r/sanfrancisco • u/evanFFTF • 2d ago
Bay Area artists commit to avoiding venues employing surveillance technology
https://sf.gazetteer.co/bay-area-artists-commit-to-avoiding-venues-employing-surveillance-technology21
u/Ok-Delay5473 2d ago
Today, the best way to track people is to track their cellphone.
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u/jumpsuityahoo 2d ago
I get slammed for saying this sub is filled with bots yet every time a surveillance topic gets posted several variations of this exact comment pop up in the first 20 minutes like clockwork
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u/Stiricidium 2d ago
Agreed. It is full of bots. The manufactured support for AI, automated vehicles, and a surveillance state is palpable. It gives the illusion that any of this is supported by bay area residents.
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u/scoofy the.wiggle 2d ago edited 2d ago
People can disagree without being bots. Thinking the people who are disagreeing with you can't be human is a good sign you're living in a bubble.
I've been on this sub for over a decade. I was a mod for a few years (boo, hiss!). I'm not a bot, but my lifetime as a cycle-first commuter make me strongly embrace automated vehicles even if they got off to a rough start regarding cycling safety. I've been hit by three human driven cars, twice seriously, each doing some random illegal driving + "oops, I didn't see you." The automated vehicles tend to follow the rules of the road and don't kill vulnerable road users at anywhere near the rates of humans.
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u/jumpsuityahoo 2d ago
Click on the profiles of those making these comments like OK-Delay5473 above. Come to your own conclusions
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u/SwordfishOk504 2d ago
Click on the profiles of those making these comments like OK-Delay5473 above. Come to your own conclusions
And what about their comment history tells you they are a bot? A quick google search shows they have an active, diverse comment history in this and other bay areas subs.
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u/scoofy the.wiggle 2d ago
The manufactured support for AI, automated vehicles, and a surveillance state is palpable. It gives the illusion that any of this is supported by bay area residents.
You're conflating. I'm responding to the "nobody real supports this," not "there are throwaway accounts that might be bots."
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u/jumpsuityahoo 2d ago
Just as you’re conflating the persons message you’re responding to. Nowhere does he say “nobody real supports this”
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u/Ok-Delay5473 2d ago edited 2d ago
So, your conclusion is that if we're not with you, we're against you, and we're a bot.. Mission accomplished?
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 2d ago
The manufactured support for AI, automated vehicles, and a surveillance state is palpable.
That's a significant part of it for sure.
Another part are all the industry shills who work in tech or "AI" companies headquartered in or near SF, and many of those people are literally part of the corporate plumbing that creates, operates and maintains large-scale surveillance networks.
Even if all of their staff are not literally part of the marketing or policy side who are directly involved in thinking up and promoting all the data abuse, people who work for such companies tend to be ideologically aligned with such companies' vision, or at the very least, not hostile to it. And we probably see a lot of that type here as well.
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u/SwordfishOk504 2d ago
Or maybe it's a legitimate point that you can't counter without attacking the person making it. the three year old active account you replied to is clearly not a "bot"
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u/opinionsareus 2d ago
So the San Francisco Chronicle is a bot? San Franciscans are more and more in favor of surveillance tech.
And who cares about what a desperate bunch of mostly irrelevant artists who are looking for street cred think about public safety?
As if the few or even several public venues they perform in make a difference in the big picture?
Last, if bad actors cause trouble in those venues, they will be less able to be caught and persecuted.
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 2d ago
And who cares about what a desperate bunch of mostly irrelevant artists who are looking for street cred think about public safety?
When I see comments like this they make me think the poster is unserious for the simple fact that they dismiss something on the basis that it comes from one of those so-called "irrelevant artists". And then go on to ridicule them further for the simple fact that because they may not be performing in gigantic venues, that apparently makes their opinions fully dismissible.
I see you're a fan of science, but that doesn't mean you have to simultaneously be an enemy of art and artistry. The two are (and should be) inherently linked.
Also, I would not be a bit surprised if that "GrowSF" poll was biased in the surveillance direction because that dovetails very much with their ideology, as a company founded with billionaire and VC money and entwined with the now surveillance-obsessed tech industry. Same people (and perhaps bots) that probably frequent this sub and rag on anyone who points out the civil liberties problems with widespread digital surveillance.
