Although I oppose the surveillance state, it's important to understand the motivations and incentives involved in the move toward Flock (and its eventual successors); until those are resolved, governments are going to be implementing Flock style programs with relatively tepid opposition.
Police departments are seriously understaffed in many major cities, and officers are much less efficient than they used to be. This has led to the decline of the beat cop, who provided a kind of ambient authority that helped create, both a sense and reality, of public order. People really want the sense (even more than the reality!) of public order; without that, they will jump to faddish solutions that promise it, regardless of the data for or against it.
The best counter to Flock is to provide alternatives to it, not just reject it while keeping the status quo going. We need a new, vitalized police culture, that shares mutual trust and engagement with the community.
I agree with everything you say; my "police departments are understaffed" is too generic, and might be better stated as "too few resources are devoted to traditional beat policing." Which isn't to say that the other things are unnecessary or pointless, but it's a different set of skills.
Police departments aren’t understaffed. It’s a priority problem not a lack of resources problem. I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all. There’s occasional break ins and car break ins. When this happens it’s a big deal.
We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door to door and gathered it herself. Cops refused to do anything even though you can see the car and the plates from multiple videos, multiple angles.
Guess what the cops always have resources for? Hiding behind bushes and trees to ticket people going 5 over. Or at turns where they know they’ll get people before people see the cop car.
Our HOA came together and asked the police department about this. They gave us bullshit about how custody of evidence etc is hard and even if they put people in jail, the lenient judges will let them go anyway. It was fucked up.
Our HOA was going in hard about installing floc cameras everywhere. I had to fight hard not to get that done. One of the reasons I won wasn’t because privacy, it was because the cops literally were like unless we can directly pull video feeds from cameras, we won’t do much. And that access wasn’t available to those police department. At least at the time.
There have been many other such stories I’ve personally witnessed in the cities I’ve lived in.
Cops seem to have plenty of resources to bully people of color, seize assets and hide behind trees and bushes to ticket people, reduce the period of orange lights so people get more tickets etc. but never enough to actually do their jobs.
Baltimore has metric shittons of police cameras but it's still a dangerous shithole. Cameras don't stop idiot criminals from criming. Baltimore's police suck and the area sucks because there's massive unemployment, cameras aren't a panacea.
Cameras make it easier to gather evidence that will let the criminal justice system try and incarcerate those desperate people. It's a lot harder to commit a crime if you are currently locked in prison.
We're talking about license plate recognition cameras, not cameras that show a blurry picture of a criminal committing a crime. These LPR cameras absolutely do result in meaningful law enforcement action and help catch criminals.
See San Francisco and their use of LPR cameras like Flock combined with drone surveillance.
I agree that police department staffing is less of a real issue than people claim it is, and that many departments have target staffing levels that are artificially elevated. But I'm struck by your comment about cops "hiding behind bushes to ticket people going 5 over", because in the ultra-ultra-progressive inner-ring Chicago suburb in which I live, one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement.
On a daily basis, I see several cars that are going forty+ miles per hour over the speed limit, weaving between lanes. They go right past the cop and the cop doesn't care. Then someone going five over goes past the cop and the cop gives them a ticket. They go after the easy ones that fill their quotas, not the ones that actually make anyone safer.
> one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement.
Which traffic enforcement though?
I really do not like the fact that lefts on red are not enforced. I have numerous times seen people run a red-red light infront of a cop car with no enforcement.
That said, people going 35 in a 30? Like I care. People weaving in between lanes? Yeah that seems much more dangerous.
Are you taking the perspective of a car-driver risking getting a ticket for technically violating a traffic law, or a resident concerned about drivers technically violating traffic laws on the roads near where they live?
Police departments in a lot of major cities are absolutely unstaffed relative to population growth after decades of demonization in the media. You are ignorant.
To add to some of what others are saying, another problem is the measurement problem.
DAs and police in general are almost universally evaluated based on arrest numbers. Only very rarely on actual crime rates, and never on something as abstract as quality of life or local revenues or property values.
Gauging how good law enforcement is just by looking at arrest numbers is probably the wrong dial to be looking at.
I've noted this in the age verification debate, and in the Android developer verification debate as well.
Just denying the tradeoffs isn't productive, if tradeoffs affect others, just pushing your position disregarding the tradeoffs as fake or not important is divisive. In actuality I think that both parties become incentivized to solve the problems of the other group of people too, but as a centrist that position often gets pushback from both sides who seem to collaborate only indirectly from a place of adversarial competition and good vs evil framing, which I think is less productive than just recognizing the conflict and negotiating, but perhaps it's more engaging...
You’re not going to get nuanced law enforcement discussion on this site considering the commentary here is Reddit tier these days. I agree with you though - the mayor and city council here in Minneapolis continuously defunding the police and refusing to give them resources predictably led to sharp increases in crime. It’s baffling to me large liberal cities have demonized the police and gaslit their base into thinking everything is just fine.
I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. If the business models can't be made illegal, it should at least come with liabilities so high that no sane business would want to hold data that is essentially toxic waste.
Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong person gets access to the data, entire populations are threatened.
You want to stop the source, which is that the government and other agencies can purchase surveillance data that would otherwise be disallowed by the 4th amendment. We need to end this 'laundering' of information through third parties, and enforce the constitution by its intent.
They're also one and the same generally-- at least if the stalker has money or the right friends most kinds of law enforcement access means stalker access. It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker, and there are so many people that work in law enforcement that bribing, impersonating, or persuading your way to access is not that big a deal. Not to mention that enabled stalkers can just file a federal lawsuit and issue subpoena for records.
The only safe thing is for the records to never exist in the first place.
> It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker
This was one of the motivations for passage of the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994. Nowadays, officers need a legitimate reason to run a plate - unless the patrol car is fitted with automatic cameras[1] that look up every plate of every car they drive past.
> The Virginia state police used license plate readers to track people’s attendance at political events;
> The New York Police Department used license plate readers to keep track of who visited certain places of worship, and how often;
> Despite all this surveillance, ALPR technology has been repeatedly shown to be unreliable; like other police technologies, ALPRs can and do make mistakes.[2]
Generally, court decisions have held that you have zero expectation of privacy when you are in public spaces. Current license plate standards[3] aim for plates that are not cluttered and are easily read by the human eyeball, despite being wrapped with license plate frames (which usually make the state hard/impossible to read which is the most common failure mode for ANLR[4]). If the reflectivity material (traditionally called "ScotchLite"[5]) is worn out (or defaced), most states require the plate to be replaced.
How is that achievable? PIs can legally do it. Random people can keep tabs on you and exchange gossip. It's the sudden scale and low cost that doesn't sit well with freedom to not be tracked in public 24/7 we took for granted.
The core ill is aggregated data, because that's what allows the mass in surveillance, data mining, etc.
The collection actions are almost immaterial. Without persistence they must be re-performed for each request, which naturally provides a throughput bottleneck and makes "for everyone" untenable.
If we agree the aggregated data at rest is the problem, then addressing it would look like this:
1. Classify all data holders at scale into a regulated group
2. Apply initial regulations
- To respond to queries for copies of personal data held
- To update data or be liable in court for failing to do so
- To validate counterparties apply basic security due diligence before transferring data (or the transferer also faces liability)
- To maintain a *full* chain of custody of data (from originator through every intermediate party to holder) so that leaks / misuse can be traced
- To file yearly update on the types, amount of data, and counterparties it was transferred to with the federal government that are made public
The initial impediment to regulatory action is Google, Meta, Equifax, etc. saying "This problem is too complex and you don't understand it."
It's not. But the first step is classifying and documenting the problem.
The only way is through - everybody should get into the practice of stalking and gossiping about each other in a Molochian environment, where the people who do not do so suffer from the losing side of an information asymmetry.
Expect AI, especially post-Mythos, to just enable this at even further scale. Consumer grade wireless networking gear as a whole is a very wide attack surface and is basically never updated.
It is not realistic to say that no person is allowed to keep track of another person; watch where they go, when, with who, etc.
It should not be acceptable for a company to gather information on "everyone"; where they have been going, when, with who, how often, etc. And it should not be acceptable for them to sell that information (to government agencies OR private citizens).
It's a matter of scale.
- Making the first one illegal/impossible would be difficult/costly; and not doing so has a limited impact (to society, not to the single person affected).
- Making the second one illegal is much easier, and it's much easier to shut down a large company doing it than it is 1,000 individual stalkers. The impact of making it illegal is much wider and better for society as a whole.
We don't want anyone being stalked. But in a cost/benefit analysis, we can do something about one of them but not the other.
If PIs can "legally" do it then it sounds like there is a law which allows them to do it. That law can be revoked (unless the power comes from Constitution which would make it effectively impossible to revoke).
Note that PIs are effectively illegal under GDPR by default. They would generally need to provide Article 13 notice, i.e. you would become aware of them unless they were just asking around without actually following you. Member states can make them legal though (via Article 23) and likely in many cases they have done so.
In the US, PI licensing is only about PIing for hire. The actual act of going through public records, following cars and whatnot do not require a license, you can spy on anyone without a license as long as you don't get paid for it.
EU is more complicated, but Article 14.5.b allows withholding notice if it would impair/defeat the purpose of processing. The PI must however apply "safeguards", whatever it could mean.
