[strogonoff]

Individual businesses aren’t stalking anyone if their CCTVs are watching out for themselves. But as soon as there is a centralized company offering the service and gobbling all the data, and that company acts like Google does with regards to web tracking, then it’d be in some sense no better than stalking (or even worse, stalking at scale).

If it only obtains the data to provide you the service of knowing who comes in or out, and deletes the data as soon as it’s not needed anymore, there would be no question; but that’s not where profit is in a double-sided market.

[themacguffinman]

Like ADT? Like a lot of security companies that offer monitoring solutions on behalf of clients, especially smaller businesses and individual homeowners?

"gobbling all the data" is vaguely scary while being totally meaningless. GTM data is fully managed by the client, Google contractually does not randomly spy on it. Many businesses would argue that they do delete user data after they don't need it anymore, but analytics is useful and therefore necessary for a fairly long time (many platforms have natural retention limits, usually a few years). Google themselves deletes user data on their first party products after 18 months by default (referring to things like Web & App activity and Location history) and users can set it as low as 3 months, approximately the same amount of time as security footage.

Edited to correct a number and remove some snark

[Teever]

How can you feign obliviousness so much that you can't see the difference between what ADT was doing in 1995 and what Google is doing in 2022?

[themacguffinman]

I'm disappointed that you chose to respond in bad faith without any argument at all, I guess I shouldn't waste my time.

[Teever]

> You think installing cameras on your own property is stalking?

The moment that someone responded in bad faith was right here.

You know full well that we're talking about the companies that get the data from these devices and what they do with it, not the rubes that these companies trick into buying their stalking products.

You also know full well that ADT is in no way comparable to Google in this discussion given the order of magnitude difference in revenue between the two companies and the extensive integration between the intelligence community and Google.

[strogonoff]

Key difference is one’s revenue stream (do you profit by selling security system or through data accumulated from your customers).

> Google themselves deletes user data on their first party products after 18 months by default (referring to things like Web & App activity and Location history) and users can set it as low as 3 months, approximately the same amount of time as security footage.

Security footage is not the problem, after all you may want to look back a few days to see who was around at the time something went missing. The problem would be processing footage into data on where each individual goes, storing that and finding various ways to profit off of it. This is not necessary for the core value proposition, and in my opinion is ethically questionable.

Sure, if they don’t store it for long, and especially if they comply with GDPR, that would help. However, I’m not deeply familiar with this, but I suspect they can easily claim that they don’t store data on you and don’t need to delete it simply by storing it in a way not obviously connected to your identity—even if this connection is very easy to make at any point.