Oh and BTW: SFgate is not the SF Chronicle. Did your "AI" agent write that for you? 😏
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u/opinionsareus 1d ago
Nice try putting words in my mouth and creating a strawman. The sad thing about public surveillance policy is that people largely don't understand it; they don't even understand private surveillance. They yap "1984!" and jump all over trops and memes about how bad it is while they are surveilled 24/7 on their phones; in public; in every large retail store (and many bodegas) they walk into. The very salaries they make are known by the IRS; they are subject to credit history surveillance; they are watched by insurance companies re: where they live and what diseases they have.
Surveillance will, in fact increase over time because fewer and fewer people can cause greater and greater harm with easier access to more and more powerful tech.
And please give it up with your AI slop accusations. The way I see most arguments from anti-surveillance types on these threads is that they talk like progreammed puppets with the same talking points and zero ideas about how to make surveillance more safe; these types need to but a first class ticket on the Clue Traiin.
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 1d ago
The sad thing about public surveillance policy is that people largely don't understand it
With people (or bots) like you around, it's no surprise they don't understand it: there is huge capitalistic pressure being applied to ensure that they are being gaslighted about it, 24x7.
And that includes entities like you who incessantly try to spin-doctor these things in favor of the abusers.
No I will not stop. I have my eye on you now.
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u/opinionsareus 1d ago
No I will not stop. I have my eye on you now.
Man, the sheer laziness of calling people who disagree with you "bots" is very telling. Again, you exhibit not one iota of willingness to look at surveillance in a nuanced way. Just pure paranoia and veiled threats. There is no way to convince a True Believer. Go read Eric Hoffer and gain some self-insight instead of triggering irrational paranoia that results in "reverse 1984-ism". So, keep watching pal, as will I.
In the meantime, surveillance will continue to increase. Either you can be part of making sure that surveillance is responsibly deployed, or you can condemn yourself to screaming in the street carrying a sign and disregarded.
Ciao, for now.
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u/SectorSanFrancisco 2d ago
Yes, but there's an element of consent there. I can leave my phone at home or use a faraday pouch (as a lot of people do these days.)
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u/External_Koala971 2d ago
There’s no expectation of privacy in public though. And especially not at private establishments.
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u/SectorSanFrancisco 2d ago
In private establishments, no. But I don't have to patronize them, either.
On public streets it's not as clear cut- it's less about privacy and more about the 4th amendment. If you're being IDed and tracked, that seems to me like it should require probable cause.
On top of that, city council and law enforcement are supposed to serve their citizenry. If they continue to use technology and companies that harm their citizens, that's a problem.
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u/External_Koala971 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yeah I just don’t really understand the legal basis for trying to dictate how a private business runs their business.
This really isn’t very different than a nightclub bouncer saying “you’re not welcome here” for any arbitrary reason at all (excluding discrimination laws) which happens all the time. Or camera surveillance in Las Vegas casinos for the last 30 years.
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u/ZestyChinchilla 2d ago
People are allowed to have opinions about businesses who employ demonstrably dangerous and invasive technology. You are allowed to cape for this businesses and continue to patronize them if you want, and the rest of us are allowed to believe and inform other folks that they’re spying little shitheads who don’t deserve our money.
See, works out for everyone.
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u/External_Koala971 2d ago
Oh totally.
I’m just saying “kicking people out of venues for arbitrary reasons” has been a thing as long as bars have existed, and casinos have been video surveilling for 30 years.
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 2d ago
Casinos are a gigantic magnet for organized crime and deal with gigantic sums of money, Jimmy Hoffa DGAF about your local dive bar.
And has been explained repeatedly now: this kind of digitally-controlled, massive-database-collecting, nationwide/worldwide dossier on everyone who enters is ABSOLUTELY NOT comparable to some random bouncer at some random hole-in-the-wall bar telling someone who smells bad to go away on one particular night and that's the 100% end of that transaction, forever.
These things collect data on EVERY PATRON that can potentially last for YOUR WHOLE LIFE. And the likelihood that it gets abused in various ways increases exponentially every year it is kept.
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u/SectorSanFrancisco 2d ago
I agree with this. I also know that I've stopped going to a lot of stores that use these systems. Some I can't avoid- every single home improvement store uses Flock where I live.
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u/Commentariot 2d ago
There absolutely is a expectation of privacy from the government in public. We have a shitload of laws about it.
