[nvesp]

Kind of weird all of those people weren't all up in arms about it before the whole ice thing, why would you be mad that they're tracking somebody else but not mad that they have been slurping up data about your movements and habits this whole time, then monetizing said data by selling it to industries like insurance companies etc.

[soupfordummies]

all of these people didnt even know these cameras existed until recently. even this weekend, was talking to a few friends and they had never heard of them. I think they wanted to just sort of sneak them in under the radar and all the current ICE stuff has created more scrutiny and public knowledge about surveillance in general.

[rambojohnson]

how is it weird for you exactly? we didn't have masked gestapo thugs before.

[phil21]

It's weird due to the complete lack of second order thinking the majority of people seem to have.

You can scream up and down about how building such things is a horrible idea because it can one day be used for evil, and folks will either yawn or call you paranoid or worse.

Then the thing actually gets (very lightly) abused/used for something folks don't like and omg it's an emergency no one could have ever predicted! And oh look - it's often times far too late to do a damn thing about it other than surface level 'fixes' that are nothing of the sort.

It gets very frustrating living in such a society, but it might simply be the way humans are wired. If it's not in your face and actively a major problem to you in the moment, it's simply not a concern.

[rambojohnson]

I mean you're not wrong, but let's not shy away from the usual pattern we see on here where the YC-brain sees a camera, a cloud dashboard, and a monthly SaaS fee and immediately calls it "the future," then acts blindsided when people notice they funded a suburban panopticon. Every time it is the same script, and then six months later everybody is pretending nobody could have foreseen the obvious abuse case.

I was always anti-IoT for this exact reason.

[dogleash]

It's weird because one of the main selling points for the principled position against surveillance is your inability to control which use-cases are allowed.

The way to avoid masked gestapo thugs is to ensure that not even your preferred leaders are able to create them.

[abustamam]

1. Most people weren't aware before the whole ICE thing. I think I only started seeing flock trend on HN a few weeks before the ICE incidents, and it only stood out to me because I had a friend who worked for a company called Flock Freight that has nothing to do with the surveillance state.

2. What you mentioned sucks. But it's hard to get the public to care about things that don't directly affect them and their day to day lives. My wife somehow browses the internet without an ad blocker even though I've told her that they track you and are basically malware, but knowing that doesn't change her browsing habits or make her even want to use an ad blocker, even if the ads are hostile to her experience.

3. Once the ICE thing came to light, suddenly people were like, wait, they can use this information to deport us or kill us? That's not OK.

[JohnMakin]

Huh? even if you knew and understood the scope of it before (I’d say a vast majority did not and thought they were just red light cameras), it is not very hard to understand that when you see the people in masks without badges snatching your neighbors haphazardly and with specious reasons that you might make a chunk of that majority look at the cameras more skeptically and maybe, just maybe wonder if that technology could be turned against you too.

Until recently very few people could articulate the real risk this tech posed, now you can literally see it play out (depending where you live)

[0xbadcafebee]

> Kind of weird all of those people weren't all up in arms about it before the whole ice thing

They weren't being used to build concentration camps before.

[BLKNSLVR]

Not weird for potentially two reasons:

1. They didn't know about it. It's only recently that there have been popular youtube videos on the topic. Critical mass can take time.

2. Before "the whole ice thing" there wasn't a team of masked brownshirts terrorising communities and using all available technology they could access in order to undertake said terrorising. That these cameras are part of that available technology, the timing ain't weird at all. In fact, it was pretty predictable.

But, yes, should have been up in arms beforehand, but likely the knowledge and visceral demonstration of the effects were not known. Visceral demonstration does pretty heavy lifting.

[wonnage]

You should be glad they came around instead of lamenting why it didn’t happen earlier

[prh8]

I don't think OP is glad people came around on it