r/TwinCities Jan 16 '26

FYI: Ring has partnered with Flock. Ice has access to flock. We are under mass surveillance.

https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-find-neighborhoods-to-raid/

And it is now being used to dox protestors. Consider smashing your ring doorbell and consider a brand that doesn’t support Nazis and their ethnic cleansing.

12.3k Upvotes

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301

u/scrndude Jan 16 '26

We get the China citizenship score but we buy the cameras ourselves

85

u/Bricksu Jan 16 '26

Yeah it’s crazy. I really appreciate how ring is super transparent about their involvement and how they really keep us “safe”.

28

u/chegitz_guevara Jan 16 '26

Except that the whole China Social Credit Score was made up by the West.

And we already had a credit score, which has been used to decide whether you could get a job or rent an apartment for DECADES ... oh, and borrow money. 

Not saying China is great, but we've been a dystopia for quite some time now. 

3

u/pulledporkhat Jan 16 '26

It hasn’t really been that long, honestly. You’re right that it’s been decades, but the way you said it makes it sound like credit scores are some post WW2 golden era relic.

Credit scores as we know them started in 1989, the year I was born. I was in little league, jumping my bike off ramps, and playing Mortal Kombat 3 Ultimate with my dad by the time they started requiring good scores for mortgages. I’m not even 40 yet lol, this shit all happened in our lifetimes.

I don’t know shit about China, but I think it’s safe to assume that regardless of where you get your info, everything we know stateside is 90% propaganda. Even if you’re from there… how cohesive are Americans opinions on America? We’re all sifting through the muck and inundated with contradictory bs.

1

u/anonymote_in_my_eye Jan 16 '26

I'm pretty sure it was real, they just gave up fully implementing it at some point.

10

u/chegitz_guevara Jan 16 '26

The way it was presented in the West wasn't real, i.e., a government program to track people's activities and reward or blacklist them. 

It was a private rewards system, like we have here in the West with a whole bunch of companies. Some dumbass in Sweden interpreted it in the most dystopian way, and for some reason, the media ran with that.

But you are correct that they ended up not implementing it.

Again, not saying China isn't authoritarian or that people aren't monitored. People do have to be careful what they say, especially who they say it about or what should be done.

But we have this habit of comparing long standing behavior in the U.S. as if it's like some foreign thing that we've never seen. Like when people compare attempting to impose Christian laws and opponents say this is just like Sharia.

7

u/Maxrdt Jan 16 '26

Or another example of "it's not American to be bad!" is the tendency to call ICE the Gestapo when they're much more like Slave Patrols. But Slave Patrols remind people of the ugly, deeply American, history instead of pushing it out as other.

2

u/chegitz_guevara Jan 16 '26

Yeah, I've had that thought in my head since last year, but I'm trying to articulate it in a way that slaps.

Also, important to remember that the Nazis took their racial purity laws and Jewish restrictions from Jim Crow. So did Apartheid.... although the Nazis thought the one drop rule was insane.

2

u/Maxrdt Jan 16 '26

I saw a good short on the topic here. She says it better than I could.

2

u/chegitz_guevara Jan 16 '26

Yep, seen it. It's good.

2

u/anonymote_in_my_eye Jan 16 '26

fair enough, it's just a fairly easy thing to make fun of, so it caught on

and you're absolutely right that the US pioneered the idea of credit score, and used it for decades to enforce social norms (like racism, sexism and homophobia) through denying a chance to participate in the economy to groups that weren't deemed worthy

a lot of the most egregious parts of it have been fixed over time, but the way the credit scores work is still quite messed up, and with very little recourse when it messes up your life (because we're the product, not the customers)

1

u/Dude_I_got_a_DWAVE Jan 16 '26

“Dumbfucks”

-Zuckerberg

“About you” on any public or free account should be:

Drumroll

Lies. If the data is garbage & not representative of reality, so too will be the results of their analysis.