A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
You’re about the whole “fake choice” people get in society thing?
I understand that, but I think you went overboard a little 😅
Sort of, but this is slightly different. It’s an active obfuscation of an externally imposed identity element. A justifiable one in this case, but an external imposition in the first place, and external identity elements should always be held at arm’s length because they tend to get abused.
Incorporating it into your material identity dulls your awareness of the fact this representation of you, isn’t “you”, and how it’s used isn’t up to you. Creating an attachment to it has risks, risks you are inclined to ignore if mentally it’s just another personalized bumper sticker in your perception.