alt Hacker NewsThat's what confuses me too. If they aren't making money any longer, they're basically saying "fuck you" to their own target customers?
What's the aim? ~~Bribing~~ Lobbying someone else in the government with the data they are gathering anyways in the hopes of cementing this?
So what this is telling me is if I don't like the way the government or public services is doing something, I should just plow ahead without any care and just force it and then be immune because I said so?
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The data can still be sold to other municipalities. That’s kind of the problem here, handling this as anything other than a privacy violation, because anything else allows them to just lease private land to install them, then sell the data to whoever wants it. But the US has been anti privacy for a while now.
The local government isn't their only customer. They also have contracts with the federal government who wants piggyback access to as many cameras as they can.
Perhaps their real customer isn't the City of East Bumfuck, Minnesota, but the FBI or ICE or NSA. Though even in that case it seems a bit inept: they need some buyin from the locals to get their cameras installed in the next small town.