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One of the best pieces of self-hosted software ever to exist.
Edit: This is Immich! for the folks who don't know.
I mostly agree with you, so we're probably not really doing much in this discussion. I'm trying not to be pedantic, but as my name will tell you, I find that to be a challenge lol.
I agree wrt how to regulate.
If disallow the govt from broad indiscriminate surveillance and disallow the govt from circumventing that rule by subcontracting it to private entities, then these companies and products that perform the mass surveillance would naturally become unprofitable and collapse. I would argue that such a product would be by its nature political, because it's only practical use case was the furtherance of a political goal.
Cameras aren't political, but the use of cameras for mass govt-level surveillance is political. So a system that does so (like the ones sold to the govt) is a political software product.
To me where it gets tricky is when private entities grow to government-sized proportions, and begin to use these same tools for similar purposes. I think that is also a problem, but it becomes harder to frame it.
Again, I disagree. Surveillance has a lot of use cases outside of government, and a huge use case is keeping the government in check. Palantir could have sold its services to non-profits like the ACLU as a check on local, state, and law enforcement agencies. They could have sold it to HOAs and neighborhood watch associations as an early warning system for repeat offenders.
The government skirting the 4th amendment (and a few others) doesn't automatically make its sub-contractor's products "authoritarian," it makes its use of those products authoritarian.
I disagree with that conclusion. The use by the government is authoritarian, but that doesn't make the product authoritarian.
A private entity can do authoritarian things, like spying on its employees or customers. Authoritarianism isn't strictly tied to governments, but anything that acts like a government. Here's the first definition I found:
Software can't really favor obedience to authority, it can't really deny you your freedoms, it's just software. Likewise for a camera system. The only way those things can be authoritarian is if paired with some form of enforcement arm, like corporate security or law enforcement. So that combined system is authoritarian, the cameras or software on their own cannot be authoritarian.
That's my point.
In theory, yes. In practice no.
ALCU could not roll a system like that out; never mind securing the resources needed to deploy this meaningfully; using it would go against their ethos, because using it would make them authoritarian, or adjacent.
Similarly, even if HOAs could deploy a system like that, that'd make them authoritarian.
Mass surveillance products like these don't have a lot of non-authoritarian uses. Even if you could find such a use (of which I'm skeptical), it'd almost certainly need to be subsidized by an authoritarian customer. We're not talking about security cameras around you personal property, here.