Reminder if you work for any of these companies (not unlikely on this site) you are actively enabling this. If your first reaction is doubt, deflection, rationalization or discomfort, there are ways out.
Or perhaps when Amazon facilities security encounters someone doing destructive or harmful things, then sharing that information with other companies in the city is a perfectly reasonable measure?
This is functionally no different than sharing your encounters with disruptive people on NextDoor.
Depends on what they consider "destructive", and it's not like there isn't already a way for contacting law enforcement when the circumstances warrant it.
The Nextdoor analogy is even more apt because it's kind of notorious for being used by people to complain about all sorts of ridiculous things that don't deserve attention
Yes, because Amazon, etc. are not the ones using Nextdoor. My point is that if you think this is just "Nextdoor but for Seattle companies", consider what you think the equivalent of a frivolous and out-of-touch comment like "oh no there's a person who isn't the same race as me walking down my street" is for a billion dollar company and what type of effects setting up a place for them to funnel things like that to law enforcement outside of the normal public channels might have on society.
I'm saying that the alternative is "An Amazon security personnel or store keeper reports a crime via the normal public channels and there's the usual paper trail for it". Your premise that this is only ever used for anything benign is what I'm disagreeing with here; obviously if you assume it, then nothing sketchy is going on, but at that point the argument is circular.
> Or perhaps when Amazon facilities security encounters someone doing destructive or harmful things, then sharing that information with other companies in the city is a perfectly reasonable measure?
If only there were a way to address people doing destructive or harmful things.
We could even make it reachable using a telephone, with a very convenient to dial, short, easily remembered number sequence.
I don't know about you, but in my area, NextDoor is mostly "I saw non-white errrrr I mean, uh, 'someone who doesn't look like they belong here' person in my neighborhood" and general witch-hunting any time it's mentioned someone gets arrested for
Also, we have concepts like "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" for a reason. Corporatizing law enforcement is not a good thing.
If Amazon wants to work with the PD they can show up to a community relations meeting like everyone else?
Innocent until proven guilty only applies to the government. Again, say you run a store in the city. You encounter someone who smashes some merchandise. The police don't make an arrest because the person insists it was accidental, but you're confident it was intentional. Is it wrong to share this experience with other shopkeepers?
The irony is that curbing this "private intelligence network" would require infringing on the free speech of private people.
> say you run a store in the city. You encounter someone who smashes some merchandise. The police don't make an arrest because the person insists it was accidental, but you're confident it was intentional. Is it wrong to share this experience with other shopkeepers?
When the "shopkeepers" are billion dollar corporations, and several levels of law enforcement (including national ones like immigration officials) are also on the network, I think it makes sense for the level of scrutiny to be a bit higher than your hypothetical
I'd be interested in details about how visible reports from a given organization are to the others on the platform. People seem to be making comparisons to Nextdoor, but one of the fundamental parts of it is the public feed. If this is essentially a special way to DM law enforcement, it's not really comparable.
Are those things you are personally struggling with (if you are considering quitting open source contribitions wholesale: don't let this make you) or is this a showcase of rationalization?
> If you make open source used by any of this companies for this network, would you also characterize it as actively enabling this?
That's a pretty strange conflation. It's pretty commonly discussed exactly how rare it is for people to make open source to get compensated by companies that use their projects. I find it hard to imagine that you genuinely think that there isn't an obvious distinction that most observers would draw between that and direct employment.
This is functionally no different than sharing your encounters with disruptive people on NextDoor.