It puts a lot of features at the fingertips of the faithful, including the ability to filter whole neighborhoods by religion, ethnicity, “Hispanic country of origin,” “assimilation,” and whether there are children living in the household.

Its core function is to produce neighborhood maps and detailed tables of data about people from non-Anglo-European backgrounds, drawn from commercial sources typically used by marketing and data-harvesting firms.

training videos produced by users show the extent to which evangelical groups are using sophisticated ways to target non-Christian communities, with questionable safeguards around security and privacy.

In one instance, he points to the sharable note-taking function and suggests leaving information for each household, such as “Daughter left for college” and “Mother is in the hospital.”

increasingly popular among Christian supremacist groups, prayerwalking calls on believers to wage “violent prayer” (persistently and aggressively channeling emotions of hatred and anger against Satan), engage in “spiritual mapping” (identifying areas where evil is at work, such as the darkness ruling over an abortion clinic, or the “spirit of greed” ruling over Las Vegas), and conduct prayerwalking (roaming the streets in groups, “praying on-site with insight”).

newly arrived refugees might well find a knock on the door from strangers with knowledge of their personal circumstances distressing—and that’s before these surprise visitors even begin to attempt to convert them.

placing people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds on easy-to-access databases is a dangerous road to go down

  • BlitzoTheOisSilent@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    IANAL, but I don’t believe so. Most/all states have laws that allow people to access your property to come to your front door/porch, I forget the exact name, unless your property is fenced with clearly visible “private property/no trespassing” type signs.

    However, once you’ve asked them to leave, they have to leave or they can be arrested/escorted away for trespassing should they refuse to and police become involved. In your example, if they were to come back after being asked to leave, I believe yes, but you couldn’t arrest them, the police would have to.

    • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      In that last case, where you have asked them to leave and not come back… but they do. There is a thing called a citizen’s arrest. Allowing nonpolice to make an arrest and detain a person. But what the law says and what you can do is often not the same. I just imagined haveing your doorbell record you saying to never come back, then slapping handcuffs on them if they do. Kinda sounds like fun.

      • BlitzoTheOisSilent@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Could be, but personally, I wouldn’t recommend it. While there are citizen’s arrest laws and I’m sure they’ve been used, I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, and it appears each state has different standards that need to be met to constitute a “citizen’s arrest,” with some states not allowing/defining it.

        Personally, my concern with attempting a citizen’s arrest would be doing so without meeting my state’s/country’s standard to do so. My state’s statute explicitly states it is a crime to illegally restrain someone against their will, and even states that doing so is skirting the line of kidnapping.

        Having a kidnapping charge thrown at me doesn’t seem worth it for a jackass who doesn’t want to leave my property but isn’t doing anything else (like attempting to harm me or damage my property). I’d play it safe and just let the police handle it, their qualified immunity will let them do whatever they want and face no consequences anyway.

        But again, IANAL, and YMMV, so do with all this as you will.

        • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Yeah, wouldn’t be me. I have kids and no time for the disuption. I also don’t live in an area where I would have to worry about such things. But I would love to see someone who does test it. Might put a damper on these people.