- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
Last July, San Jose issued an open invitation to technology companies to mount cameras on a municipal vehicle that began periodically driving through the city’s district 10 in December, collecting footage of the streets and public spaces. The images are fed into computer vision software and used to train the companies’ algorithms to detect the unwanted objects, according to interviews and documents the Guardian obtained through public records requests.
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So instead of spending X dollars to ensure people have homes, we spend X++ dollars to evict them from their spaces?
Sure, it’s like how NYC spent $150 million to bust people evading $105,000 in subway fees. Absolutely anything to avoid legitimately helping people.
That is a stupid issue with Mayor Adams, but NYC legitimately spends millions on housing the homeless. The city has to get you shelter. It’s the law.
How long has this been a law? The last time I went to NY I saw plenty of people sleeping in Penn Station.
Since 1981:
https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2021/10/how-nycs-right-shelter-mandate-works/185933/
And why would you think people wouldn’t be able to sleep in a train station? It’s just like an airport.
How else would the mega rich be able to buy up the property and rent out the spaces for normal people to finance?
We’re all shocked that New Technology X is used to target and oppress people
quite ironically in this context, san jose is named after st. joseph – he of the legal dad of jesus fame – who was once famously told there was no room at the inn and had to make do in a stable.
Sounds about right for American-christianity.
Only if you’re charging a luxury room price for the stable.
And help them right ? RIGHT ?
If only we didn’t live in a dystopia and that was what this was for.
One can only dream i guess.
Yes and no. San Jose has many many programs to assist the homeless, but some of them are dying in the creeks with flooding. We also have relatively new initiatives for reporting encampment to outreach groups instead of the police.
Not everywhere is a safe place for someone to settle. It’s one thing to have a person spend the night somewhere, but services like these may help identify encampments that are establishing in areas at risk of flooding etc before they get too entrenched.
San Jose’s homeless is a very mixed bag. some wanting to be perpetually homeless, some actual recently loss home and is savable, some on the streets due to drugs (friend had a story where homeless asked for a burger, but refused one from a burger joint nearest by (implied wanted money for drugs)).
Weeding out whose helpable isnt an easy task, because not all homeless share the same reason on how they got to that lifestyle.
When housing becomes a for profit business, this is the result. It’s happening in my city in Canada as well.
I have a homeless community sprouting up behind our cul de sac and it gets bigger each spring. It likely disappears in the winter, I’ve no desire to walk through the uncleared snow to find out. And a few blocks away people are camping out on sidewalks everywhere, it’s becoming an epidemic, in a city that was once very affordable.
Tulsa Oklahoma is full of homeless encampments and this is supposed to be one of the cheaper states to live in. Yet landlords want to price their places like the bigger cities. It is scary to see what cost to rent in this town compared to the pay being offer for jobs. Its wonder there isn’t more homeless.
Being homeless is like the software piracy equivalent of housing. You’re not paying but rich people are “losing money” since homeless people aren’t paying them $4000+/month therefore it’s a crime.
The rates of suicide are going to skyrocket
AI policing has begun.
They’ve already been using it to give probably cause and as evidence that all black people are the same and therefore guilty. I’m referring to facial recognition
In terms of legal precedent this may be a good thing in the long run.
The software billed as “AI” these days is half baked. If one or more law enforcement agencies point to the new piece of software the city deployed as their probable cause to make an arrest it won’t take long for that to get challenged in court.
This sets the stage for the legality of the software to be challenged now (in half baked form) and to set a legal standard demanding high accuracy and/or human assessment when making an arrest.
I think you’re more optimistic than I am about a conservative appeals court judge being able to first understand that the technology works very well, then actually give a shit if they do.
I’m arguing against the technology. I believe that the decision to make an arrest should fall to a human being and that individual should be allowed to override a bad call by the shit being billed as AI.
There’s a real possibility that law enforcement agencies may try to foist responsibility for decisions onto software and require officers to abide by the recommendations of said software. That would be a huge mistake.
