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Anyone with a camera and $5 can now have a license plate reader:
Automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), software that allows computers to separate and analyze license plates from camera footage, could soon become ubiquitous in American neighborhoods thanks to a company called Rekor Systems. On Thursday, the firm started selling a product called Watchman. The $5 per month subscription allows homeowners to add the company's OpenALPR software to almost any home security camera.
[...] there are a couple of limitations to the $5 package. The software won't automatically log every single license that passes your home. As a homeowner, you'll also won't be able to obtain someone's name, address and location history from their license plate. That's a feature only law enforcement can access.
[...] privacy advocates fear the technology could be easily abused by both homeowners and law enforcement agencies to erode the privacy of innocent people further. And advocates have good reason to be skeptical of companies like Rekor. Amazon's Ring security service spent the majority of 2019 defending its partnerships with law enforcement agencies. In one instance, a report from Motherboard showed that the company had coached police on how to convince homeowners to hand over their Ring camera footage without a warrant. Similarly, it's easy to imagine a context in which police agencies could abuse the widespread proliferation of technology like OpenALPR.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 31 2020, @05:08PM (7 children)
I've given a bit of thought from time to time, about my parents-in-law. The old man was born in 1905, and MIL was born in 1918. Yes, the people were still making babies at 50, and 43, respectively. But, life changed drastically in their lifetimes.
For that matter, life has changed pretty drastically in my own lifetime, and I'm only 63.
Now, this surveillance thing . . . try to imagine how society is going to change in the next 50, 75, or 100 years. If this crap progresses only at the present pace, NO ONE will ever be alone. People already take their telephone conversations to the toilet with them. The spy-phones are immediately at hand while you're making the creature with two backs. Alexa sits right outside the bedroom, bathroom, and whatever else all day, every day. Siri may get pushed under a pillow if the lovemaking gets especially energetic. Fifty years from now? Your every belch, fart, and queef will be broadcast around the world.
Of course, with that sort of ubiquity, very few will be paying attention to you, in particular. But, you're being watched. And recorded.
So, how is society going to change? Maybe, for starters, child porn will be better defined, and stuff that isn't really porn becomes acceptable. Maybe. People become more blase about nudity in general, because EVERYONE has naked pics on the tubes, somewhere, from somewhen.
Those examples don't really address the issue though. How will society really change?
I'm expecting that just about everyone becomes a conformist. If you conform, no one is going to notice you. Nonconformity will invite scrutiny. The average age for kids to lose their virginity being whatever - anyone who goes significantly past that age becomes the subject of ridicule. And, those who beat that age significantly? The same. Conform, or be subjected to a mocking public - and you can't wear a disguise out into public, because SOMEONE is spying on you as you change your face.
Maybe I'm all wrong. I'm not going to know about society in 2075, but some of you are going to be around. You guys really ought to be thinking about that stuff now. How is your life going to be affected by all of this surveillance? I promise that society is going to change, even if I can't predict exactly how.
How many of you actually WANT to live in a society that records your every single fart, from birth, until death? Do you want a few score stalkers, watching you bathe, keeping track of which body part you wash first, and which last, and counting every caress of each body part along the way?
Some freaky shit, isn't it?
Isn't it past time to tell Sillycone Valley to stuff their IOT up their anuses? Just give it some thought.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @07:43PM
just a few thoughts with no conclusion:
the "surveilance makers" are normal humans too after leaving the office but the surveilance has no office hours and no holidays.
some people want to be "out there". anything that might help them get more exposure will be welcomed.
surveilance is good. the more we (humans) can see makes us know more. the problem is if there are two classes with different access righs: one has unfethered access and the other doesnt. one class will censor some stuff whilst other data will be scrutinizedd down to the last pixel. if you "speak out" anti establishment too much, your pixels will be "blown up" alot, whilst others pixel will be "blured" to point that they are not recognizable anymore...
sadly we will just have to trust "in the basic good of humans" -or- we have to make all surveilance public domain, accesible by anyone anytime (including children). many will believe in "the basic gooodness of humans" and be thankfull for censoring all the bad. ofc, tbh, it is submitting yourself (and your offspring) to live in a bubble made of laundred fake news -aka- the real and sanctioned news?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Friday January 31 2020, @09:31PM (3 children)
That is very similar to what China is like now. With their "social credit" score to enforce conformity.
Another thing we are seeing, is how privacy is becoming a luxury. Once upon a time if you wondered outside of your village you were pretty much an anonymous traveler and most people paid no attention to you. You had quite a lot of privacy and anonymity.
Now the only way you can get a similar level of privacy is if you own large tracts of land which are cordoned off to the public (or own your own island, a la Epstein). If you are rich you can go to private clubs, where surveillance is not really done, "discretion" would be exercised in your actions, mannerisms, etc... that normal people could get roasted for.
I suspect the future will be as it is now, just worse. The alternative is we have some massive crunch (economic, war, population) that renders this organised and integrated structure fragile and it breaks down.
If I do end up matching the average human lifespan, I should still be alive around 2075, and I can't even imagine what it would be like (Although most of my family and people I grew up with would be dead by then, which is a bit of a melancholy topic for a Friday night).