Article 14(5)(b) does, but that only applies for Article 14 notice (personal data not directly obtained from data subject). Article 13 (personal data obtained directly from data subject) does not have such exception in GDPR itself.
This becomes extremely relevant when you read it in the light of the C-422/24 decision. In that personal data collected via body worn cameras was determined to be "directly obtained". Paragraph 41 from the judgement:
> If it were accepted that Article 14 of the GDPR applies where personal data are collected by means of a body camera, the data subject would not receive any information at the time of collection, even though he or she is the source of those data, which would allow the controller not to provide information to that data subject immediately. Therefore, such an interpretation would carry the risk of the collection of personal data escaping the knowledge of the data subject and giving rise to hidden surveillance practices. Such a consequence would be incompatible with the objective, referred to in the preceding paragraph, of ensuring a high level of protection of the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons.
Given this it's very unlikely that PI observing (especially if they record) could be considered to be Article 14 instead of Article 13 type of collection as it's exactly "hidden surveillance practice" that the Court warned about.
Member states do have a right to restrict the Article 13 disclosure obligations via Article 23 restriction, but that requires specific law in the member state & the law itself must fulfill the obligations that Article 23 requires. Article 23(2) essentially forbids leaving everything up to the controller.
And as far as PI in the US goes, actions between stalking and PI "for self" tend to be so similar that I wouldn't necessarily recommend anyone to try it.
Means of Control by Byron Tau and Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine. Can’t recommend these books enough for anyone who is skeptical of the above claim.
Honestly it should probably just be illegal for anyone, private or public, to engage in mass surveillance (or "data gathering", whatever) of anybody who didn't expressly consent to it. As long as the data exist, they will be abused.
When I installed the SoundCloud app and it told me by continuing I agree to them sharing my data with their 954 partners.[1]
1. I’m not even joining. When I mostly recently installed the SoundCloud app - for the first time on a new device, that’s what’s it said: 954 partners. How can anyone reasonably understand what it is their agreeing to in that scenario.
This is the important point. You need the right to not be discriminated when you withhold your consent, otherwise your consent is effectively meaningless, as it is forced on you by your impossible bargaining position. This is one of the central pillars of the GDPR without which it wouldn't work at all. Be advised to make asking customers for consent that doesn't directly benefit them illegal as well, lest you risk creating another wave of malicious cookie banners.
> You need the right to not be discriminated when you withhold your consent, otherwise your consent is effectively meaningless, as it is forced on you by your impossible bargaining position.
Which is why "we don't serve patrons without shoes and pants" policy is unconstitutional, yeah.
If you don't want to agree to a business's demands — you're welcome to not deal with them and look for an alternative. All the alternatives have the same (or even worse) demands? Unless you can prove collusion, that's just how the invisible hand of the market worked its magic out. Go petition you congressman to violate laissez-faire even more than it already is, I guess.
The trouble with this is that I, at least, am trying to live in a society. And society has both rights and responsibilities. Sometimes you are forced to do things, or don’t do things, contrary to your desires. Every freedom has two sides, you can’t ignore the fact that increasing some freedoms for one decreases other freedoms for others.
The shirt and shoes example is a great example in fact that illustrates the point. You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes, just like a business does not have unlimited freedom to impose whatever terms it likes, just because it put it in its ToS.
> You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes
Okay, I am gonna be 100% serious here: you absolutely should have such a freedom. Just as loitering or jaywalking being a crime is inherently totalitarian, what the hell.
In this case, unlimited means literally everywhere.
You do have the right to go barefoot in your own home. And in true public spaces.
But, a property owner can require shoes. Do I care if somebody is barefoot in the local grocer? No, not really. But, the proprietor might because they want to limit their liability (should something fall on your foot, a cart run it over, or a loose tack/nail somehow land in an aisle, etc).
Except the are companies with which you effectively must do business.
Microsoft (or Apple).
Any web host, payment processor, etc that's contracted to do work for your local government (I suppose you could try driving to the government office and pay by check, but then you need to give consent to Ford or Chevy).
Short of living like a hermit, there's no practical way to avoid all ridiculous T&C.
Yes please. Your shaming didn't work. Free markets centre of gravity is biased towards capital and land owners. We need people power to balamce it back. Something we poor people are all enjoying now (pssst me and you are poor.... kings and barons are the few and rich)
I really need to start putting /s at the ends of my comments where I merely restate the currently adopted legal theory/framework in non-sugar-coated terms, don't I? The whole liberal movement has its roots in the merchants' and industrialists' desire of having as little interference from the aristocracy-heavy governments of the yore, and it really shows even to this day.
Not only that, but it should be illegal (eg: fines for the company and potential jail time for executives) for tying consent to use/purchase of services or products.
A significant chunk of the infrastructure that farms data is now from private organizations, who sell that information because it is a source of revenue.
Government is the bogeyman we are afraid of, but ad tech is doing the actual heavy lifting.
The Potus is literally a pedophile, criminals are here to stay and winning. Your camera company supports them as long as they have money and/or control of the system.
Even if we somehow, perhaps via magic genie-wish, made the government totally disinterested... these systems would still enable dystopian levels of private surveillance and manipulation.
This should ironically start at the VC level - and that includes YC et al. Some one comes and says "hey, we got this idea, we collect facial recognition data for training proprietary AI models", the response from the VC should "I'm gonna stop you right there. This is unethical."
Not "Did you say I can 5x my ROI? Here, shut up and take my money!"
Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly
said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain
10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will
produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it
ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at
which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its
owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely
encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is
here stated.
We today can also add crypto schemes and mass surveillance to the examples.
And mind you, VC are people who are both pretty good at earning money and also eager for even more money. That's how they got to where they are, after all, not necessarily by being virtuous (over a certain minimally required amount, or a social signaling of possessing such an amount).
Fair enough. But, to be fair to them, they did have a falling out. There was a story on here how it went all the way to PG and then they asked Sam to leave (Something like that). I think saw it in a comment here, really don't remember.
Assume VCs are brainless profit maximizers who don't understand ethics. How do you get them to say "I'm gonna stop you right there"?
Answer: Make it unprofitable to collect this data. Change the incentives.
So really, the correct answer IS on the legal level. Make a set of laws which make it burdensome at best and completely unprofitable at worst, and then the incentives within the system aligns.
Agree with your point and the solution. Make it risky to operate - so that most VCs would wash their hands off due to legal risks. Kind of like what happened to the crypto space. But, it always gets worse before it gets better. Tons of rug pulls happened before SEC took action.
This is great sentiment. Companies can be stopped, and then the medusa grows another head. Kill the business model, make the brokering of data illegal, and if caught, fines would be paid directly to those effected. This would go a long ways to promoting privacy first.
Look at the silver lining - once the paperclip maximizers have crashed both modern civilization and the biosphere, it will be easy for any survivors to find privacy amid the metaphorical and actual ruins.
One simple remedy would be to make companies (that collect such private data) and their directors/executives jointly & severally liable[0] for any identity theft. It should come with "forever" liability equivalent to SuperFund sites[1]
Notes:
0 - Financial penalties would not be limited to "your share" of the penalty. If you have money, and the other parties don't, the plaintiffs can collect from whichever defendant has money.
1 - Everyone who ever owned the site with the toxic waste is liable for the cleanup. This is why when a gas station is sold (in the US), all of the fuel tanks are dug up and replaced - this way, none of the future leakage can be attributed to the previous owners.
When you have dedicated groups of ppl on IRC and Newsgroups showing how easy it is to access these systems and teach others, you know it’s a bad thing. There are dozens of them and most of the people gathering this information and using it is not for good. It’s a flawed system
There is a weird fetish with Flock right now. Privacy advocates have been screaming at the public for 25 years now and suddenly the public cares and is obsessed with this one very specific company.
Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7.
I mean, cool, stop Flock, but don't stop there. Flock is very much not the final boss in this fight. The cynic in me says we will all get bored once Flock is off the radar though.
It’s easier to consider responses or solutions to specific problems, rather than to solve for a broad, general principle. You can see this in many areas of life. Solving for general principles requires group effort (usually); you can get buy-in from individuals if you csn focus them on specific cases or subsets. So the Floxk fetish is reasonable at this point, IMO.
There’s also nothing inherently wrong with carrying sensors in your pocket. The “wrong” is in the providers/manufacturers exploiting the position they put themselves in. Managing data is hard, and most people don’t want to do the necessary work most of the time, so the providers/manufacturers offer to do that for their users/customers. However, they also exploit their csretaker position by tresting the data like they own it too, and extracting profit.
If the solutions to the Flock problems could be framed such that other providers/manufacturers had to build systems that were “local first” or “private by default” (as in pre-internet home computing plus explicit, finegrained shsring consents), then it would also be fine to carry sensors. I want my fitness tracker and GPS. I just don’t want the data it generates used to build advertising profiles on me such that ads (and government mass surveillance dragnets) can follow my every other move.
>Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7.
While the above is a difference in scale, the various "credit bureaus" have been doing this stuff for much, much longer.[0][1][2]
That's not to excuse the use of ALPRs and tracking on mobile devices. It's all really creepy and collection and trade in such should have strong negative incentives (company breaking fines, loss of corporate charter, jail time, etc.).