“unwanted objects”
This sounds like a real opportunity for false positives as opposed to, I dunno, engaging with the community?
this brave new future which we live in fucking sucks
the accuracy for lived-in cars is still far lower: between 10 and 15%
Sounds like the tech isn’t terribly useful
That surely won’t stop governments from throwing millions at it or private companies from taking the money.
I wonder if it could spot Steve
I’m so grateful he’s Canadian
It doesn’t have to be accurate to be useful
Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
Basically a dowsing rod, totally incapable of detecting bombs, drugs, etc. But possibly still useful as a probable cause generator.
That was probably one of the more depressing Wiki articles I’ve read in a minute.
They start out identifying the various “races” probably. I’m a brown person and would like to keep reminding everyone that different races do not exist in the sense that it is not a scientific term with any meaning. A term with proper meaning is “species” and there is only one “homosapiens”… it’s not just Juantastic who lives under the bridge, it’s all of us. We are all a single family. Anyway, would you let your brother or sister or parents or relatives go live under a bridge and hungry? Nah right? What if they were thousands of miles away and didn’t have a place to sleep in? Still nah! You would do whatever to try to help! So why are there homeless people in every city and why do we not help Gaza and Ukraine people? Right? We need to do a better job!
This might actually get struck down on constitutionality. How does one confront their accuser in court if the accuser is a trained neural net?
And that’s without even touching on the fact that ML is stochastic in nature, and should absolutely not be considered accurate enough to be an unsupervised and unmoderated single-point-of-failure decision engine in contexts like legal, medical, or other critical decision-making process. The fact that ML regularly and demonstrably hallucinates (or otherwise yields garbage output) is just not acceptable in a regulatory sense.
Source: software engineer in biotech; we are specifically disallowed from using ML at any level in our work for the above reasons, as well as potential HIPAA-related data mining issues.
I don’t know much about jurisprudence, but wouldn’t the neural net be a tool of the person that brought the lawsuit.
Like if you get brought in due to DNA, you don’t have to face the centrifuge that helped extract your DNA from the sample?
You’re ignoring the fact that using such a failure-prone system to initiate legal proceedings against a citizen is ABSOLUTELY going to overload an already overloaded system. And that’s not even going into the fact that it puts an unjust burden on those falsely accused, or the fact that it’s targeting a segment of the population that’s a lot more likely to go “fuck it, I don’t care, how could things possibly get worse” (read: serious depression, PTSD, other neurodivergences that often correlate with being unhoused). This is by-design.
This is an all-around grade-A shit policy. It’s also a policy designed to treat the symptom instead of the cause. It will make the streets around San Jose look a bit nicer, and in doing so it will harm a lot of people.
I don’t think the idea is to bring criminal proceedings against people. Not sure what they do in San Jose but in cities I’ve lived, homeless people are essentially immune to fines or criminal charges because police know they can’t/wont pay anything. So they go force them to move and throw away their belongings if they can’t or don’t take them in time, but do not arrest or ticket these people.
I think it’s a stupid policy but I don’t see how any of this is applicable. If the AI identifies an encampment, it’s going to be police that come and scare them off. This isn’t like a red light camera where you get mailed a ticket because there’s no address to send a ticket to and the AI isn’t going to be able to identify individuals occupying a tent.
I mean I’m not ignoring those facts. I prefaced by saying I don’t know much about jurisprudence.
Thanks for providing some insight though.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t intend to come off stabby or dismissive
No problem.
Appreciate you clarifying. Have a nice day random person.
Maybe it’s to help them.
Don’t tell me, I like the illusion.
Hate my state.
By all means, find a better one.
Not… Everyone can afford to pick up everything and move or they may have other factors like job and family keeping them there
Yeah im trying my damnest but this state is meant to keep people poor.
Uf, this is not a great response. That citizen should stay and add their valuable voice to calls and demands for improvement.
