San Jose invited tech companies to mount cameras on a vehicle in what appears to be first-of-its-kind experiment

Look, another city ignoring the affordable housing situation, and actively developing a software to be the bad guys.

@neutron@thelemmy.club
link
fedilink
English
66M

There’s no easy solution. Some are evicted from their homes with crushing debt, some have safety nets to depend on, some want to end their homeless situation as soon as possible, some, however, are content with eating discarded food and begging for cash to buy alcohol. Not everyone is a hopeless drug addict or a temporarily inconvenienced millionaires, and this is not even mixing charity into the problem.

My guess is whoever thought on implementing AI into this probably consider this a problem that can be made easy by offloading all our human problems into a black box. It isn’t going to be that way.

The city is San Jose.

I so, so hate that journalists and editors everywhere - from NBC to WaPo to podunk local papers - seem to have pretty much acquiesced to the fact that headlines are just going to be clickbait going forward.

@RGB3x3@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
English
76M

I can’t stand headlines like these.

I also abhor the recent trend of “she started a trend, now she’s going to prison.” It’s such an annoying clickbait tactic. Just say “local woman going to prison for trend.”

Ha! Very appropriate response.

It’s too bad the programs that actually help people aren’t given more money and people to make it large scale. Instead, we get this.

I’m sure this won’t be used for horrible dystopian decision making

This application IS the dystopian decision making in action. What’s done with this info won’t be any better.

Unless it’s used to find them shelter & permanent accommodation. But that’s never going to happen.

People with the tiniest grip of power are very quick to forget the human factors.

@umbrella@lemmy.ml
link
fedilink
English
36M

But that’s never going to happen.

AutoTL;DR
bot account
link
fedilink
English
76M

This is the best summary I could come up with:


For the last several months, a city at the heart of Silicon Valley has been training artificial intelligence to recognize tents and cars with people living inside in what experts believe is the first experiment of its kind in the United States.

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.

There’s no set end date for the pilot phase of the project, Tawfik said in an interview, and as the models improve he believes the target objects could expand to include lost cats and dogs, parking violations and overgrown trees.

City documents state that, in addition to accuracy, one of the main metrics the AI systems will be assessed on is their ability to preserve the privacy of people captured on camera – for example, by blurring faces and license plates.

The group, made up of dozens of current and formerly unhoused people, has recently been fighting a policy proposed last August by the San Jose mayor, Matt Mahan, that would allow police to tow and impound lived-in vehicles near schools.

In addition to providing a training ground for new algorithms, San Jose’s position as a national leader on government procurement of technology means that its experiment with surveilling encampments could influence whether and how other cities adopt similar detection systems.


The original article contains 1,487 words, the summary contains 240 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Create a post

In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.

This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.


You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:

Learn more…


Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We’ve tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!

Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!


This community is the “official” Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other “Privacy Guides” communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.


Moderation Rules:

  1. We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
  2. This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
  3. No soliciting engagement: Don’t ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
  4. Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
  5. Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
  6. Don’t repost topics which have already been covered here.
  7. News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
  8. Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
  9. No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don’t abuse our community’s willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
  10. No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
  11. Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
  12. General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.

Additional Resources:

  • 1 user online
  • 10 users / day
  • 42 users / week
  • 116 users / month
  • 1.08K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 660 Posts
  • 11.1K Comments
  • Modlog