Although it is interesting how inconsistently this principle of is applied to other areas. For example, if you come to HN and advocate against encryption or AI because they can amplify the dangers of bad actors, you are going to be met by fierce opposition. So why do these hypothetical bad actors only become valid concerns in certain conversations?
When it comes to encryption, it helps save actual lives. If you mandate getting rid of encryption, bad actors will still break the law and use encryption to carry on business as normal. Regular citizens lose, oppressive governments & criminals win.
>When it comes to encryption, it helps save actual lives.
So does the license plate data. It is used to find and bring justice to criminals. Does that not make us all safer?
> If you mandate getting rid of encryption, bad actors will still break the law and use encryption to carry on business as normal.
Laws are pointless because the criminals will just break them is a silly argument that can be used against most laws. Why should we have any laws about gun control, money laundering, or drugs if the criminals will just do whatever they want anyway.
And the flip side of this argument should also be considered. Do we think the Nazis would have given up on their genocide if they didn't find this data?
> Does that not make us all safer?
Is there evidence in that direction?
Thank you, this is a perfect example of the type of inconsistencies I’m talking about when discussing these issues. The prior comment says encryption saves lives and that is accepted without question, but the idea that empowering law enforcement saves lives is met with a request for evidence. Why did you not reply to both claims the same way?
And if you truly believe that finding and arresting criminals does not make us safer, that is an indictment of our entire justice system. It would also make license plate cameras a rather silly place to draw the line.
I think it's because you don't have to look too hard to find examples of authoritarian regimes leveraging information technologies for surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. Or how US government agencies use loopholes to get around the 4th amendment and buy sensitive civilian data from private data brokers. Or how data breaches are becoming larger and more frequent each year.
Encryption seems highly likely to have saved many people from, say, losing their life savings by having their banking credentials hijacked.
I am less certain about license plate cameras. Hence, the ask. I will leave the questioning of encryption up to someone who actually questions its utility.
Can you genuinely not think of situations in which law enforcement being able to pin a specific vehicle to a time and place might help them catch dangerous criminals or be used as evidence in a trial to help get them convicted?
In any significant capacity? No. Because we'd see it in crime stats; the widespread successful use of license plate scanners should show up in a chart. The world before and the world after their introduction appears very similar from a crime rate standpoint; it stands to reason getting rid of them would be similarly low-impact.
I really don't think that'd be the same if we got rid of encryption tomorrow.
>In any significant capacity?
Notice the subtle shifting of the goalposts. Who said anything about "significant capacity"? The original argument was "it helps save actual lives". Now we need to see "widespread successful use" in the "crime stats"? How would that even be possible? These systems can't be implemented in a vacuum and crime stats are constantly fluctuating for countless reasons, so how could the specific cause ever be isolated? Yet crime has generally been on a downward trend for decades, can we be sure these type of systems aren't responsible for some piece of that?
>I really don't think that'd be the same if we got rid of encryption tomorrow.
Once again, why aren't you asking "Is there evidence in that direction?" You are demanding evidence for one and the other is just a hypothetical based of what you "think" might happen. But what is that thought based on? Do crime stats show that identity theft has gone done since the popularization of online banking
You are not treating these issues with the same rigor. Can't you recognize that?
Something that seems inherently different between GP's comment and encryption is that encryption is an algorithm / tool, not a dataset. Not creating literal tools because they might have bad use cases is clearly a bad idea (e.g., fire, knives, hammers, etc.).
I'd say that one thing inherently different about datasets is that they are continually used badly, including by well-meaning actors. Data is frequently misinterpreted, with good intent, to draw bad conclusions.
You might hit your thumb with a hammer. That hurts! People would be a lot more careful if misinterpreting data had such clear, immediate effects on them.
Also, there are many different groups with different passionate opinions in any community as large as this one.
What is the distinction you are making between a "dataset" and a "tool"?
To use this specific example of the license plate dataset, this is a tool used to find and bring justice to criminals. How is it any different from any other tool at the disposal of law enforcement? Isn't this system just a scaled up version of a cop with a camera?
