There are ways of doing this that don't require you to abdicate all of your privacy to a third-party SaaS company who makes it easy to share information with the police everywhere.

My camera system is not connected to the cloud and it has a retention policy of 4 weeks. I took pains not to aim them anywhere where I'd be collecting data outside of my own property. There's full-disk encryption in use. The police could maintain their own surveillance network and place their own cameras in a legally compliant way and it would be fine.

Flock and Ring are awful because they enable easy surveillance and search after the fact, not a priori because they are surveillance systems. If they required proof of warrant before letting the police execute a search I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with them. A police officer stalking an ex is like the basic example you get if you ask an ALPR vendor why we need audit logging and proactive auditing of all searches. But that's not the only way these tools enable invasion of privacy.

If you want proof that that's the problem with them, you should know that people have been building wired camera systems and ALPR systems for decades before Flock and Ring came into existence. So it's solely the cloud Search-as-a-Service business model that's the problem there.

> The answer to that is the only one that matters.

This statement rests on the belief that absolute crime rate is the only thing that matters, and is a cousin to the "I have nothing to hide!" response from people who care little for intrusions to their privacy. Are you in favor of giving law enforcement authorities a way to unlock all private electronic devices?

I'm willing to tolerate the presence of some crime in the name of personal liberty. I do not think my whereabouts should be known on demand by government actors just because I drive a car.

By any means necessary, as long as crime goes down? So we can execute anyone that breaks any kind of law and as long as crime goes down, that's all that should matter? Rights have no value to you, only protecting people from crime? There's no balance to be had, the only relevant question is if crime goes up or down?

Wow.

> The answer to that is the only one that matters.

Is it, though? Crime would be super low if we were all confined to prison cells by default, too.

No it's not. Would crime go up, down, or stay the same if we had to get strip searched before entering airplanes?

> Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed?

I would think the same, crime rates would be unaffected in the short and medium term, since I don't think it prevents much crime given the short or non-custodial sentences given many criminals. Clearance rates and justice (conviction rates) would likely go down though IMO.

Crime would go down if everyone was executed. Your question is not the only one that matters.

probably up