zlacker

>>amarch+(OP)
It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state.

Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations that do that anyway just illegally(Obama apologized when they were caught).

I don't say that Europeans are any better, just different approaches to achieve the same thing. The Euros just appear to be more open and more direct with it.

The tech is there, the desire to have knowledge on what is going on is there and the desire to act on these to do good/bad is there and always has been like that. Now that it's much easier and feasible, my European instinct say that let's have this thing but have it openly and governed by clear rules.

The American instincts appear to say that let's not have it but have it with extra steps within a business model where it can be commercialized and the government can then can have it clandestinely to do the dirty work.

IMHO it is also the reason why extremist governments in US can do decade worth of work of shady things in few months and get away with it when in Europe that stuff actually takes decades and consumes the whole career of a politician to change a country in any way.

Also, the Brits are usually in between of those two extremes.

>>mrtksn+Su
This may make sense to you if you live in a big city, but luckily a lot of the US is uninhabited, especially in the western US. There’s many places you can drive hundreds of miles and not see anyone or be monitored like you would be in a large city. That’s not to say there’s no monitoring at all, but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah, is neither practical nor desired by the people that live there

>>jamesl+M92
Are you unaware of Flock pushing their cameras to all the small town sheriffs? It's definitely not just in New York City.

I live in an incorporated area whose population is less than 10,000. The police have mounted Flock license plate cameras pointing both directions at every road leading out. Every shopping center is adding them too.

Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.

>>ethers+Yi2
There’s Flock, there’s police drones, there’s Ring cameras everywhere, etc. yes I’m aware

My point wasn’t to say there’s no monitoring in the US. It’s that there’s extreme variance in population densities which therefore means less opportunity and necessity for the same uniform surveillance in many places compared to countries with more even population densities. Whether the power of the federal government keeps expanding and eroding the federalist design the US was founded on to push uniform surveillance policies is another matter

> Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.

OP was comparing the US to Europe and the UK, which have much more even population densities than the US. Finding sparsely populated areas there is a much higher bar than in the US

>>jamesl+In2
Yeah, all the people who stand to lose from oppressive surveillance can just gtfo into the desert, that will solve their problems and definitely isn’t what the surveyors wanted then to do in the first place. Yeah, like, if you do not like being surveilled in the society, have you considered not participating in it? This marginally better than being exiled forcefully.