn't said shit about this and asked for a legislative change, I doubt anyone will dare upsetting GE. Intel and AT&T by threatening this new profit center either.
Have gnu, will travel.
Don't worry, every tire sold in North America has an RFID chip, your license plate is superfluous.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Maria's Taqueria y Burdel already knows that shit.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
There kind of was, in a weird way.
In the way back 70s and 80s even, if i was being spied upon on a public street, it was pretty certain there was something specific about me. Maybe I was a crook, maybe I was a cheating spouse, or (very unlikely) maybe i just had a stalker. It was expensive to spy on someone. So only certain people could ever be targets.
Now, everyone can be targeted cheaply. That's a different world. that's a different world than the Founding Fathers could see. Maybe they'd specifically say "you should be able to disappear in public unless there was a warrant".
If you don't control yourself, you will be controlled. That is the way it has always been. You know it exists. Are you going to use it to control yourself, or are you going to let others use it to control you?
Heavily? Compared to the rest of California, perhaps.
All the privacy of government spy programs with all the transparency of private corporations! What could possibly go wrong?
People give a shit about privacy. They just don't understand it and (more importantly) how and when its being compromised.
The biggest issue is a disconnect between where privacy is compromised and where its expected to be compromised. If I post a picture of my dog to Facebook and share it with my friends, I expect that only my friends will be able to see it. That's seems like a pretty reasonable assumption.
However, because its on FB's server, I no longer have control over the picture and that's the tricky part that many people fail to understand because there isn't really a real-world equivalent to hosting a picture on someone else' server -- at least not without invoking some heavily constructed scenarios that would be just as hard for an average person to understand as the actual problem.
At the end of the day, ignorance is ignorance whether its intentional or not, but in the unintentional case we have at least the possibility of informing people and reducing the amount of ignorance toward the issue. Unfortunately we've been pretty unsuccessful in that context as well since for the most part, all of this privacy invasion has been fairly subtle and unintrusive to the average person so its hard to convince them that there is even a problem that they're ignorant of, never mind correcting that ignorance.
Never heard of a voting district?
CA on average is blue, but San Diego County is red.
If you don't control yourself, you will be controlled. That is the way it has always been. You know it exists. Are you going to use it to control yourself, or are you going to let others use it to control you?
Feel free to elaborate on this poetic advice as your Rights dissolve faster than a Millennials Starbucks account.
You act as if We are still gifted with choice.
People give a shit about privacy. They just don't understand it and (more importantly) how and when its being compromised.
The biggest issue is a disconnect between where privacy is compromised and where its expected to be compromised. If I post a picture of my dog to Facebook and share it with my friends, I expect that only my friends will be able to see it. That's seems like a pretty reasonable assumption.
However, because its on FB's server, I no longer have control over the picture and that's the tricky part that many people fail to understand because there isn't really a real-world equivalent to hosting a picture on someone else' server -- at least not without invoking some heavily constructed scenarios that would be just as hard for an average person to understand as the actual problem.
At the end of the day, ignorance is ignorance whether its intentional or not, but in the unintentional case we have at least the possibility of informing people and reducing the amount of ignorance toward the issue. Unfortunately we've been pretty unsuccessful in that context as well since for the most part, all of this privacy invasion has been fairly subtle and unintrusive to the average person so its hard to convince them that there is even a problem that they're ignorant of, never mind correcting that ignorance.
People will gladly give up privacy in exchange for a "free" price tag. The top 10 worst passwords consumers use today have not changed in decades, regardless of the obvious rise in hacking and identity theft, caused by using shitty passwords. The fitness guru who gets offended when a website drops a cookie wears a fitness tracker 24/7. The consumer shocked by the invasive nature of targeted ads owns an always-on listening device in their home, because "convenience". The social media addict who streams and tweets their entire vacation wonders how the criminal knew they weren't home. The user who's laptop hard drive failed three times still doesn't back their data up to the server.
Ignorance is ignorance, but we seem to be beyond that. We're now in a state of willful ignorance. Also known as not giving a shit, which tends to reinforce my original point.
As far as informing people, damn near everything comes with a EULA today, and yet no one actually reads them.
In the end, I'm certain that people will complain about no one warning them about the consequences of not giving a shit. All I can say is 1984 was written over half a century ago.
In the pavement, disguised as expansion joints.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Fezzik: Why do you wear a mask? Were you burned by acid or something?
The Man in Black: Oh no. It's just they're terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.
technology gets more powerful it also gets more intrusive
Technology is invasive the moment it becomes pervasive.