In the meantime, one has to deal with at least some of this stuff unless you're willing to go live in a leanto in the woods.
I don't think it's a "weird fetish." It's just most of the things privacy advocates have been warning about - PRISM, warrantless metadata requests, tech companies handing over data - are all largely invisible.
A camera pointing at your child's playground or gymnastics class is much more salient.
I followed the shooting at Brown University last year very closely. Brown's leadership was heavily criticized for having camera blind spots and not being able to track the shooter's exact movements through campus. I can understand why people with stewardship over the safety of their students/customers/constituents would make decisions to err on the side of tracking. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I understand it.
I got my BS in Computer Science legally carrying a Glock in every class. I think it's very likely I was the only person doing so; Not because I was fearful, but because I like being prepared. It takes very little long-term effort for people to carry pepper spray, a gun (if able), and a first aid kit everywhere they go. You never know who's life you might save.
There's been exercises where you simulate active shooters with some or none of the people armed. As I remember it the situation with some of the targets were armed ended up with higher casualty numbers in quite a few simulations. The solution to a bad guy with a gun might be a good guy with a gun, but it also might be easier paths to run away and lowering the probability of a bad guy getting access to a gun.
Looking at the non-US stats, it's pretty clear the latter is at least a lot more credible.
I'm actually not surprised. As a conceal carrier, I think that most people that conceal carry a firearm are woefully under-trained and potentially a liability. I still absolutely encourage people willing to put in the effort to do it, given the potential to save lives. Pretty much every single active shooter situation only ends with the suspect shooting themselves, or being shot - I want every chance to end the threat possible.
The criticism around that event, I believe, involved Brown University disablinf cameras trying to protect potential illegal immigrants being targeted by ice. It wasn't the lack of cameras. It was a purposeful disabling of said cameras that already existed.
Yes and so the real issue is that they outsourced to the wrong compan, gave up control of their camera feeds, and violated the privacy of their campusgoers. Had they just had their own CCTV system then this would have not happened.
Correct, whoever made the decision to create ICE, as it became a security risk that lead to deaths. Glad that's what you said, and no other valid interpretation.
While there were deaths, I didn't see any that were the result of a "security risk". I did see a whole lot of stupid people doing stupid things, and none of them were ICE agents, so I'm surprised there weren't more deaths.
> I did see a whole lot of stupid people doing stupid things, and none of them were ICE agents, so I'm surprised there weren't more deaths.
Random masked goons in unmarked cars trying to arrest people is pretty damn stupid, yes. Same goons putting themselves in front of cars, and shooting through side windows of cars driving away, or shooting at random people on the street, is pretty damn stupid.
I'm going to provide a bit of nuance here, but would like to clarify I am not a fan of ICE's tactics in the slightest. Yes, the ICE agent was stupid for standing in front of the car, just as Renee Good was stupid for hitting the gas while he was standing in front of her car. At that moment, he became 100% legally justified to shoot. The limits of human cognitive performance significantly limit how fast your brain can send the signal to your hand to stop shooting, and the stop-signal happened when he was standing by her side window. In a split-second, he was shooting to defend himself against a reasonably perceived threat of being run over. Yes, it could have been completely avoided by both individuals, but "shooting through side windows of cars driving away" is misleading. The Alex Pretti incident, completely, totally unjustified. Just wanted to provide a bit of nuance from the perspective of someone who studies self-defense encounters.
It's a relatively new agency in name (2003), but it's not really all that new. It was formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and U.S. Customs.
A little know fact is that Biden deported more illegal immigrants then previous presidents with smaller budget and without killing them. He also deported higher amount if actual criminals in the set. So, you know, whatever before ICE is now was more effective.
Also, the abuses and violence are staggering. And they managed to deport or mistreat actual citizens, because they did not cared. Again, not effective.
Here is the problem - conservative and right wing people use "effective" as euphemism for "we want to see as much cruelty and abuse as possible".
This is a very common pattern; my university pushed through a ZeroEyes AI camera/open carry weapon detection contract within 2 weeks of a shooting at a nearby school, even though it’s trivial to bypass by hiding it; it’s most probably just (gruesome as it is to think about) a bad press insurance so if anything happened, they can say they had “state of the art AI detection” and they did all they could. No one wants to be the one caught not doing “all they could” against the media cacophony in the immediate aftermath.
Yep, here they admitted there were local revolutionary war re-enactors who were falsely flagged (although thankfully they didn't let it get past the first flag).
I recently did a dive into ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder i.e. sociopaths) and unsurprisingly most what's stopping them from outright killing people is the likelihood that they'd be caught. So one thing is clear is that as long as we have sociopaths and the like who treat crime purely as value/risk proposition some sort of powerful detective tooling will always be necessary.
Unfortunately automated surveillance is considered the best detective tool we have but in reality it doesn't seem to be the case with public self surveillance and good ol' park a policeman box in every neighborhood seems to outperform automated surveillance. So there's much more to this than "surveillance is bad or good" discussions we have right now.
With most of these things, people are for state power until they are victimized by it. It's a common pattern.
:D
I've had property stolen. Cameras generally won't help, and didn't help. Limiting ingredient is often not knowing who did it in any case-- in most places most common crime is committed by a tiny number of regular characters. Go look at the mountains of threads online where someone had a tracker enabled object stolen and knew exactly who had it only to have law enforcement do nothing.
that doesn't seem to be the case always, given the data on crime reporting:
"Patterns in police reporting for property crime during 2020–2023 were similar to those for violent crime. A quarter (25%) of all property victimizations in urban areas were reported to police, which was lower than the percentages in suburban (33%) and rural (36%) areas (figure 2).
Similar to overall property victimization, a lower percentage of other theft victimizations were reported to police in urban areas (20%) compared to suburban (28%) and rural (31%) areas."
"For violent crimes, in 1997, 7% of victims
stated that “Police wouldn’t help” as the reason they did not call the police. This more than
doubled to 16% by 2021. For property crimes, the corresponding rates were 12% in 1997 and 18% in
2021"
Police work for the State. The State orders them to work for the Public when it interests the State. Intervening in violent crime and property crime can be seen, cynically, as a PR move.
To be beholden to the State for justice and protection is fine when the State is beholden to the Public for their consent. Today, in the West, the Public has been so thoroughly disarmed, and /disrobed/, that consent is a formality, consent can no longer be withheld.
Look no further than Flock and FISA for the ongoing crisis of consent.
When cops are released from the State apparatus, they'll be given the respect and admiration they deserve. Until then, it's difficult to separate them from their incentive structure.
We need a law that says if you hold any data about a person, they must be notified when anyone accesses it, including law enforcement.
I used to work in criminal investigations. I understand how this might make investigation of real crime more difficult. But so does the fact that you need a warrant to enter someone's home, and yet we manage to investigate crime anyway.
Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company. It should require a warrant and notification. You could even make the notification be 24 hours after the fact. But it should be required.
The entities holding the information here are literally police departments. The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations. It's good to want things, though.
The information is not in any way restricted to use in active criminal investigations, and further, has been found to frequently be used for a variety of other purposes.
It's a bit like saying pornography is used in the study of human anatomy.
~jedberg is talking about a hypothetical law that would apply to ALPR data. In reply, you said "The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations." ("The information" here referring to ALPR data.) (You also said, "The entities holding the information here are literally police departments.", but I don't see that that's relevant unless we choose to believe that police departments are more deserving of public trust by default than any other organization.)
I was replying to the "used in active criminal investigations" part. Yes, the ALPR data managed by Flock is sometimes used in active criminal investigations. However, it's also used for many other things.
The many other things that it's used for supports ~jedberg's argument.
So we're clear, you believe there should be a law that, when a police department collects information about you during a criminal investigation, they should notify you directly that they've done so?
Specifically, I believe that if information that is held by a private 3rd party I accessed by anyone, law enforcement or otherwise, that third party should be required to tell you that it was requested and by whom. Just like they can't put a gag order on a search warrant to your home, this hypothetical search would be exempt from gag orders.
Homes might be an exception, I don't know, but I'm of the impression it's routine for police to get physical search warrants with nondisclosure orders attached.
Right, and my point was, your proposal would proscribe large classes of common law enforcement searches. I'm stipulating the homestead exemption you're talking about here (obvs. neither of us are lawyers), but, given that, you're saying it should be extended far, far outside of homes.
Are you a little concerned that by advocating a drastic change in policing extending far past ALPR cameras that you're creating room for proponents of the cameras to say that everyone who opposes them wants broadly to hamstring the police?
I watched ALPR proponents in Oak Park make exactly those kinds of arguments.
It does make sense. Police are absolutely not beyond reproach, and there's screwups all the time. They need to be held to a high standard.
It's also easy to imagine reasonable compromises, like a time delay where they only have to report after e.g. 48 hours, and allowing a system whereby a judge can issue a warrant to extend that delay.
And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.
Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right? But what you are saying is not just that LEA would need warrants to look at public recordings from a willingly cooperating camera owner, and that the warrants can't be gag orders (unless specified), but that the targets must be notified, even if the subject under search were someone else, the fact that I'm included in a recording would compel the LEA to notify me?
And how exactly would I be notified? Wouldn't that necessitate even more privacy invading features like facial recognition and a facial to contact information technology? Not an uncommon paradox.
