"We announced changes that required auditing, that required using our audit assistance tool, which detects abnormal behavior, and we’re calling on state regulators to focus less on banning this type of technology and more [on] holding our law enforcement community accountable.”

This is absolutely passing the buck. “The collection of your data isn’t wrong, it’s just the myriad ways it can be abused. We want to play whack-a-mole for every problem; as unelected corporate policy that totally isn’t purely profit driven.”

Not-a-lawyer, but I’m quite sure I haven’t signed any TOS allowing Flock to capture or retain my data for any amount of time. Just by driving through a city where some other idiot signed away my rights probably shouldn’t hold up in court.

Legislation should be prioritizing punishing misuse of PII, expanding what PII means in our modern world, and enforcing information sharing barriers instead of eroding them.

If you can tell exactly where I was yesterday at 2:35pm because my car’s internal spyware pinged, my cellphone pinged, I drove past a few ALPR cameras and my credit card was used at a vendor, all without a warrant; then the related data is PII and needs to be protected in a way it isn’t currently.

Corporations should not have data-sharing agreements with governments and should not be allowed to sell their user data to third parties at all.

The only caveat I have here is that he’s a puppet. The likelihood that there are intelligences behind him is too great. Trump doesn’t have a strategy, but others do.

Flatter him a few times and ask him to say something stupid and it’ll get said. He is the distraction, but doesn’t know it.

My holdout for hope is that this much of a stooge can only come around every few years. There can’t be another idiot waiting in the wings, right? Right?

I don’t think those in his circle will dance on the same strings that trump will, and will break the illusion if asked to, but I’m just an optimist.

I really think this is it. Calling for a cab was an effort. pushing a button in an app that says, “I need a cab here” was the secret sauce Uber provided. That’s old news now. They also had a benefit of pricing while they had VC, but that’s evaporating.

For the record, I don’t uber or equivalent. I either am or find a DD or “rideshare” with friends and family.

I haven’t used them, but there are taxi apps that seem to hook into the less-predatory transport businesses. Pricing may not be as competitive, but that comes with the drivers earning a stable wage.

Same. And I’m being serious here while it could sound sarcastic:

I feel good knowing I saved the cart return guy 15 seconds. His day will not be improved because he still needs to move all the carts; and when that task ends there will be another. I understand this, but I still feel like I made the place better than I found it. Where I am, it’s hot-AF outside right now, so I hope that I’m making the next indoor task sooner and my time is appreciated – but my time is literally like <1 minute, so I know it’s not a lot of anti-entropy.

My math is that, with billions of people on the planet, if even part of us tried to save someone 15 seconds every few days, we could build so much faith in humanity.

Right. The root cause here is that companies are allowed to collect stupid amounts of information about private citizens - and then sell that information to a government or abuse it for their own purposes under the cover of an EULA of ‘we will collect [various information] for business purposes’. If I can’t apply for a job without agreeing to 3 EULAs that sign away my personal information, then I’m not agreeing to them; I’m being held hostage by them.

If flock was not allowed to store PII data (and PII was extended to cover location history, nearby devices, and a few other things), then their business model would evaporate.

Most people are familiar with the “you’ll feel that tomorrow when you poop”, but I think relatively few have experienced the spicy pee the next day.

Something about Carolina Reaper does that to me. I wonder if there’s some compound that gets processed differently in that pepper, or if it’s just the overall concentration of capsaicin.

Just adding here, what is clear to all of us as Coaster indicated, that aggregate privacy and anonymity are what is really at stake here.

Sure, I’m in public and just walking around. I don’t have a right to privacy in those instants. Some jerk with a camera is within their rights to capture my image.

The other aspect of the laws, though, is that even a few years ago, that image was of an anonymous person. The photographer didn’t know who I was and couldn’t find out without asking me and if a cop wanted that picture they had to request it from the taker. Now, though, that image can be shuffled off to a giant datacenter to be processed and potentially figure out who I am, coordinating the time, place, clothing, activities, nearby people, and myriad other details and the tech companies have no problem handing it over that information without any of the humans ever knowing.

I think the simplest solution is that any LEO querying a company’s data about a private entity should require a warrant or subpoena. Data sharing agreements between companies and governments should be illegal.

The longer solution is that collecting and retaining this information “for business purposes” needs to be more heavily regulated. The current definitions of PII are out of date. PII should include things like location, likeness, mood, etc, and the history of those things. Look at what Walmart and others are doing with dynamic pricing, for example.