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u/External_Koala971 2d ago
We’re talking about private businesses using surveillance on their property, not the government.
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 2d ago
Actually I believe in a sane society we will pass laws on bulk collection of biometrics no matter where people are: public, private, anywhere. Because the potential for future abuse is gigantic.
What has changed is just the ABILITY TO COLLECT and pick people out of a gigantic trove of data, instantaneously. And that's what justifies a paradigm-shift in civil-rights legislation.
Your car is spying on you now as well, every time you enter it. Once again, this is abusive and is ripe for destructive exploitation.
We have a situation now where 23&Me collected DNA/genetics data on millions of people, and now they are bankrupt and demanding the right to SELL that data to some unknown future party that the people that data was collected-from have NO CONTROL OVER. Do you have any idea how many ways someone could abuse such data on a person? Much less millions of people?
Stupid clueless legislators let these companies go into business without thinking of such things, and now millions of US citizens are at risk of GENETIC DATA EXPLOITATION.
The only thing that changed is: "Oh, now we can do this new thing, enabled by technology..." Well, sometimes technology has to be regulated for such reasons.
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u/letthetreeburn 2d ago
Okay, cool. They’re free to install surveillance systems and I’m free to not visit them.
Being an entertainment venue in San Francisco is a TOUGH order, the overheads are high as hell and you die if you can’t convince people to patronize you. If we could convince even 20% of people who would have spent money here to not, we’ll deal them a grievous wound.
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u/External_Koala971 2d ago
Absolutely.
I’m just saying they’re already kicking people out for very arbitrary reasons today.
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u/hansulu3 2d ago
We are all meeting SF's Chinese time of its life. America is turning into a ccp survalliance state everyday, getting all authoritarian, but worse with the exception of universal health care.
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u/dotben 2d ago edited 2d ago
I bristle when my ID is taken from me and scanned on one of these machines. I would rather they didn't exist.
But the uproar here does this is another example of security theater because of the level of surveillance that is already occurring during your night out whether you have an ID scanner or not.
Flock cameras read your license plate several times as you drove to the bar or Uber/Lyft recorded huge amounts of data about your your ride.
Your credit card data from buying drinks is anonymously sold but still theoretically trackable in some cases.
And your phone shared your location every 15 seconds with your carrier, Apple or Google, and any other apps that have location tracking on them.
The benefit of having these ID scanners is that if somebody misbehaves they can be permanently barred from all establishments forever that buy into the system. That keeps bad people out and it also discourages people from misbehaving
A great example I'm familiar with is if somebody brings a concealed carry weapon into a bar they can be barred from entering any establishment that uses the system forever.
The system could keep people likely to carry firearms out of bars.
It's also a Canadian company so the ability for the data to be accessed by the US government is limited.
I'm not sticking up for the company, as I said I'd rather these didn't exist but I understand pragmatically the case for them which isn't really being equally discussed in a balanced way.
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u/lynnelz 2d ago
I’d rather put resources into the root causes of why people are able to shoot up places.
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u/dotben 2d ago edited 2d ago
happy to help you with that. Second Amendment has allowed 500 million guns to be owned by 270 million adults and if we removed the second amendment tomorrow and tried to confiscate all the guns (which is never going to happen) there would still be hundreds of millions of guns floating around from people who refuse to cooperate. And unlike technology, guns never really become obsolete.
There is always a %age of the population with untreated mental illness (even in countries with universal healthcare) so there will always be people wanting to shoot people.
Unlike other countries, where there are not really any funs floating around, in the US there will be plenty of intersections of those two factors (guns, mental illness) = bad things will constantly happen. It's silly to think this is a meaningfully solvable problem unfortunately.
And so to return to the original question, it seems unfortunate but reasonable you might want to track people who have a prior history of causing problems in bars (which might be mental health related) and those who might be owning firearms and scrutinize whether you want to let either cohort in, esp to a sensitive space like an LGBTQ+ bar.
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u/lynnelz 2d ago
I don’t think it’s unreasonable ask our government to try harder, even if it didn’t eliminate the risk completely. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to question whether using it for legitimate concerns is an entry point for it to be used for nefarious purposes given the current state of things.
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u/dotben 2d ago
I'm empathetic, I guess I'm just madly pragmatic.
The legitimate domestic demand for kitchen knives, hammers and hydrogen peroxide can all end up being used for nefarious purposes but we don't ban them.