Again, just want to understand the position, my position might leak as the question being leading, but I can't help it.
Much like you can't gag a search warrant on a home, you wouldn't be able to gag these orders either.
> And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.
True, but my proposal would require that they notify you.
> Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right?
No, but I'm saying this should apply to any time a 3rd party releases information to anyone, including law enforcement. In this case the Flock cameras feed into a private database. They should disclose when someone looks something up.
> And how exactly would I be notified?
Presumably if they can identify you then there would be a way to notify you. But those details could be left to the author of the bill.
My main point is that your data, when housed with a 3rd party, should be considered an extension of your home and offer the same guarentees and protections as the items actually in your home.
You can kind of circumvent that law by keeping the recordings in house.
What we have in argentina is an Habeas Data law, if someone has data about you, you can ask for it, (or ask it be amended or deleted. Pretty simple right?
The home bit is no go though. Maybe an extension of the self? Too flimsy though, there's enough strong of a case treating it as what it is, an image, a visual representation of a person. A home is a specific of a concept that means something else
> Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company.
Nice idea, but at least in the U.S. (with the lone exception of LE obtaining cell phone location records), courts have consistently held that if you give your data to someone else, you are no longer entitled to an expectation of privacy in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
If you want your data to be considered an extension of your home, at least for now, keep it at home.
Nice idea (2), but many companies and govt agencies force one to give lots of data or you will not be receiving services, sometimes very important services.
I think the notion that data would be a home is beyond weak, but the explanation you gave for why isn't solid either, since the objects of data do not need to and in this case haven't consented.
That is, recordings of people in public settings (in some jurisdictions) are property of the recorder, but it still isn't a home (just imagine how that would work in some jurisdictions, someone takes a picture of you and it's trespassing? Would you be able to shoot them?)
Alternatively, one could create serious civil damages for those capturing surveillance imagery that causes various harms including false prosecution for any data they collected, even if it was unlawfully taken or used after it was collected. ... then let the liability work out the problem by making it too risky to run non-targeted mass surveillance apparatus.
This would avoid having to define what is and isn't a mass surveillance system. Any camera recording off your property would have a legal risk for the operator-- but if you're just recording locally and only using it to discourage or solve crime you're suffering the risk would be minimal and justified.
Is there not some concept that utilizes cryptography in a way such that information about people is accessible, but if it's accessed, then the access request is added to a ledger (akin to blockchain) such that who made the access, when, and about whom becomes provably public knowledge?
That will never happen in America without a focused political revolution because anarcho-libertarian techbro billionaires profit extensively from personal data trafficking and bought off the majority of politicians to keep it that way.
It sounds good but the implementation would be harder than achieving single payer healthcare that's better than what Medicare is now destroyed by for-profit prior authorizations and fake healthcare with lifetime limits.
I think the answer is better technology, not less of it.
This stuff is more easily available in rudimentary systems. Consider the model of recording everything and just dumping tapes somewhere. Much harder to monitor abuse than a well designed system with an audit log. Better yet, have computers process the data and only expose what's absolutely necessary. Technology lets you do that.
But I want to push back against this idea that we have anything resembling a police or surveillance state. Nothing will dispel this myth more than an experience reporting a crime to police. Think about thefts in drug stores. They have security guards, cameras, security devices, etc, but every day the same group of people walk in and walk out with stolen goods. Everyone knows who they are, but police do absolutely nothing to stop them, because there is no political will. So the solution is to put deodorant behind lock and key and close down stores in high crime areas.
So besides these one off creepy stories of people abusing the system, this stuff amounts to nothing. I want to use technology more and perhaps our murder clearance rate can stop going down.
Heart disease accounts for 22% of all deaths in the US; cancer is 19.8%; injuries like car accidents come in third at about 7.8%. Homicide doesn't make it anywhere near the top 10.
When it comes to firearms, the vast majority of deaths are suicides with homicides being about a third of that. And the majority of homicides are domestic violence which usually happen inside the home.
The fact that the homicide clearance rate has decreased DESPITE turning our entire society into one of the most advanced surveillance states in human history pisses me off. That's MY tax money going to subsidize these companies that are taking away ALL OF OUR rights. In 2021 China's supreme court banned the use of facial recognition technologies in public places and then further strengthened that ban in 2025. They also got the PIPL in 2021 which is an even stronger version of the GDPR. In these respects, the US has regressed beyond The People's Republic of mf'ing China.
Your answer is to give these companies MORE of my money. I think the answer is to force them to pay us all back and let us reinvest it into problems that are actually relevant to anyone who doesn't obsessively consume True Crime podcasts
My quality of life is affected by crime. Sure no one is going to kill me. But why should we accept crime? It's easy to solve. Arrest people and keep them locked up, especially for anti-social crimes. Just yesterday, Noemi Guzman, took a large kitchen knife from a Walmart, kidnapped a 3yo and nearly stabbed him. In 2024, she was involved in another violent incident (including attacking her father and breaking into a church) and was found not responsible by reason of insanity. So too insane to throw in jail so we let her out in the street?
My answer is to arrest and prosecute the people that are destroying polite society. I don't get your point in China. I could care less.
Noemi Guzman does not have nearly the impact on your life that your neighbor driving a car with the catalytic converter removed or the CEO of a company that has a facility near you that made the decision to cut corners on holding tanks for their trichloroethylene
My children going to a park with regular drug users with convenient needle drop (remove needle drops and arrest the handful of drug users that hang around children's parks with dangerous drugs on them)
Package thefts (sting operation to arrest the handful of people organizing these thefts)
Crazy people on subway (end "showtime" and people sleeping on the train)
People driving dangerously (cameras)
Smell of weed everywhere (don't allow smoking weed in public)
But I guess the few random fully avoidable deaths is acceptable because its not that often? Kind of like a child sacrifice we have to endure because its somehow compassionate to let crazy people roam the streets and assault people randomly?
None of this involves corporate CEOs and is relatively simple to solve.
If we want to reduce avoidable deaths, you can get a lot more bang for your buck investing in almost ANYTHING other than this extremely rare event. We've already invested way too much of it. And you're paying for it with MY taxes
You are overindexing on it because you watch too much TV.
Your kids would be a lot safer and better off if we moved some of our money away from surveillance and put it into cleaning up superfund sites on the NPL
There's no buck here. You just enforce the law and prosecute. They're already in the system being arrested for the umpteenth time. Just leave them in prison, society would improve considerably.
Cops already exist, they are just told they can't enforce the law.
The fact that the police won't use surveillance data in a way you would consider good and effective does not mean you don't live in a surveillance state.
One of the key aspects of police and surveillance states is that the incentives are structured so that the policing and surveillance need not be done with the interest of public welfare in mind. As you said there is no political will.
Yes I think this site is not unique, I personally have at least 2 websites I have not shared anywhere with at least all of this information, that I am developing for my local community or just for myself. Its a subject worth discussing but I am also skeptical of the value of this link. I think maybe what is most worth considering is, "does this have value over deflock?" is it more accessible? Less overwhelming? I am not sure but I think that conversation would not be a great use of time in this particular space.
I’m all for mass surveillance of roadways, but I want to see results. Every day I see and hear people breaking laws with their vehicles in ways that make life worse for others around them.
Yep. Automate the whole thing and be done with traffic cops abusing their power to meet quotas or harass minorities. It would likely make car insurance cheaper too since people would drive more safely, and the cost of investigations and arbitration drops down with readily available video evidence.
Just make quotas illegal. Make enforcing them a felony for command staff. Lock up body worn camera videos so they can't be used for "performance review." That footage belongs to the public, for legal purposes, it shouldn't be a "tool" outside of that.
More importantly, can I borrow you car? I have some, uh, stuff, to go do.
You can at least question an officer in court. Automated stuff is incapable of testifying - which is why traffic camera "tickets" are not enforceable in every state.
Facial recognition performs so poorly on non-white people that you'd have to find the most racist officer saying "they all look the same to me" to get that degree of defectivity.
> You can at least question an officer in court. Automated stuff is incapable of testifying - which is why traffic camera "tickets" are not enforceable in every state.
That's besides the point, you don't need to question a picture with accompanying information (such as location, detected speed).
> Facial recognition performs so poorly on non-white people
You don't need facial recognition. Car with plate XYZ (trivial character recognition) ran a red light, $1000 fine with associated picture proof of the crime sent to the owner of the car as registered in their locality. Done.
Most of those red light tickets you’d be surprised but city subreddit advice will be like “ignore it, don’t even look up the ticket number because that acknowledged you received the ticket.” They only mail it to you via regular mail. They have no clue if it actually got to you.
This is true in theory but not so much in practice. The American legal system only works for people with enough time and/or money to pursue justice (or whatever else they want from the legal system). Like traffic tickets on a road trip - very few people can actually go back to fight them.
Facial recognition is irrelevant if the liability is on whomever the vehicle is registered to.
Mass surveillance is by definition oppressive. I think you mean to say you're in favor of targeted surveillance, targeted at criminals, who are on roadways. This is the distinction that's getting lost.
Give me a database of everywhere you have ever driven, and I will find multiple ways to make you look like a criminal.
Right - we don't know. Even with mass-surveillance, you don't know if they're a criminal, because criminals can look innocent, and innocents can look criminal. That's why you need to do more than just look at the whole world and look for any pattern of criminality - you need targeted detection and analysis.
