How exactly does this provide more surveillance of the police themselves? I've done about ten FOIA lawsuits against police departments and it's laughable to think that they won't just lock footage away and exempt it from the public's eyes. Probably through a trade secret exemption because private companies are involved.
There's more than one definition of missile. Florida criminal code's just one place where a drone could be considered a "missile".
Florida criminal code:
"790.19 Shooting into or throwing deadly missiles into dwellings, public or private buildings, occupied or not occupied; vessels, aircraft, buses, railroad cars, streetcars, or other vehicles.—Whoever, wantonly or maliciously, shoots at, within, or into, or throws any missile or hurls or projects a stone or other hard substance which would produce death or great bodily harm, at, within, or in any public or private building, occupied or unoccupied, or public or private bus or any train, locomotive, railway car, caboose, cable railway car, street railway car, monorail car, or vehicle of any kind which is being used or occupied by any person, or any boat, vessel, ship, or barge lying in or plying the waters of this state, or aircraft flying through the airspace of this state shall be guilty of a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084."
Kind of. Motorola (axon) effectively acts as an integration system for flock and about 20 other services. Motorola's stuff is IMO the bigger problem because it includes access to flock.
yes, people tend to act differently. not the people they're trying to afect, just random people just minding their business. but it is not an effective deterrent to things like "violent crime".
• Meta-analyses (studies that average the results of multiple studies) in the UK show that video surveillance has no statistically significant impact on crime.
• Preliminary studies on video surveillance systems in the US show little to no positive impact on crime.
I don't have much advice here because ever situation is different and the sensitivies of asking is different with every organization. What's worked for me is being absolutely direct and honest in the situation and the urgency of needing pay. Often times the other side doesn't realize how much it affects you, and shattering that illusion is what's needed. In other words -- you kinda need to make them feel like an asshole for not paying you. Sometimes it doesn't work, though. At some point you will need to raise it as a legal issue and begin refusing work.
Then you might be surprised to know that a lot of those numbers were exaggerated. If you're trusting people to tell you accurate things based on numbers that they won't share.... you're gonna have a bad time.
I once went on a date with someone who did research at OKCupid who told me that they were doing NLP-style analysis of peoples' messages that they sent to each other. Still not really sure what to think of the date itself, but it was a fucked up admission.
If you remember the old OkCupid blog they used to post interesting articles about online dating. I know their article about whether you should smile on your profile picture was eventually debunked [1], but it was nonetheless nice to have objective, data-based, non-pua advice on how to be successful in online dating.
There was an actual effort at data science going on here before the marketing team took it over in the latter years. See the published book Dataclysm by one of the founders for more of the good stuff.
They did tons of data analysis across all aspects of profiles, and had a popular blog where they published the results.
They were heavily involved in researching what factors more reliably led to not just better matches, but better relationships -- when you disabled your account, they'd ask if it was because you'd met someone through OkC and ask you to pick who, if you were willing to share.
I don't think there was anything fucked up about it, as long as it was all anonymized and at scale. Trying to understand what messaging strategies worked better or worse could be a major part of figuring out how to improve matches.
Like, one obvious factor could be to match people who send lots of long messages with lots of questions with each other, while a separate set matches people who's messaging style is one sentence at a time. I'm not saying that would necessarily work well, but it's not crazy to research if NLP analysis of messages can produce additional potential compatibility signals.
The whole point of OkC back then was to try to develop as many data-based signals as possible to improve matches.
You realize that you're responding in a thread about OkCupid deceiving users and sharing data with 3rd parties right?
34. In response to this request, Humor Rainbow gave the Data Recipient access to nearly three million OkCupid user photos. Humor Rainbow’s President and Chief Technology Officer were directly involved in facilitating the data transfer.
35. In addition to user photos, Humor Rainbow shared other personal data with the Data Recipient, including each user’s demographic and location information.
> I don't think there was anything fucked up about it, as long as it was all anonymized and at scale
I'm confused why "as long as" carries so much weight here considering the article that started this discussion. You seem to trust that they stopped their privacy fuckups with third parties. I don't know where your trust comes from.
I'm saying that NLP over messages, and sharing with third parties, are completely orthogonal. It's not about trust, it's two different topics. The different topic was started by the original commenter. Because people often make comments on HN that are related but separate. As NLP and third-party sharing are.
My privacy problem exists with third parties AND internally within OkCupid. At some point, running NLP over messages necessitates that an analyst or ops person actually has to look at the underlying data at some point.
The 3rd party stuff just exudes something like a privacy "code smell" -- "orthogonality" doesn't really matter to my point because 1. these things don't exist in a vacuum and 2. stench has a way of permeating through layers, regardless of how orthogonal underwear is.
