A lot of drivers have road cameras in their vehicles. If you crash into them, they will provide that as evidence when filing a police report. No one claimed that there would be a direct link from an autonomous car to police HQ, but that if you decided to break the law, the owner of that vehicle would do everything in its power to pursue you to the fullest extent of the law.
That's not materially different than where we are now, your exaggerations aside.
Thats not what I presumed the commenters to be saying: "driverless cars will have sensors and cameras that wil report anything back to the police"
So, lets assume we turn on an amber-alert and activate all driverless car cameras and sensors to find license plate X...
Sure that sounds great - but "just leave all driverless car sensors up all the time and track everything everywhere is what I hear in that comment.
And like I said, major tech companies are actually tracking every vehicle that drives by them, and reporting it to the police already.
I am just saying that the implications of driverless cars, while seeming like "sexy tech" have not been fully thought out - or if they have, that they havent been shared as being resolved issues.
I can tell you that I am in the process of handling about a petabyte of police body-cam video and I can see how thesse things can be abused
>driverless cars will have sensors and cameras that wil report anything back to the police
Well, driverless cars do have extensive sensor suites, and if you are a hit and run driver and I had a photo of your license plate, I would certainly use that to my advantage. I think you're reading the worst possible thing into what people are saying, which is your prerogative, but probably not constructive.
>And like I said, major tech companies are actually tracking every vehicle that drives by them, and reporting it to the police already.
Well yeah, that's what palantir does: they contract with governments and police departments to improve surveillance infrastructure. But assuming that because Palantir does that, everyone else will too is as silly as assuming that Amazon is going to come out with a Facebook clone. It's not in their business models.
Every ATM and many shop keepers, hospitals, hotels, etc., all have cameras. They may not automatically be turned over to police, but if something happens, the police will often just go and see if there are any surveillance cameras and ask their owners to give them the recordings. Most of the time, they will be happy to do so, since they generally don't like crime happening outside their places of business.
So if you did a hit and run on me while on the road, and even if I didn't have a dash camera (there are drivers who do, and who keep them always recording because they want to be protected from the sort of anti-social behaviour you seem to be discussing), if I have a location and time/stamp, the police could easily try to see if there were any third-party surveillance cameras either at the scene of the crime, or in the various streets down which you might have fled.
And of course in London and the UK in general, people have gotten quite used to surveillance cameras everywhere, which are being recorded by the police, and sometimes there are being monitered in real time by employees of the police department, and in some cases they can even speak to you via a microphone and a speaker near the camera, "Hey, I saw you litter in the park! Please it pick it up and dispose of it properly and we'll say no more about it." The UK citizens are OK with this, and haven't been complaining about it being a police state.
Quite frankly, I'd much rather if the police always had body-cam videos running all time time, so we (a) get hard data on how many police actually do commit cases of misconduct, and (b) actually eject those that do out of the police force.
OK, so lets forgeet the hit-and-run scenario for a moment.
How fucking shitty are ATM cameras or shop cams? (Ive designed hospital systems, btw - and they have less cameras than you think)
I can tell you that I have never seen a conviction of any ATM robber/murderer in my life -- thats not to say that ATM cameras havent worked, its just that its not widely publicized.
but the UK is not the US (anymore) -- and while your UK surveillance network is massive by comparison, I am advocating against self driving cars becoming the next level of surveillance.
to your last point though, police body cam vid is an interesting thing;
They typically produce about 16GB a day - which then needs to get slurped off the device - stored locally, then transfered to [end-location] - now if we talk about CJIS Compliance - this basically means govcloud and it needs to be stored indefinitely (or per the municipalities policy, which usually is about 5 years+++)
but going through that data is the hard part... and the problem scales pretty quickly.
Just do a wiki on "how many police by city in the us"
So look at these numbers:
```New York, New York 42.3 36,228 60.0 51,399
Chicago, Illinois 43.9 11,954 48.2 13,135
Los Angeles, California 24.6 9,850 31.7 12,692
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 40.2 6,313 50.9 7,995
Houston, Texas 22.2 5,182 28.4 6,632
Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia 55.1 3,753 63.9 4,352
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, Nevada 20.9 3,326 30.5 4,855
Dallas, Texas 24.8 3,279 29.0 3,829```
So imagine, 16GB x 36,228 X 5-years of data.... and you want me to search back and find SELECT* from BCD WHERE OFFICER==X AND DATE==Y etc....
ALSO! Guess what - we know how many police in LV were on cams - So at 16GB a DAY PER officer we have 3,326 body cams from AXON collecting ~16GB a day - so from the vegas shooting there is alone we have 5.3TB of bodycam data to potentially be processed... reduce by 30% for off duties at the time, then reduce by another 30% to assume that they all didnt respond, then reduce by another 10% for those that werent wearing them... etc etc... so basically we should have around 1TB from that day alone in body cam footage...
im saying that I am PD and I want to run a random search for X lic plate and I access the autonomous nodes driving all the freeways for lic X and I see through cams and sensors that 'ggggtez' hasnt yet put his new sticker on his car - via the auto car nodes... and so I track him with these sensors and pull him over to give him a tiket. the shit was paid, his sticker was in the mail, but he didnt get/apply it yet - but I cot him time and money, because, fuck you, ggggtz, and thats why.
and what i am saying is that silicon vally is building that reality, and fuck you silicon valley, because I helped al along these nearly 3 decades and I do not want this reality.
its pretty gosh darn simple. cyber-dystopia was what we were supposed to be fighting.
I already got FUCKING SUED for revealing too much on HN in the past - this shit is not a joke people.
Nobody has an expectation of privacy while driving. There is decades of jurisprudence establishing quite the opposite. That's why there is a giant mandatory number plate on your car, why there is implied consent for search as a condition of your driving license, etc.
Why would it autoreport everything? Google has no incentive to do that.
How about instead, if just reports crimes that happen to its own vehicle? In the same way that a HUMAN would report crimes that happen to its own vehicle.
TL;DR: I don't think the tech is going to stop; we are going to have ubiquitous surveillance whether we like it or not; so we have to have laws and enforcement that we can live with (as opposed to work around, as so much of our lives today function.)
I wrote up my view, and I'd be interested to know what you think:
(Here's an anecdote: One of my favorite local cafes has a little tub of brown sugar for the coffee. They used to cover it with a piece of plastic wrap. This didn't work well at all, and there were flies. One day I came in and they had gotten a proper lid for it. I mentioned that to the owner and he started complaining about the Health Department getting on his case and making him do it. All I could think was, "God bless them. It's a shame we need them, but there it is." This guy wasn't a bad person, he just didn't give a shit about preventing disease vectors. That's why we have to have Health Departments, collect taxes and pay people to go around wiping the other fellow's ass for him. Law is a hell of a thing. As the tools we have available become god-like, we're going to have to learn how to live with it in a way that's, uh, livable.)
