[freebeard]

That said, I believe the benefits of 24/7 drone surveillance over public land outweigh the privacy infringement of citizens.

Agreed, but perhaps there should be some constraint.
yro.slashdot.org..Facial Recognition Database With 3 Billion Scraped Images 'Might End Privacy as We Know It' (muckrock.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz writes:

For the past year, government transparency non-profits and Open the Government have been digging into how local police departments around the country use facial recognition. The New York Times reports on their latest discovery: That a Peter Thiel-backed startup Clearview has scraped Facebook, Venmo, and dozens of other social media sites to create a massive, unregulated tool for law enforcement to track where you were, who you were with, and more, all with just a photo.

Read the Clearview docs yourself and file a request in your town to see if your police department is using it.

The Times describes Clearview as "the secretive company that might end privacy as we know it," with one of the company's early investors telling the newspaper that because information technology keeps getting more powerful, he's concluded that "there's never going to be privacy."

He also expresses his belief that technology can't be banned, then acknowledges "Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can't ban it."

Since that story has fallen off the front page, it's superceded by:
it.slashdot.org...Exploit Fully Breaks SHA-1, Lowers the Attack Bar (threatpost.com) *

https://developers.slashdot.org...Slate Announces List of The 30 Most Evil Tech Companies (slate.com)

Slate's article includes its comprehensive list of the 30 most dangerous tech companies. But here's the top 10:

Amazon
Facebook
Alphabet
Palantir Technologies
Uber
Apple
Microsoft
Twitter
ByteDance
Exxon Mobil

There's also lots of familiar names higher up on the list, including both 8chan (#20) and Cloudflare (#21). 23andMe came in at #18, while Huawei was #11. Netflix does not appear anywhere on the list, but Disney ranks #15.

And Oracle was #19. "It takes a lot to make me feel like Google is being victimized by a bully," wrote Cory Doctorow, "but Oracle managed it."

Why they would call 8-kun 8chan, IDK. Journalists.

it.slashdot.org... Telnet Passwords Leaked For More Than 500,000 Servers, Routers, and IoT Devices (zdnet.com) *

*The technical term is 'pants around the ankles'.