Cameras, prisons, chatbots: who controls the watching?
Surveillance tech keeps growing, and the fights are about control. The Drive reports that a city cancelled its contract with Flock, a company that sells surveillance cameras to police. Flock ignored the cancellation, so the police chief unplugged the cameras himself. It got 448 points on Hacker News.
In Michigan, the prison system will pilot a new classification system on December 1. The state forecasts about 30% better prediction of future violence risk. It will help decide security levels and run ongoing reviews with real-time data, first in selected men's prisons. The department supervises about 32,000 people.
And a new exploratory case study on arXiv looks at how ChatGPT's public website could help with surveillance tasks.
When a vendor keeps cameras running after a city says stop, who is really in charge? Risk scores in prisons shape real lives, so people will want to know how the 30% figure was measured and how a score can be challenged.