An example is cops stopping and searching you. If they're looking for a murderer, and they stop people coming out of Home Depot, and find a shovel, lye and rope in your trunk - hey, looks like a murderer! But it also could just be any customer going to Home Depot to get gardening supplies. So they can only stop people if they have probable cause: a reason they specifically think this specific person is the murderer.
(The other reason for probable cause, which is just as valid today as it was during the Framers' time, was to protect innocent civilians from unreasonable search and seizure by the Government, as well as protecting personal privacy. Mass surveillance violates all those principles.)
Driving recklessly is not an "essential liberty". Safer roads equals less deaths and injuries on them, which is not "temporary safety", it's literally life or death.
We don't need mass surveillance for traffic control. It can be done by the police if they really wanted to do it. Truth is, they don't care enough about road safety. This is about surveillance of citizens for control. First step is just infrastructure setup - next step is using it to prosecute those who dare to challenge the rise of fascism.
Be an advocate for your own rights to privacy. Don't simply accept it as normalcy.
Letting the state control our privacy is a huge price to pay for traffic management. Especially if said state is currently detaining people left and right, and occasionally murdering them
I'm not concerned about "privacy" on public roads. If law enforcement illegally detaining and murdering people is a concern, I'd rather increase accountability for the law enforcement officers engaging in illegal activity, instead of removing their ability to police actual crime.
What might be more productive is to suggest legal ways law enforcement can prevent and enforce the problems this was designed to stop. It will help you see where the laws are limited, what needs to be updated so you can balance the risk of privacy vs. the need to enforce laws (or the need for new laws all together). Right now we're osilcating between gaps criminals exploit and infringing on fundemental privacy rights.
As much as I dislike flock. There's definitely a case to be made for the business model where first responder companies can generate huge amounts of taxpayer funded ARR in "sanctuary cities" due to criminals never getting actually serving sentences. If criminals are stuck in the:
"Commit crime -> brief retention period -> activist judge lets you go" loop, then you can definitely build a business model that just capitalizes on the fact that there's no consequences to committing a crime, and local/state governments have to waste copious amount of money due to the incredibly inflated demand of first responder services.
First: that's not what a "sanctuary city" is. That term specifically refers to cities that don't let their local law enforcement and courts assist ICE/CBP. The idea is that local crimes happen to everyone regardless of immigration status and we don't want a situation where undocumented people live lawlessly because they can't talk to police or court officers without fear of deportation.
Second: there's no "activist judge lets you go" loop. In practice judges are pretty tightly constrained by the law when it comes to pretrial detention. However, there _is_ a "cops refuse to do their job out of protest" loop.
And also: none of this is a technical problem! It's all political/social dynamics and surveillance doesn't affect it at all.
- I used "Sanctuary city" as a synonym for a "soft on crime" city.
- An example of who I classify as an "activist judge" is Teresa Stokes. She let out the repeat offender with 14 prior arrests that stabbed Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte[1].
I think you have a very warped understanding of municipal government, policy, and how it relates to law enforcement. Because nowhere in the US that I'm aware of has a city council that can "tell the DA" anything.
You’ve identified an interesting loop which I reckon is deeply uncomfortable for the Progressive type.
Nonetheless, it’s true for most voters in Oakland or SF. Just last month, a judge let a homeless stabber back on the street after he threatened and tried attacking SF’s mayor and his bodyguard. The Progressive reaction was to blame the mayor and the police— and then the newly freed homeless guy immediately broke the law again and had to be re-arrested.
I’m curious if there were some consortium of all private businesses with their own surveillance cams deciding to aggregate their footage could it be stopped?
I worry about this. It's easy enough to go around putting bags over flock cameras, but it would be harder to justify targeting ones that just maybe are doing double duty.
We need to find a way to make partnering with flock a liability.
Here's a modest proposal: what if we made it a serious crime for anyone to retain automatically-recorded surveillance footage, or data derived from it, for longer than some limited period of time (say, 7 days) unless said footage is released to the public within that timeframe?
That is, you can put up cameras wherever you want, but you can't gain any kind of competitive advantage by doing so.
I think the public would be more alert to the dangers of mass surveillance if the magnitude of that surveillance was more obvious. And if everyone was watching everyone, at least it wouldn't as easily abused for purposes such as selective prosecution or blackmail.
For the Canadians sitting at home, tut tutting more American foolishness that could never happen up here... Flock started their expansion into Ontario this very month[1].
Why do people consistently and falsely believe that they have privacy in public settings? You are literally out in public. If you don't want your behavior in public to be observed, then either don't behave in such a way that you wouldn't want observed, or stay home.
UPDATE: don't conflate stalking with observation. These are not the same. You can observe, but you cannot intimidate.
Every entrance to my neighborhood has a Flock camera from my local police department. Tracking the exact time I enter and leave my home is at the very least right at this line you’re trying to draw.
What's the difference in outcome between passive stalking by having sufficient cameras to capture everyone's actions at all times and active stalking with a film crew?
It is intimidating and threatening to most normal people for their wearabouts to be tracked at all times, regardless of the mode.
Take this opportunity to learn that different people might have different thresholds to feel intimidated and that normal people don't feel comfortable being tracked at all times in real life, regardless of the mechanism by which it's being executed.
In the above example, maybe you feel uncomfortable because the film crew is following you around in broad daylight? Would you feel better if they stayed hidden like the flock cameras in this example?
They're not being tracked at all times in real life. They're potentially being tracked in public.
I get that some people have a desire for privacy in public. And I'm even sympathetic to it. However, with the exception of the EU, privacy in public not is a right, nor is it a thing most people believe they possess. (And even ECHR Article 8 has a carveout for recording public activities for legitimate purposes.)
If you think you should have such privacy rights, by all means, use the political process to achieve it. But note that it's not cost-free, and there will be tradeoffs.
In the film crew example, what is the difference if the crew is sufficiently far away from you such that you won't know? The paparazzi already do it to celebrities, seems reasonable for individuals to just track each other at a distance if we're all okay with your proposed path.
> seems reasonable for individuals to just track each other at a distance if we're all okay with your proposed path.
They often do. What am I gonna do, run up to anyone who's taking cell phone videos that might have me in it and try to force them to stop recording? That would make me look unhinged.
It’s a false equivalence. Passive surveillance cameras aren’t the same as having a bunch of annoying people trailing me, which gives rise to the concern for the personal safety of me and my family. So I reject the comparison.
> Passive surveillance cameras aren’t the same as having a bunch of annoying people trailing me, which gives rise to the concern for the personal safety of me and my family. So I reject the comparison.
Rejecting reality doesn't mean it's not real. The direction passive surveillance is going and is at is already approaching active surveillance in terms of outcomes. The only difference is it's being applied more uniformly, rather than just to a specific individual. But the outcomes in terms of tracking all of our whereabouts are indistinguishable.
This is the entire premise of the post, which you are tiptoeing around and never directly answering the question of "is it fine for everyone to be tracked in public at all times"? A yes or no here would be helpful.
What about if/when those cameras are no longer really passive, and everything they see gets autonomously compiled into a dossier on your activities and movements?
That’s a separate issue. Real time observation is one thing. What happens with the data afterwards is another.
Now, the obvious response to that is “if you’re not watching, it can’t be recorded in the first place.” But we have legitimate reasons for wanting to observe public activities. The question is, how do we strike the right balance between legitimate use and abuse?
Would you mind if I parked near your house, such that every morning, when you drove past, I could follow you. To work, to the store, to the gym, you know, wherever.
Then on the way home I'll park where I left off. If anyone asks me I'll them everything I know about you. It's "public" information after all.
Having this surveillance done by human beings rate limits the process to, in theory, focus it on actual criminals. Requiring warrants for the more invasive and persistent techniques adds another layer of accountability.
You're bootstrapping your argument with an assumption that there's something to account for. Public activities are public. You're shifting the accountability from the actor to the observer.
Lawmakers won't care until it is them and their kids that are being tracked by "hackers". Flock API's are poorly protected and the individual cameras are hackable as shown by Benn Jordan in multiple YouTube videos.
This movement reminds me of the "protecting democracy" message that was run on the national stage that pailed against the backdrop of rising inflation.
Privacy is important just as democracy is important, but crime and lawlessness feel more immediate and will always take center stage.
Any message to try to address the spread of flock and flock-like business models have to address what replaces it. If the only choice people are given is either having flock, or car break-ins, then I think we can probably guess what people would choose.
SFPD at least, has credited flock and flock-like tech for why property crime has dropped so much in recent years.
It's taxpayer-funded dragnet-warrantless surveillance, data harvesting, and stalking. And it is local elected officials' deliberate voluntary or bribed choice to invite Big Mommy into the lives of their constituents and people passing through. The anti-privacy doomers don't get to force their invasive anti-values on everyone else who wants respect for and to preserve their right to not be autonomously surveilled and monitored every single second when not in a business or organization premises.
Agreed. Flock has been a key contributor in solving numerous crimes. I'm happy for Flock to be in my county and would like the police to have more access to technology like this, not less.
