Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kragen 884 days ago
in the 20th century governments killed about a quarter billion of their subjects (see https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE5.HTM) plus another couple hundred million foreigners (see https://www.clingendael.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/2006080...) which brings the total to about five million per year

car accidents kill less than that, though by a factor of less than four, about 1.3 million per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...)

so probably you should re-evaluate your risk assessment: even if you're only concerned with pieces of metal traversing people's bodies, rather than people being maimed, enslaved, raped, and kept in poverty, ignorance, and disease, you should weight the denial of fundamental human rights as a much larger threat than unintentional automotive injury

1 comments

Maybe do not drive a car with internal cameras if you are living in an autocratic hellhole? Yes, things can change in liberal democracies as well, but a car is easily sold.
autocratic hellholes arise where autocracy is more stable than democracy, for example when the police have enough dirt on activists to keep them from organizing opposition and can persuade themselves that such a crackdown is justified

you can sell the car, but you may find yourself walking to work, and you can't un-record the videos the car already recorded of you; and, if your neighbors still have surveillance cameras the police have access to, you may not have achieved any actual privacy

privacy, in the civil liberties sense, is a collective good, not an individual good

It is an unrealistic expectation that a sufficient number of people boycott modern cars (with internal cameras) to change the vendors' offerings. Besides that, there will not even be a sufficient number of old cars for everyone (everywhere).

Your general point is quite correct, though, and I am avoiding surveillance more than most people.

yes, i do think preserving democracy and civil liberties is an unrealistic expectation, but i think that we can make efforts in that direction which are productive even if they ultimately fall short of what we would want