This might be too pedantic, but a dataset is not a tool in and of itself. It's something that can be processed by a tool. And it's not simple for anyone to reproduce without significant access, either to the original observational opportunities or to the dataset itself. Information about individuals is often in datasets and those people too seldom have a say in the security practices used to safeguard it.
Tools (or pick another word that illustrates this distinction) like encryption, hammers, etc. do not contain our information. They are fairly straightforward to reproduce. And therefore nearly impossible to contain. Bad actors will have encryption and hammers, whether we want them to or not. The only question is whether good actors will also have them, or if they will be restricted by laws. This, for example, can make it easier for datasets to fall into the wrong hands, because they are less likely to be encrypted.
It seems very strange to define these terms based off the difficulty in reproducing them.
Let's look at the sibling comment's example of a nuclear bomb. That's "not simple for anyone to reproduce without significant access" and as citizens we don't "have a say in the security practices used to safeguard it." And international laws have done a relatively good job keeping them out of the hands of bad actors. Does that make them a dataset?
Contrast that with data that is easy to reproduce, like say the name of the 45 different Presidents of the US. That is obviously a dataset. Yet there is no private information involved, it is all public data. Many people can even produce that list entirely from memory. But having that list on a piece of paper in front of me could still be a helpful tool if I was taking a US history test.
Isn't an atomic bomb just a scaled up version of a firecracker?
Nobody denies that collection of datasets can have upsides. But the downsides are often not seen/evaluated accurately. And negative effects don't necessarily scale with the same power as positive effects.
>Isn't an atomic bomb just a scaled up version of a firecracker?
Yes and no. I think radiation is a big differentiator, but absent that, I don't think it is better morally or ethically to level a city with conventual bombs than it would be to do it with a nuclear bomb.
>Nobody denies that collection of datasets can have upsides. But the downsides are often not seen/evaluated accurately. And negative effects don't necessarily scale with the same power as positive effects.
I'm not disagreeing with this. I'm asking why this same logic is not applied elsewhere.
The point with the firecracker/bomb is this: Not just because it's the same type of tool means that it has the same cost/benefit analysis. The dangers of, say, firecrackers in the had of the general public, scale dramatically faster than the benefit, going from kid-safe firework to bunker busters. The same goes for "a cop with a camera" to "tag readers at every corner".
I think with encryption, the underestimate is on the other side. Everyone understand that bad guys using encryption is bad. But people do not see the upsides of encryption for the good guys, pretty much for the same reason as they do not see the downsides of data collection: I have nothing to hide. [or the common related variant: Advertisement doesn't affect me]
> I think with encryption, the underestimate is on the other side. Everyone understand that bad guys using encryption is bad. But people do not see the upsides of encryption for the good guys
And why are you confident that this doesn’t exist for the license plate dataset? You’re confidentially making two opposing arguments with no justification beyond it getting you to your desired conclusion on that specific issue.
That what doesn't exist for the license plate dataset? I am sure there are good reasons for having that dataset. For most data collection, there are good reasons.
My argument is that just because we decided that "police with camera" is a worthy trade-off, you cannot use this as an argument for "license plate scanning is a worthy trade-off". It could be that it is, but it doesn't follow from "it's a scaled up version of police with camera".
I think you are going too deep down individual tangents here. My “cop with a camera” comment was challenging the idea that datasets aren’t tools.
If the issue is purely about amplifying the danger of bad actors and therefore forcing us to reevaluate the tradeoffs, encryption and AI do that too.
>advocate against encryption
This is a good point. If people are willing to push back against giving law enforcement everybody’s data why would they also oppose giving law enforcement everybody’s data? It is inconsistent because if you think about it “giving law enforcement everybody’s data” and “not giving law enforcement everybody’s data” are basically the same th
Encryption is this same exact topic, and the prevailing technical viewpoint is the direct application of the principle of minimizing collected datasets.