Does your country also have a recurring problem of police shooting unarmed citizens? If not, it probably helps to understand the dynamics of why the police are not widely trusted here
County was not a typo. It's awful whenever there's an overuse of force in the USA. I'd recommend watching a few police bodycam videos on youtube before judging them wholesale though. The experience of a police officer in the United States seems to be long periods of tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror and adrenaline. Anyone out there can have a gun and encounters can unexpectedly escalate to deadly violence in seconds. Some of them should not be police officers. There are many great officers out there just trying to protect their communities.
All it takes is one cop acting badly to ruin things for quite a lot of people though, and the fact that police uniformly circle ranks around any of their members who is accused of something regardless of the validity makes "well, not all of them are bad!" a pretty useless sentiment. I'll consider them individually when they start holding individuals accountable, but not before then.
I think you're making some hasty generalizations here. They don't "uniformly" cover for their colleagues. Do you expect the police service to be perfect and never make mistakes? Can you point me towards a single human-run service where that's the case?
I am not American, but in my extremely dangerous country we have many privately-operated cameras and I don’t know a single person who is against them. We also have strict privacy laws.
So I was disappointed by what felt like very weak arguments in the article. Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused. The solution is to fix the abuse problem.
I’d like to hear stronger arguments against these devices, so that I’m better informed locally.
> Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused.
This isn't your life pro tip to get you some additional 20% discount on the next McDonald's order, or some ethical kind of abuse that gets you your needed treatment, because the healthcare system is just too nonexistent to care, though.
Any criticism against the use of surveillance technology needs to resort to the rhetoric of COULD, because any other choice of words would put the final nail in any surveillance companies' coffin, with evidence from either whistleblowers or circumvented security issues.
It's certainly hard to look behind the curtains - fair, but in a world where the top companies are selling advertisements by accumulating and correlating large-scale tracking information from every person on earth, regardless whether they're users of the products or not, it should be much harder to shrug off such a possibility as dystopian nonsense than to see it as the fucked up reality (circumvention of fundamental rights included) that it is.
No, the solution is to fix the societal issues leading people to resort to crime. Surveillance cameras are not a solution, they are a band-aid placed several steps away from the wound.
I could be convinced to support public cameras if access to the footage was tightly controlled and only used for solving serious crimes, but government officials and flock themselves have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted to use them in a responsible manner. It’s too powerful of a tool to put in the hands of untrustworthy individuals
If someone breaks into my car and a Flock camera sees it, is their right to privacy in a public space more important than my right to not have my property get stolen?
Its worth checking out a recent interview with the Flock CEO on Cheeky Pint (Stripe's podcast with John Collison) [1]
As much as I fear the Orwellian future this could turn into, I think its important to recognize that the burden of preventing that is on lawmakers, not companies.
He explains in the interview that he would love for laws to be passed to create tighter controls over how these systems are used. The problem is that police departments don't want it! Perhaps they can elect to do it themselves, but then they expose themselves to competitors who have "more powerful features".
Something like 70% of homocides go unresolved! I think its cool that Flock is trying to help police departments fight crime. But it's time to yell at your lawmakers. Don't hate the player, hate the game!
An academic study about the use of surveillance technology at the Los Angeles Police Department, the book documents the LAPD's use of data brokerage firms (e.g., Palantir) that collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, as well as automatic license plate readers like Flock, and Suspicious Activity Reports generated by police and civilians, which include reports of mundane activities such as using binoculars, drawing diagrams, or taking pictures or "video footage with no apparent aesthetic value." All this data ultimately gets parked in Fusion Center facilities, built in the aftermath of 9/11, where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information. As the author observes, "The use of data in law enforcement is not new. For almost a century, police have been gathering data, e.g., records of citations, collisions, warrants, incarcerations, sex offender and gang registries, etc. What is new and important about the current age of big data is the role in public policing of private capitalist firms who provide database systems with huge volumes of information about people, not just those in the criminal justice system."
Live in a neighborhood that privately installed cameras. The city also installed cameras. Before the camera's cars used to come and raid houses and worker's trucks. It was quite common. The neighborhood has statistics and tracks how many stolen cars / plates drove through the neighborhood. All crime statistics dropped, police show up and arrest people. Saying its an illusion of safety is bullshit. It's all fake until you're a victim of a crime. We need our own way to fight back against gangs, etc. I'd rather have more cameras and less police. Also lets get some drones as well, they work fantastic in SF. The city owns the data its not getting sold. It gets erased unless a crime is reported.
I am somewhat skeptical that either the ACLU or EFF are effective organizations for this cause. The ACLU in particular have drifted significantly from a civil liberties focus, and EFF's privacy track-record for corporate run surveillance has never been the best and of late they seem to be following the ACLU away from civil liberties.
There is an increasingly popular idea that all libertarianism, including civil libertianism, is inherently partisan and specifically right-wing. I think it has done a lot of damage to these organizations' ability to effectively fight this and other issues. I've shifted a lot of my support for ACLU/EFF towards IJ in recent years.
> Flock advertises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a culture of mistrust and preemptive suspicion. As the EFF warns, communities are being sold a false promise of safety - at the expense of civil rights* (EFF).
...
> True safety comes from healthy, empowered communities; not automated suspicion. Community-led safety initiatives have demonstrated significant results: North Lawndale saw a 58% decrease in gun violence after READI Chicago began implementing their program there. In cities nationwide, the presence of local nonprofits has been statistically linked to reductions in homicide, violent crime, and property crime (Brennan Center, The DePaulia, American Sociological Association).
These are incredibly weak arguments. I haven't personally looked into how good Flock cameras are at actually preventing crime and catching criminals, but if this is the best counterargument their detractors can come up with, it makes me suspect they're actually pretty good.
Crime is extremely bad. Mass surveillance is bad too, especially if abused, but being glib or dismissive about the real trade-offs is counterproductive.
Also, recording in public spaces (or private spaces that you own) is an important and fundamental right just like the right to privacy; simply banning this kind of surveillance would also infringe on civil liberties in a different way. I agree that laws and norms need adjusting in light of new technology, but that discussion needs more nuance than this.
I also thought it was interesting that the author basically argues Flock cameras are too effective at figuring out where criminals are, but then also argues they aren’t effective enough at reducing crime.
I understand the privacy argument. There are a few questions though:
1) Suppose there will be another shooting. Don't you want to know what exactly has happened before you go to the protest? Suppose your child will be hurt. Wouldn't you do anything to capture the culprit? How exactly would you feel if the police would tell you that they couldn't get the video with culprits face, because watching it would be a violation of someone's privacy?
2) Everyone has a camera in their pocket. Someone is filming all the time. Police can seize this video. Isn't that a privacy risk? Should we ban cameras in smartphones?
3) Should we even be private in the public? Doesn't privacy in public spaces encourage crime? I will die on a battle to keep the privacy in my home, but in public? I personally prefer to be safe, than private, in public.
4) What about private cameras near homes filming 24/7? Are those risks for privacy?
5) People in power will always be corrupt, have bad intentions, will use public goods for personal gain. Should we disregard broader benefits because there will be isolated cases where those benefits will be exploited?
1) If someone killed my child, I would probably want to kill them back. And yet we don't consider that sufficient reason to make revenge killing legal. The wishes of the victims need to be weighed against the cost it imposes on everyone else, including those who are innocent. The cost of violating everyone's right to privacy, the social impacts of mass surveillance, and the risk of that data being abused.
2) > Isn't that a privacy risk?
Yes, it is!
> Should we ban cameras in smartphones?
No? How about making it difficult for the police to seize everyone's videos without a good reason? We already do that for phone videos, it's called warrants. But Flock doesn't. They just ask cops to enter any arbitrary "reason" text into a HTML textbox and instantly get access to everyone's videos. And if the people explicitly said they don't want those specific cops to have access, like many people decided about ICE? Well, just ask the next county over and use their system, it's not checked in any way.
People don't have a right to privacy in public (at least in the US). Do people not realize anyone can photograph or film them in public at any time. Heck, photographers can even then around and sell the without the subject's consent. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia
I'm really struggling to see the parallel between being filmed in public and committing revenge murder.
Sorry if I was unclear. My point was just that "if you were a victim, wouldn't you want this?" is not a very strong argument. What victims want does matter. But when it affects other people, their needs matter too.
Especially with mass-surveillance, which affects everyone. It's not possible to mass-surveil only people who would commit crimes, you need to surveil all innocent people too.
> My point was just that "if you were a victim, wouldn't you want this?" is not a very strong argument. What victims want does matter. But when it affects other people, their needs matter too.
Right and you used murder as an example. Do you think murder is even remotely comparable to putting up a security camera in a public space?
Yes, a victim might want some sort of response that is socially unacceptable, sure. But if you want to make a convincing argument you have to explain why the proposed response is unacceptable. Not some different, extreme, response of your own invention.
I'm really not sure how "committing vigilante murder is wrong" is supposed to be a good argument against putting up security cameras in a public space.
Privacy is not "convenience", I'm not sure how you arrive at that. And it's also not mine, it's everyone's.
I don't want children to die (obviously). I also don't want governments to track the movement of protestors and dissidents, police to stalk their ex-girlfriends, etc.
I don't think the effectiveness of mass AI surveillance in preventing crime is high enough to justify the drawbacks.
Boy would it just be terrible if someone hacked into the flock network and manipulated all the camera results ever so slightly. A letter here a number there, license plates or matches never quite lining up. It would take years for them to find the source of the “bugs”. Not saying I know anyone doing this or anything, just saying it would be oh soooooo terrible.