Like, do you trust that OKCupid staff didn't download user messages to their laptops?
I did like that they shared a lot of hard data with insightful analysis. At the time, there were a lot of narratives about what women wanted and it was refreshing to see them post what was actually working. I remember being skeptical about anything being private online at the time, but I guess that perspective wasn't as pervasive.
No it totally wasn't a fucked up admission, it was actually a useful and pro-user measure (all this good stuff was before the 2011 acquisition).
Christian Rudder's OKTrends blog (and Sam Yagan's presentation at their acquisition celebration) even spelled out the reason why: some women on OKC (or, more rarely, men) would acquire the "Replies rarely"/red color on their profile, for almost never (<10%) replying to initial messages, which was generally considered to be undesirable behavior, even in the negative (there is value in a negative message: "Thanks but I'm not interested due to age/location/other factor". And also OKC could then measure whether users' stated preferences mismatched preferences inferred from which set of users they message e.g. people who say they're looking for 30-55 for LTR but tend to message people 21-35 for short-term). And before anyone points out that younger more attractive female profiles would get more initial messages than males (up to 200:1 more), OKC used to allow you to set filters on the other user's age/distance/other criteria, so you could automatically filter those out. Also, factor in the usual caveats that many users on dating sites tend to lie about their age/weight/height/location/status/etc.
Anyway, to avoid getting labeled the dread "Replies rarely", some (mostly female) users got in the habit of sending one-liner responses that were ambiguous/non-committal/cryptic/negging. And then not responding further (but without unmatching, which only took a single click). This was making their profile look less undesirable but generating pointless message traffic and reducing the overall utility of the platform at actually attempting to match people (for compatibility, not just initial attraction). Hence, OKC tried to actually measure initial exchanges to figure out which ones led to genuine back-and-forth conversations of 3+ messages (which is an ok proxy for inferring a match, certainly a better proxy than just counting initial messages/likes/votes on photos). Yagan jokingly referred to this as "Every Monday morning, we ask 'How many three-ways did we set up over the weekend?'").
(PS, Rudder and Yagan both stressed that users' names/identities/ identifying characteristics were kept out of the analysis.)
After the 2011 IAC acquisition, most of this platform quality control (and looking for constructive insights) went out the window pretty quickly and the three cofounders moved to OKCupid Labs. But it was good for the brief while it lasted. By 2013 a chainsaw had been taken to most of OKC's unique features, esp. for free users.
Hey, my point is that it's fucked up that I went on a date with someone who admitted their job was to read other people's messages. If you don't think that's fucked up, then we simply have a difference in opinion. I don't know what the rest of your post is about.
OKC analyzed message traffic in an anonymized way to infer when matching was/wasn't working, and what insights that revealed about people's inferred vs stated preferences.
As such it wasn't "reading other people's messages". That's according to the OKC founders description of what they did, pre-acquisition. Since they were reasonably upfront about what they did, and since that functionality worked even for free users and they didn't aggressively push premium or gate the features, I believe they were being truthful. Furthermore, after the 2011 acquisition and when they stopped being active on OKC itself, there was a palpable degradation in site quality. (And post-2014, IAC went on to sell personal information about users' substance use etc. to insurers, to which users had never given informed consent).
So I think your date explained things badly and you picked up the wrong end of the stick. It's trivially easy to write a script that strips usernames and identifying information. And it's not too hard to distinguish "Hey baby" or "DTF?" from more meaningful messages. For the platform to do that with an intent to improving matches was strongly positive, not negative.
We're talking past each other. You think the ends justify the means and I don't. Like, if there's a "Read" marker for a person viewing my messages, then I should have the same for analysts reading my messages, too. Like, when someone is running grep over everyone's messages, they're not just viewing that in isolation -- the context is what's important, and that requires actually reading the messages and their outcomes.
> For the platform to do that with an intent to improving matches was strongly positive, not negative.
Do you realize how much work that OkCupid has put into their product to make matching intentionally worse (through analysis!)? Take off your rose-tinted glasses!!
Edit: aaaand there's a new article about OkCupid giving facial recognition data to 3rd parties.
makes me wonder if the person you went on a date with cherry-picked you due to your data. (anyone who would post on hacker news is obviously a good catch!)
I think the "only thing" that would make me cherry-pickable from their data is that I used an autoclicker to give everyone a 5 star... I have mixed feelings about doing that, but I got a couple (surprisingly nice) dates out of it that never went anywhere.
If only they had the long term data too. It might make for easier discussions on the first date, but maybe there's more to opposites attracting/different roles in a relationship.
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