In Germany it's prohibited by law to point your private surveillance camera to public spaces like the boardwalk, no recording of these areas is allowed. I think thats the way it should be. Unfortunately in some areas (e.g. train stations) it is allowed.

It's so easy to get rid of a congressman you don't like with term limits. But why do you think, on average, his replacement would be better? The replacement would only be more unknown.

Which Chinese cameras do this? I've only seen some dumb IP cams.

This is exactly the sort of thing there should be legislation for. To a somewhat weaker extent than I’d like this is what GDPR and friends covers, the law says that companies must state what data they’re gathering and what purposes they’re gathering it for. If they overreach then they can be fined into oblivion.

In practice this is not as strong as it should be, broadly companies can and do basically go “we’re collecting all your data for whatever purpose we like” and get away with it, but they do at least think carefully about doing so.

There’s no reason we can’t force providers of cloud backed devices to treat your data with respect, rather than thinking of it as residual income they’re leaving on the table if they don’t also sell it to third parties for data mining.

These constructions feel too simplistic to capture anything useful.

My credit card company can see my transactions. My medical provider can read my medical records. People who hire house cleaners let people see inside their house.

It's commonly accepted that when you engage with a company for business purposes, they can see things involved in your business with them.

The problem with the Ring situation isn't that Ring can "see" your video cameras. It's that they were using the information for things outside of the scope of business that was implied when you bought the camera.

People don't care if a Google bot "reads" their e-mail for spam filtering. They don't care if a contractor sees the inside of their house during construction. What they do care about is if the other party tries to use that access for something outside of the scope that was agreed upon.

> It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.

These snooty takes where we're supposed to look down upon others for having reasonable assumptions about usage of their data are why it's so hard to get the general public to care about privacy. It's unnecessarily condescending for what? To look down upon people or play "told you so" games? If privacy advocates want to get anywhere they need to distance themselves from people who run with this kind of attitude.

The fault is not with the idea of expecting that you own the data that you made and the equipment that you purchased. The fault here is the regulatory structure that makes you by default not the owner of your data or your things.

If you also mean make it so Congress doesn't have a $4T slush fund to buy favors and influence every year, then I'm on board. If you think reducing the paltry sums spent on campaign contributions is going to take the money out of politics, you're bad at math.

Citizens United was a case about a federal agency attempting to suppress the publication of a movie due to breaching "electioneering communications" rules first introduced in 2002. Contrary to the common narrative, it was more a case of the government arguing "speech is money" as a pretext to use its authority to regulate certain expenditures of money in order to control what information could be released into the media ecosystem. The court struck this down under a correct application of consistent first amendment jurisprudence, ruling that speech is always protected by the constitution, and cannot be suppressed under the guise of regulating spending.

The case and the ruling had nothing to do with campaign donations or funding of candidates. Overturning the Citizens United ruling would create a situation in which agencies under the authority of incumbent politicians would be able to control and curate public political discourse in the lead-up to elections. This is likely the exact opposite of what you intend.

> term/age limits for all public offices.

Term limits would have the effect of creating large incentives for office holders to use the prerogatives of office to set themselves up for their future careers after their terms expire. Term-limited politicians would be even more motivated than those in the status quo to hand out favors to potential future employers and business partners.

On top of that, it would be much more difficult for for politicians to establish notoriety and carve out a base of direct public support by building reputation in office. Instead, a steady stream of relative unknowns would require support from sponsors and entrenched party organizations to win office, making back-room players much more powerful than in the status quo. This is, again, likely to result in the exact opposite of what you intend.

> Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations.

Agreed, but that will require voters to abandon their reflexive partisan positions and accept that the institutions themselves are dysfunctional, irrespective of which people happen to be administering it at any given time. In the current cultural climate, that seems unfortunately unlikely.

Comments like these are a distraction. All we need to do is get to work. If people took action every time they felt like posting these comments, we'd get a lot done.