The "Take Action" section is missing the most obvious solution. Everyone just goes and takes down a camera. We as a society do not consent to this use of public space and simply have a national "Take out the trash day."
There is no way Flock could practically ramp up production or manpower to replace the entire fleet before failing to meet contractual requirements with their customers that keep money flowing in.
Who are you to speak on behalf of society? Wouldn't society also be better off if those who stole your car got caught?
Further, I'm not sure why there is an expectation of privacy in public places. You don't have to consent to being filmed when you're walking down a public sidewalk.
The best way to block Flock is probably to find a way to track billionaire celebs like Taylor Swift and Elon Musk.
If they were able to successfully change laws so they can fly anonymously they can probably change laws on cameras in public places, at least for them anyway.
Edit: not a low effort comment. This is something you should all read and demand the same of. I consternated on how not to call your regime moronic. It _is_ moronic that you don’t have these basic protections and we keep having to listen to you all whine about that.
It's fundamentally a security camera, for many people. People buy them to see what's going on, record crimes for reporting, and to feel safer. I think there's significant overlap in people who want to feel safer and people being ok with the police being able to look through their cameras, since being able to record events, for the police, was part of the motivation for the purchase of a security camera. My frail elderly grandpa, who has seen his neighborhood go to shit with the reduced police funding, would definitely see this as a "nice feature".
Would be nice if the cameras were useful. Most you get is a nice souvenir showing the crime occurring. Recording is not prevention. People don’t even bother hiding their face when they porch pirate in front of an obvious Ring camera because they know there is no real risk.
IANAL, but if you are to take action it might be most prudent to do so non-destructively.
Putting a bag over the camera/solar panel or taking it down and returning the lost/abandoned property would leave it disabled just as well.
The added damage of outright destroying it would make no real difference to the company (might even just make them more money) but would make it easier to characterize the action as criminally motivated rather than an act of conscience in the public interest.
And you're conveniently unaware of the historical context of the origin of that phrase too, if we're to take you literally, since you seem to entirely misunderstand how the whole reason it was problematic was due to the inherent power dynamics
People absorb the norms of their social class and start policing themselves and others without needing orders or hierarchical power dynamics.
Norm enforcement can spread faster and further than formal authority because lots of people can act on a signal whilst thinking they drew their own conclusions. Think of steve bannon's quote "politics is downstream of culture".
formal rank of the speaker is less important than that the signal comes from the socially legitimate tribe whose approval, language, and standard the subject is a member.
> Think of steve bannon's quote "politics is downstream of culture".
I'm going to be honest: if you think Steve Bannon is a thought leader, I don't think we'd agree on pretty much anything.
> formal rank of the speaker is less important than that the signal comes from the socially legitimate tribe whose approval, language, and standard the subject is a member.
You're claiming that a random stranger on an internet forum has as much social power as the literal monarch of a country. That's absurd, no matter how much fancy language you use to try to justify it.
Indeed, one of the great wisdoms of history is that a mobs have no power. We are very wise men so we know that there are no peer reviewed controlled trials showing mobs having power. We call this thing Science.
Although I oppose the surveillance state, it's important to understand the motivations and incentives involved in the move toward Flock (and its eventual successors); until those are resolved, governments are going to be implementing Flock style programs with relatively tepid opposition.
Police departments are seriously understaffed in many major cities, and officers are much less efficient than they used to be. This has led to the decline of the beat cop, who provided a kind of ambient authority that helped create, both a sense and reality, of public order. People really want the sense (even more than the reality!) of public order; without that, they will jump to faddish solutions that promise it, regardless of the data for or against it.
The best counter to Flock is to provide alternatives to it, not just reject it while keeping the status quo going. We need a new, vitalized police culture, that shares mutual trust and engagement with the community.
Most cities are spending 9-10 figures on Police staff, and somehow are understaffed?
We simply aren't getting effective policing, and technology isn't the solution.
Reality is cops have become police report writers, traffic accident helpers, and domestic abuse arbiters, that is over half the job.
I agree with everything you say; my "police departments are understaffed" is too generic, and might be better stated as "too few resources are devoted to traditional beat policing." Which isn't to say that the other things are unnecessary or pointless, but it's a different set of skills.
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Law enforcement has also burned its goodwill with the public, making everything harder.
Police departments aren’t understaffed. It’s a priority problem not a lack of resources problem. I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all. There’s occasional break ins and car break ins. When this happens it’s a big deal.
We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door to door and gathered it herself. Cops refused to do anything even though you can see the car and the plates from multiple videos, multiple angles.
Guess what the cops always have resources for? Hiding behind bushes and trees to ticket people going 5 over. Or at turns where they know they’ll get people before people see the cop car.
Our HOA came together and asked the police department about this. They gave us bullshit about how custody of evidence etc is hard and even if they put people in jail, the lenient judges will let them go anyway. It was fucked up.
Our HOA was going in hard about installing floc cameras everywhere. I had to fight hard not to get that done. One of the reasons I won wasn’t because privacy, it was because the cops literally were like unless we can directly pull video feeds from cameras, we won’t do much. And that access wasn’t available to those police department. At least at the time.
There have been many other such stories I’ve personally witnessed in the cities I’ve lived in.
Cops seem to have plenty of resources to bully people of color, seize assets and hide behind trees and bushes to ticket people, reduce the period of orange lights so people get more tickets etc. but never enough to actually do their jobs.
> I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all.
Compare to e.g. Oakland, which recently approved a Flock expansion:
https://oaklandside.org/2025/12/17/oakland-flock-safety-coun...
Why?
https://sfstandard.com/2023/06/09/oakland-crime-police-respo...
https://oaklandside.org/2025/10/08/oakland-watchdog-audit-po...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-police-off...
Now, will Flock help with this? No. But the visceral lack of safety people feel makes them more likely to see it as a necessary evil, not snake oil.
Baltimore has metric shittons of police cameras but it's still a dangerous shithole. Cameras don't stop idiot criminals from criming. Baltimore's police suck and the area sucks because there's massive unemployment, cameras aren't a panacea.
Yeah I don't get the camera supporters. Cameras do nothing. Desperate people aren't concerned about cameras or stopped by them.
Cameras make it easier to gather evidence that will let the criminal justice system try and incarcerate those desperate people. It's a lot harder to commit a crime if you are currently locked in prison.
We're talking about license plate recognition cameras, not cameras that show a blurry picture of a criminal committing a crime. These LPR cameras absolutely do result in meaningful law enforcement action and help catch criminals.
See San Francisco and their use of LPR cameras like Flock combined with drone surveillance.
https://fb.watch/GvATBMj1bj/
https://abc7news.com/post/how-sfpds-new-investigation-center...
Etc.
I agree that police department staffing is less of a real issue than people claim it is, and that many departments have target staffing levels that are artificially elevated. But I'm struck by your comment about cops "hiding behind bushes to ticket people going 5 over", because in the ultra-ultra-progressive inner-ring Chicago suburb in which I live, one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement.
On a daily basis, I see several cars that are going forty+ miles per hour over the speed limit, weaving between lanes. They go right past the cop and the cop doesn't care. Then someone going five over goes past the cop and the cop gives them a ticket. They go after the easy ones that fill their quotas, not the ones that actually make anyone safer.
> one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement.
Which traffic enforcement though?
I really do not like the fact that lefts on red are not enforced. I have numerous times seen people run a red-red light infront of a cop car with no enforcement.
That said, people going 35 in a 30? Like I care. People weaving in between lanes? Yeah that seems much more dangerous.
Are you taking the perspective of a car-driver risking getting a ticket for technically violating a traffic law, or a resident concerned about drivers technically violating traffic laws on the roads near where they live?
Neither, but what I'm describing is the resident concern.
Police departments in a lot of major cities are absolutely unstaffed relative to population growth after decades of demonization in the media. You are ignorant.
To add to some of what others are saying, another problem is the measurement problem.
DAs and police in general are almost universally evaluated based on arrest numbers. Only very rarely on actual crime rates, and never on something as abstract as quality of life or local revenues or property values.
Gauging how good law enforcement is just by looking at arrest numbers is probably the wrong dial to be looking at.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47124169
I've noted this in the age verification debate, and in the Android developer verification debate as well.
Just denying the tradeoffs isn't productive, if tradeoffs affect others, just pushing your position disregarding the tradeoffs as fake or not important is divisive. In actuality I think that both parties become incentivized to solve the problems of the other group of people too, but as a centrist that position often gets pushback from both sides who seem to collaborate only indirectly from a place of adversarial competition and good vs evil framing, which I think is less productive than just recognizing the conflict and negotiating, but perhaps it's more engaging...
If you take a look externally to other countries and cities, do you attribute their relative safety to good policing?
No that would be cultural homogeneity and extremely low immigration.
Give "correlation between immigration and crime" one search. Or don't and just continue to hit on your bigoted dogwhistles
You’re not going to get nuanced law enforcement discussion on this site considering the commentary here is Reddit tier these days. I agree with you though - the mayor and city council here in Minneapolis continuously defunding the police and refusing to give them resources predictably led to sharp increases in crime. It’s baffling to me large liberal cities have demonized the police and gaslit their base into thinking everything is just fine.