You and I said the same thing. As a Libertarian, I would suggest to you a (singular) camera is invasive, but accepted. A thousand cameras owned by the state is in fact a violation of constitutional guarantees against UNREASONABLE searches. Is it really unreasonable to be free from observation in a "Free" society?
Think about it for a second, the very thing we made fun of in the USSR is happening today, and both liberals and conservatives are arguing for more of the same surveillance state.
The difference between a single picture from 1970 by my dad on a camera at Disneyland is clearly not the same thing as the government being able to watch me travel from my home to Disneyland on all the cameras lined all the way there and back. Once is inconvenience, a hundred thousand frames is observation. Somewhere along that long line, it stops being expectation of not being filmed and one of expectation of being filmed at any given moment.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
People will gladly give up privacy in exchange for a "free" price tag
Are you sure about that? Now people will sure give their name and address to some company for a free price tag -- but it comes with the expectation that it will only be used by the company they gave it to.
That's the disconnect of ignorance. People who haven't had reason to consider the issue in depth don't really expect that their data is being sold to 47 "partners" and stolen by hackers 3 times a year because the site is too lazy or incompetent to secure their system. We expect the data to be used for in-house things like product planning and flyer layout.
We've been told for centuries that business is the end-all-be-all and we tend to trust them until they break trust rather than requiring them to earn trust in the first place.
We're now in a state of willful ignorance
I don't know that I'm that pessimistic about people. I tend to believe more that the world is just too damned complex and its just not possible for busy people to know and understand every piece of technical information that comes along. Computer people should probably know better but I don't think we should require any random welder or burger flipper or fisherman to understand such details.
damn near everything comes with a EULA today, and yet no one actually reads them.
Yeah, because they're unreadable. Intentionally so. Your average EULA is several dozen pages of deep legalese that even lawyers take days to parse through in full. And we're asked to read several of these per week, if not per day for anyone who spends significant time on the Internet. Then there's EULA updates which are often "announced" on some hard-to-find page on their website (even if the EULA is for an offline program.)
Its just too much. Just like you can't expect the welder to understand the privacy implications of any particular website or piece of software, you really can't expect a him to understand the legal implications of dozens of absurdly long EULA documents. I have to click off a EULA to order a damned pizza these days!
I don't know what the answer is. Maybe there isn't an answer. Certainly not an easy one if there is. But I can guarantee you that the answer is not going to be "just expect everybody to be a computer expert and a legal expert and have several hours per week to dedicate to parsing through all of the details AND savvy enough to know when the details are BS and they're actually dealing with someone shady."
I mean if you want to take that tack, we may as well shutdown repair shops -- everyone should be a master mechanic right? And the hospitals -- who needs one everyone's partner or friend or neighbor is a fully trained doctor? But of course that's not the way the real world works and we really shouldn't expect everyone to have specialized knowledge online either.
People will gladly give up privacy in exchange for a "free" price tag
Are you sure about that? Now people will sure give their name and address to some company for a free price tag -- but it comes with the expectation that it will only be used by the company they gave it to.
That's the disconnect of ignorance. People who haven't had reason to consider the issue in depth don't really expect that their data is being sold to 47 "partners" and stolen by hackers 3 times a year because the site is too lazy or incompetent to secure their system. We expect the data to be used for in-house things like product planning and flyer layout.
We've been told for centuries that business is the end-all-be-all and we tend to trust them until they break trust rather than requiring them to earn trust in the first place.
When the end result is a constant stream of hacks leaking consumer data, it's still willful ignorance, no matter how you want to paint it. If a company contracted to never sell user information and secured it using the best encryption, but charged $5 for their product, no one would buy it. People bitch about 99 cents these days. Willful ignorance at its finest.
With regards to hacking and consequence, it's the it'll-never-happen-to-me syndrome. That same ignorance leads to humans ignoring medical signs that lead to cancer being detected in the too-late stage, over and over again.
Bottom line is if consumers actually gave a shit, they wouldn't be handing over their most sensitive information. Convenience trumps privacy. Every time.
...And the hospitals -- who needs one everyone's partner or friend or neighbor is a fully trained doctor? But of course that's not the way the real world works and we really shouldn't expect everyone to have specialized knowledge online either.
Actually, it's ironic that the real world still requires 8 years of highly specialized schooling and a doctorate degree in order to for someone to be legally authorized to do work on a human body, and yet we recommend 30 days worth of training and a certification to work on a computer holding your most sensitive information. Funny how that shit works, isn't it. Again, mass ignorance at its finest.