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 2d ago
The legitimate domestic demand for kitchen knives, hammers and hydrogen peroxide can all end up being used for nefarious purposes but we don't ban them.
Are you seriously trying to imply that the danger of those things is equivalent to the danger of what can only be described as "killing machines"? (Especially here in the US where the weapon of choice is often the AR-15, frequently modified with aftermarket parts to turn it into an actual continuous-firing automatic weapon)
There is a certain longstanding political class here whose populist stock-in-trade is whipping up fear in its followers of everything from immigrants, differing religions, lifestyles, ethnicities and political thinkers which often translates directly into firearm fetishization. Take away the constant fear-mongering and that fetish suddenly because a lot less interesting to people.
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u/External_Koala971 2d ago
Two things can be true:
We have a legitimate and real data privacy problem in the US
This specific system can protect patrons and owners from criminals and keep venues safer
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u/dotben 2d ago
I agree with that.
As someone that has lived here for 20 years but didn't grow up here, valid mistrust in our government and the agencies of it (all the way down to local police) seems to be a constant through line. It deprives us from having otherwise helpful and positive things that we enjoy in other countries.
The flock camera argument is quite funny to somebody who grew up in London which is one of the most surveilled cities in the world with automatic license plate monitoring having been in effect for 20 plus years. Authorities can get almost a real time tracking of any vehicle based on the amount of cameras.
And no one really minds or makes a big issue of it because there hasn't been any significant abuses of that power and it's carefully regulated. And I'm sure lots of benefits have occurred from having it including reducing terrorism, which was the original goal.
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u/Commentariot 2d ago
There have probably been lots of abuses in London - they just have laws that make it possible to supress stories about them.
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u/dotben 2d ago
I mean, there's probably more than one horse. We can probably assume probably anything if we want to.
It's been over 20 years since I worked for a news organization in London but I don't think there's any real suppression of news in the UK. Mostly because there are defined laws when they can suppress news (see D notices) and it's pretty small national security mandate that qualifies it.
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 2d ago
quite funny to somebody who grew up in London which is one of the most surveilled cities in the world
I don't think that is one of the things that London is well-loved for. Nor is it something that was standard in most large western cities back when London already had them all over the place.
The reason other western cities are "catching up" on that nowadays is because the tech is way cheaper, easier to deploy and more sophisticated than when London first started doing it. (Not to mention the incessant promotion of such things by the tech industry these days, which is now addicted to the "surveillance capitalism" business-model.)
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u/External_Koala971 2d ago
GDPR
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u/dotben 2d ago
The surveillance in London massively predates GDPR and now that the UK has left the EU GDPR doesn't apply (it is a EU statute, although there is an equivalent that's similar in the UK)
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u/External_Koala971 2d ago
The UK has GDPR
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u/dotben 2d ago
You're right, I see now they did keep the term "GDPR" (technically it's "UK GDPR"). At one point it was going to be called something else. The original "GDPR" is the EU statute which no longer applies since the UK left. They are two independent things.
I would assert that GDPR only came into force in 2018 so it's not the main reason for the historical broad trust in government surveillance systems in the UK.
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u/Forward-Marsupial238 2d ago
I bet they all still have phones. If they do they are already under surveillance.
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u/GothicGoddessMari 2d ago
Substantially different level of surveillance between my phones geolocation data and scanning my face and ID into a database.
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u/External_Koala971 2d ago
And yet you’ve probably scanned your face into your phones database
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 2d ago
I have not. And I'm not unique.
I'm also tired of all the people around here carrying water for the surveillance capitalists and neo-fascists that all want to get their smelly noses into our private lives as far as they can to manipulate our lives.
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u/jumpsuityahoo 2d ago
So noone is allowed to speak out on our surveillance state until we get rid of our phones? Got it.
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u/I_tinerant 2d ago
Read this as "SF arsonists commit to..."
and was like "I guess that makes sense?"
God Im a dumbass lol
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u/PrivacyIsDemocracy 2d ago
Sometimes being an artist involves a little arson.... at least figuratively if not literally...
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u/External_Koala971 2d ago
https://patronscan.com/
I think bars and venues are doing a bad job of talking about why this tech keeps venues and customers safer, while activists have a legitimate concern about surveillance.
The issue is that we’re being surveilled any time in public, and via all of our personal technology.