France wants to make Olympics-style surveillance permanent
therealnews.com
This summer’s Paris Olympics saw an experiment in AI-assisted algorithmic video surveillance. Now French officials say they want to make it permanent, in what experts call a worrying use of invasive and even racially discriminatory technology.
  • rockSlayer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    74·
    12 days ago

    Of course they fucking do. Just like how the police were supercharged in LA during the Olympics and they’re still one of the most militarized units in the country today. Countries use the Olympics as an excuse to slip in shit that would never fly otherwise.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    192·
    12 days ago

    If your country isn’t already surveilling you, there are a dozen data companies, many of them who you don’t even know you are interacting with via a third party, willing to sell them and anyone else willing to pay every bit of information they can glean from you.

    And it’s amazing what they can glean from you based on nothing but your internet habits.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
        71·
        12 days ago

        Limit them maybe, but I think we’re kind of screwed. I’ve read articles about algorithms that can get a ridiculous amount of information about you based on how others interact with you.

        • j4k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          12 days ago

          Oh, yeah. That is why I said limit. Even GitHub has ridiculous tracker junk now. I have most of that blocked. It really sucks that people are so complacent to the onset of feudalism. Chalk it up to ignorance of history. Giving up citizenship in a democracy always has terrible consequences throughout history. People now seem to act like it is crazy to point this out, but are blind about the big picture consequences. Things may seem bad now, but this path will make them massively worse.

        • nogooduser@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          11 days ago

          It shocked me decades ago when I joined Facebook and they suggested friends that I thought that I had zero connection to on the internet.

          e.g. my next door neighbour even though I didn’t put my address in and only knew them for a quick chat over the fence.

          Now they’ll have so much info about people who’ve never dealt with them due to them being able to slurp up everyone’s contacts with WhatsApp (I have no idea how they can do that in a GDPR compliant way).

  • TheObviousSolution@lemm.eeEnglish
    42·
    11 days ago

    France is getting UK style surveillance without none of the benefits and rights allowed in public spaces for brits.

    That’s the thing about GDPR in the EU, in terms of surveillance, it’s taking the right away from citizens for their own personal surveillance to at least be able to bring to the police to identify culprits, but has no qualms about allowing the greater risk that the GDPR was supposed to prevent, misuse and widescale of personal data. First it was when they stepped back the web regulations so websites can push personalized tracking onto users in the guise of forced personalized ads or absurd payment methods plans per site, and now they continue to show they don’t mind mass surveillance.

    I get the impression that the GDPR in the EU is slowly being corrupted to prevent us from being able perform surveillance so that authorities minimize the risk of getting recorded doing something that they shouldn’t or calling out abusive practices while increasingly allowing our personal data to be abused. Rather than have a surveillance state that puts our personal data at risk next time they get hacked, it is also possible to allow the means and the regulations for us to record criminal behavior and present it to the authorities when needed, in a decentralized, non-cloud, non-shared way that would be much more secure than this.

    • koper@feddit.nlEnglish
      31·
      11 days ago

      So you’re saying that the GDPR makes it illegal for individuals to use surveillance for self defense. That’s not true. Recital 50 specifically allows people to share data with law enforcement. And if you’re referring to putting up cameras, that’s actually very ineffective at reducing crime while it does expand mass surveillance.

      • TheObviousSolution@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        10 days ago

        Putting up cameras does shit with crime when it’s managed by one central agency without crowdsourcing the effort, yes. It actually takes a lot of effort to go through false positives and all the footage, the sort of effort only the people who’ve been personally affected put into it, and even if you identify the portion where the culprit appears, that alone is not usually enough to identify them. It is still effective at identifying that a crime took place and to begin to define a profile of the culprit, and there are plenty of examples that prove how effective it from recordings on YouTube in countries where it is allowed. If it wasn’t, retail stores wouldn’t be putting them up.

        You are also miscomprehending the GDPR and recital 50, which refers to things like phone recordings you take, not security cam, which you aren’t allowed to put and share in social networks under many circumstances but which is generally not enforced because random passerbys don’t normally sue for breach of it, although you are allowed to retain and share with law enforcement. GDPR is even criticized for its SLAPP potential on journalists.

        Your take about GDPR allowing you to put up cameras is really wrong, and just about any simple search about putting up cameras and the GDPR will disprove it. If anyone really believes it, they will risk fines if neighbors or police want to be assholes (assuming you aren’t trying to be one yourself). It’s a shame you decided to weigh in in such an issue in a way that disinformed readers to such an extent.