https://youtu.be/37fp2n6p19Q

That’s why police looks to piece together from a larger surveillance network. Maybe you can’t see the face on the home camera but in another camera down the road, or a license plate on the getaway car down the street, or an accomplice without disguise. They want everyone to have cameras and then they can abuse the system.

Friends showed me high quality close up footage of someone stealing their bike. Absolutely useless, all you saw was an average guy that you wouldn’t recognize if you walked past on the street.

No cloud involved if you run your own VPN.

Or even better, _just a little_ cloud involved if you expose through Cloudflare tunnel for just you and whoever else needs to access it.

I hate it, but you are being recorded everywhere you go. Your plates and your face get scanned every single day, all day long. This is normalized. Privacy is dead.

You will never get access to any of that data when you need it. It is not there to help you. You need to keep your own evidence of the world around you; you never know when you will need it.

I live in the UK and first time I'm hearing about this - it's definitely illegal to record your neighbours or members of the public without permission, but AFAIK if you are recording videos of your own driveway you can post those anywhere you like since there is no privacy issue there.

Have you got any more info about this?

Edit: let me clarify - sure, there are _circumstances_ under which it's illegal to post a video on facebook, whether it's recorded with CCTV or your phone doesn't matter. But there is no blanket ban on posting CCTV footage anywhere, and your post makes it sound like it is.

I agree. And that's sensible. We don't want the law and culture to diverge too much. The former is meant to serve the latter.

But I do still think it would be possible to start going after the suppliers of the services.

Interesting. Thanks for this perspective. But for the sake of this debate it's still more or less the same situation.

> The core issue is that "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument is correct as long as the government is trustworthy.

The government and everyone else who might have access to the data.

> Not only that, but mass-surveilance greatly improves life because it allows much better crowd management.

Hard disagree.

> Case in point - speed cameras. Would you support the removal of all speed cameras in Norway?

No. Speed cameras are different. They do more or less not record people who are not reasonably suspected of committing the crime of speeding. They are more analogous to a doorbell camera (or car sentry system) that only actually starts storing/sharing/streaming data when very good evidence of a crime is in progress. I would, for example, be OK with a camera pointed at a public area if the operator of the camera can prove that the data is only stored whenever say the house's burglary alarm trips (this is equivalent to speed cameras when the induction loop in the ground says that a car passed faster than the speed limit). That minute of recording that may include innocent people in public areas is something I would consider to be in the public good. It's at least very different from a system that monitors continuously.

The fact that nothing is stored in normal circumstances of course needs to be backed up by very public audits. For example the operator would need to release source code and be liable to an enormous fine if state inspectors find that different code actually runs on the device. At least that seems like the ideal situation to me.

Setting an example would be just doing without the things he doesn't agree with. Need to make a call but only other people's cell phones are available? Well, you don't make the call. Need wifi but no open networks are available? Well, you don't get wifi. Is this even more inconvenient than the already-inconvenient use of other people's cell phones or wifi logins? Absolutely. But it's actually sticking to your principles.

Live like the Amish in 2026 (though I assume they have phones now).

It's not setting an example. We have a word for it and it's called being a mooch.

The attitude is consistent with that famous video where RMS explains that he's "never installed GNU/Linux" because he could just ask someone else to do it for him, and suggest others should do the same.

For that matter, why own a car if we can borrow someone else's? Especially with license plate readers and traffic cameras everywhere, who wants to be tracked? Let your friend be tracked instead. That is the level of logic here.

Consider that there are two components here: one is that Stallman is uncomfortable with the risk of carrying a tracking device (aka cell phone) around with him. The other is that he wants to make it known that people shouldn't carry cell phones because of that tracking; part of his platform is advocating for and against things like this.

If he was merely worried about the risk, and was just out to protect himself, then using someone else's cell phone (which would be at hand regardless of whether or not he used it) would be a perfectly reasonable, pragmatic thing to do. Transferring the risk, as you say.

But using someone else's cell phone is a violation of the principle. How can I take his advocacy seriously if he freely admits that we need cell phones out in the world, otherwise it's even too inconvenient for him to go about his business?

[0] Is it fancy if IR camera tech has been around since like the 1980's or 1970's?

[1] Since WWII if Wikipedia is to be believed.