I guess trying to tell people about life in the 90s and 00s would be a bit like people trying to tell me now what like was like in the 1930s. There would be one difference though, digital storage does not degrade. When I look at pictures of my ancestors from the 1930s and earlier, they are all black and white, worn and faded with age. Whereas photos I took 10 years ago with my DSLR still look great, and with improved processing they have actually improved in quality since I took them. The photos of me at the tail end of the year 1999 still look as good as they did then, and might be of interest for future "So, how did you celebrate a new millennium" questions.
Back in the time of my grandparents, movie cameras were a rare and expensive item, and film even more so. Now everyone has a phone and enough storage to keep track of their entire life. The cost of storage space is dropping faster than I am filling it, meaning that in most cases it isn't worth the time for me go through and delete stuff off my server, vs just buy more space.
Old VHS and audio cassettes wear out, ghost etc... with each play (and general environmental factors), but a lossless copy will always be the same quality. It used to be clear cut for me what music was "old", because when you play the tape it hisses more, and the sound has degraded. Now I can hear a song streamed from the internet and I can't tell you when it was made by the sound quality. It could have been made yesterday or 20 years ago. In many ways it is a merging of generational cultures. Before there was quite a clear delimitation between them, almost forced by the degradation of media (and technological replacement), now its somewhat more blurred.
My future kids could well dig through the archives of my file server and find all sorts of stuff, including photos/videos of ex's, silly things I did, parties I went to, stories I wrote, videos etc.... Not sure they would care, but it would be there, with no loss in quality over time. Compare that to my parents stuff, most of their tapes have long since degraded beyond use, their vinyl gone, as is most of their paper workbooks and even their photos of when they went (in their teens) on summer holidays,
In the future, I suspect humans will still be humans. Their problems will be the same, how to eat, sleep, shag and earn enough money/credits/whatever to achieve that, plus whatever intra-species competition we currently are enthrall to will continue to manifest in odd ways within the prisms of respective societies. The rich/powerful will use technology to enslave us even more in order to preserve their privileges, others will use it to try to usurp them, and we will continue to orbit the sun in this odd little space rock.
One big difference is there may well be a massive digital repository of data captured by previous generations who have passed away, all of which could be catalogued and searchable forever. I suspect (barring any major technological disruption) that future archeologists jobs may be a lot easier than what they have to piece together at present.
Hell, my old Slashdot posts still exist from almost 15 years ago, this post may well end up archived somewhere on the internet far longer than I will be around myself! Hello future peeps! :-)
(Score: 2) by Nesh on Friday January 31 2020, @11:39PM (2 children)
lol, most of the bits will have gone or will be stored in old non-readable formats.
You think digital lasts longer?
Nothing degrades faster than bits stored on out-dated medium.
Or are you pinning your hopes on cloud storage?
Good luck with that.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Saturday February 01 2020, @12:12AM
No shit. I've got stuff on Zip drive disks, and I still have a Zip drive somewhere in a box.
Problem is, there's no parallel port on this machine. So I guess I'll have to go buy a USB adapter or PCI-e card if I ever want to actually try reading them and find out if the data is there or bit rotted to oblivion.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday February 01 2020, @08:05PM
You could easily end up with files from the 20 GB hard drive era on your 10 TB hard drive if you were diligent enough in recopying them and backing them up.
There is M-DISC/Syylex/etc. [wikipedia.org] today that can store data longer than usual. Within the next couple of decades, we should see consumer implementations of "memory crystal" technology [wikipedia.org] that can store a large amount of data for an indefinite amount of time.
Medium/format concerns are overblown. You are going to be able to read JPEG, PDF, AVI, etc. files a century from now. Optical disc drives have stuck around far longer than expected by adding support for new discs of the same size. You will be able to interface with your superman memory crystal.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Saturday February 01 2020, @03:25AM (1 child)
I'm slightly more optimistic. As you say - people may become more blase about nudity, since everybody has been "publicly" nude at some point.
But I think "being weird" is going to be similar. *Everybody* is weird in some ways, except for the small minority so utterly boring that nobody wants to know them. One of the big lessons of growing up is to embrace your weirdness rather than trying to hide it, as is often done during the awkward "social integration" teen phase. Not that it's a lesson universally learned, and different people advertise their weirdness to different degrees, but it's a rare adult that tries to be uninteresting.
Though you've got a couple decades on me, with the 70s standing between us. I think that was a decade when aggressive non-conformity really started taking root in the American psyche. There was a time when the conformist suit and tie was simply assumed professional attire - I've never seen such a place or time.
On the other hand, celebrity may lose much of its appeal. Everybody will likely have a few "Facebook stalkers", but when that number hits the thousands or millions - suddenly the odds tilt strongly in favor of one or more of those stalkers being dangerous.
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday February 01 2020, @07:44AM
I did once think the same as you do - that people would just come to accept each other's idiosyncrasies as society became more "transparent", in the case or universal symmetric surveillance at least. I'm not quite so sure of that now, with the politician polarisation on social media and the amount of group-think and outing/shaming of non-conformists that seems to be going on within the different factions (some worse than others). Maybe whoever wins the culture wars will define the new conformity (assuming we avoid other potential global disasters such as nuclear war and global warming)? Of course the surveillance we have is not at all symmetric so that could be a source of the problem, but you have to get pretty deep into conspiracy theory territory to come up with an explanation as to how that works, as least as far as I can tell.