I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. If the business models can't be made illegal, it should at least come with liabilities so high that no sane business would want to hold data that is essentially toxic waste.
Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong person gets access to the data, entire populations are threatened.
You want to stop the source, which is that the government and other agencies can purchase surveillance data that would otherwise be disallowed by the 4th amendment. We need to end this 'laundering' of information through third parties, and enforce the constitution by its intent.
Not just the government. It shouldn't be possible for any random stalker to find someone's daily movements.
They're also one and the same generally-- at least if the stalker has money or the right friends most kinds of law enforcement access means stalker access. It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker, and there are so many people that work in law enforcement that bribing, impersonating, or persuading your way to access is not that big a deal. Not to mention that enabled stalkers can just file a federal lawsuit and issue subpoena for records.
The only safe thing is for the records to never exist in the first place.
Further reading:
AP: Across US, police officers abuse confidential databases
https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
> It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker
This was one of the motivations for passage of the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994. Nowadays, officers need a legitimate reason to run a plate - unless the patrol car is fitted with automatic cameras[1] that look up every plate of every car they drive past.
> The Virginia state police used license plate readers to track people’s attendance at political events; > The New York Police Department used license plate readers to keep track of who visited certain places of worship, and how often;
> Despite all this surveillance, ALPR technology has been repeatedly shown to be unreliable; like other police technologies, ALPRs can and do make mistakes.[2]
Generally, court decisions have held that you have zero expectation of privacy when you are in public spaces. Current license plate standards[3] aim for plates that are not cluttered and are easily read by the human eyeball, despite being wrapped with license plate frames (which usually make the state hard/impossible to read which is the most common failure mode for ANLR[4]). If the reflectivity material (traditionally called "ScotchLite"[5]) is worn out (or defaced), most states require the plate to be replaced.
Notes:
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_... Prior to passage, a slang term for running/looking up the plate/registration of a car with a pretty woman driver was "running a date".
1 - https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-rea...
2 - https://www.aclum.org/publications/what-you-need-know-about-...
3 - https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/646bcc8a-219b-47d8-b5cd-72624...
4 - https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/0063bf88-cb44-4ab9-90b6-200c8...
5 - https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/scotchlite-reflective-material-u...
Disclaimers:
I used to work for my state's motor vehicle department and had database/developer access to driving licenses and motor vehicle registration records.
I graduated from a police academy when I was a youngster.*
How is that achievable? PIs can legally do it. Random people can keep tabs on you and exchange gossip. It's the sudden scale and low cost that doesn't sit well with freedom to not be tracked in public 24/7 we took for granted.
> How is that achievable?
The core ill is aggregated data, because that's what allows the mass in surveillance, data mining, etc.
The collection actions are almost immaterial. Without persistence they must be re-performed for each request, which naturally provides a throughput bottleneck and makes "for everyone" untenable.
If we agree the aggregated data at rest is the problem, then addressing it would look like this:
1. Classify all data holders at scale into a regulated group
2. Apply initial regulations
The initial impediment to regulatory action is Google, Meta, Equifax, etc. saying "This problem is too complex and you don't understand it."It's not. But the first step is classifying and documenting the problem.
It's not achievable.
The only way is through - everybody should get into the practice of stalking and gossiping about each other in a Molochian environment, where the people who do not do so suffer from the losing side of an information asymmetry.
Expect AI, especially post-Mythos, to just enable this at even further scale. Consumer grade wireless networking gear as a whole is a very wide attack surface and is basically never updated.
Sorry, I was ambiguous in what I meant.
It is not realistic to say that no person is allowed to keep track of another person; watch where they go, when, with who, etc.
It should not be acceptable for a company to gather information on "everyone"; where they have been going, when, with who, how often, etc. And it should not be acceptable for them to sell that information (to government agencies OR private citizens).
It's a matter of scale.
- Making the first one illegal/impossible would be difficult/costly; and not doing so has a limited impact (to society, not to the single person affected).
- Making the second one illegal is much easier, and it's much easier to shut down a large company doing it than it is 1,000 individual stalkers. The impact of making it illegal is much wider and better for society as a whole.
We don't want anyone being stalked. But in a cost/benefit analysis, we can do something about one of them but not the other.
If PIs can "legally" do it then it sounds like there is a law which allows them to do it. That law can be revoked (unless the power comes from Constitution which would make it effectively impossible to revoke).
Note that PIs are effectively illegal under GDPR by default. They would generally need to provide Article 13 notice, i.e. you would become aware of them unless they were just asking around without actually following you. Member states can make them legal though (via Article 23) and likely in many cases they have done so.
In the US, PI licensing is only about PIing for hire. The actual act of going through public records, following cars and whatnot do not require a license, you can spy on anyone without a license as long as you don't get paid for it.
EU is more complicated, but Article 14.5.b allows withholding notice if it would impair/defeat the purpose of processing. The PI must however apply "safeguards", whatever it could mean.
> following cars and whatnot do not require a license, you can spy on anyone without a license as long as you don't get paid for it.
Pretty sure that would be considered stalking and is broadly illegal in the US, PIs being an exception.
Article 14(5)(b) does, but that only applies for Article 14 notice (personal data not directly obtained from data subject). Article 13 (personal data obtained directly from data subject) does not have such exception in GDPR itself.
This becomes extremely relevant when you read it in the light of the C-422/24 decision. In that personal data collected via body worn cameras was determined to be "directly obtained". Paragraph 41 from the judgement:
> If it were accepted that Article 14 of the GDPR applies where personal data are collected by means of a body camera, the data subject would not receive any information at the time of collection, even though he or she is the source of those data, which would allow the controller not to provide information to that data subject immediately. Therefore, such an interpretation would carry the risk of the collection of personal data escaping the knowledge of the data subject and giving rise to hidden surveillance practices. Such a consequence would be incompatible with the objective, referred to in the preceding paragraph, of ensuring a high level of protection of the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons.
Given this it's very unlikely that PI observing (especially if they record) could be considered to be Article 14 instead of Article 13 type of collection as it's exactly "hidden surveillance practice" that the Court warned about.
Member states do have a right to restrict the Article 13 disclosure obligations via Article 23 restriction, but that requires specific law in the member state & the law itself must fulfill the obligations that Article 23 requires. Article 23(2) essentially forbids leaving everything up to the controller.
And as far as PI in the US goes, actions between stalking and PI "for self" tend to be so similar that I wouldn't necessarily recommend anyone to try it.
Government ... random stalker ... same thing.
Means of Control by Byron Tau and Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine. Can’t recommend these books enough for anyone who is skeptical of the above claim.
Honestly it should probably just be illegal for anyone, private or public, to engage in mass surveillance (or "data gathering", whatever) of anybody who didn't expressly consent to it. As long as the data exist, they will be abused.
But I did expressly consent.
When I installed the SoundCloud app and it told me by continuing I agree to them sharing my data with their 954 partners.[1]
1. I’m not even joining. When I mostly recently installed the SoundCloud app - for the first time on a new device, that’s what’s it said: 954 partners. How can anyone reasonably understand what it is their agreeing to in that scenario.
This is the important point. You need the right to not be discriminated when you withhold your consent, otherwise your consent is effectively meaningless, as it is forced on you by your impossible bargaining position. This is one of the central pillars of the GDPR without which it wouldn't work at all. Be advised to make asking customers for consent that doesn't directly benefit them illegal as well, lest you risk creating another wave of malicious cookie banners.
> You need the right to not be discriminated when you withhold your consent, otherwise your consent is effectively meaningless, as it is forced on you by your impossible bargaining position.
Which is why "we don't serve patrons without shoes and pants" policy is unconstitutional, yeah.
If you don't want to agree to a business's demands — you're welcome to not deal with them and look for an alternative. All the alternatives have the same (or even worse) demands? Unless you can prove collusion, that's just how the invisible hand of the market worked its magic out. Go petition you congressman to violate laissez-faire even more than it already is, I guess.
The trouble with this is that I, at least, am trying to live in a society. And society has both rights and responsibilities. Sometimes you are forced to do things, or don’t do things, contrary to your desires. Every freedom has two sides, you can’t ignore the fact that increasing some freedoms for one decreases other freedoms for others.
The shirt and shoes example is a great example in fact that illustrates the point. You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes, just like a business does not have unlimited freedom to impose whatever terms it likes, just because it put it in its ToS.
> You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes
Okay, I am gonna be 100% serious here: you absolutely should have such a freedom. Just as loitering or jaywalking being a crime is inherently totalitarian, what the hell.
In this case, unlimited means literally everywhere.
You do have the right to go barefoot in your own home. And in true public spaces.
But, a property owner can require shoes. Do I care if somebody is barefoot in the local grocer? No, not really. But, the proprietor might because they want to limit their liability (should something fall on your foot, a cart run it over, or a loose tack/nail somehow land in an aisle, etc).
Except the are companies with which you effectively must do business.
Microsoft (or Apple).
Any web host, payment processor, etc that's contracted to do work for your local government (I suppose you could try driving to the government office and pay by check, but then you need to give consent to Ford or Chevy).
Short of living like a hermit, there's no practical way to avoid all ridiculous T&C.
Yes please. Your shaming didn't work. Free markets centre of gravity is biased towards capital and land owners. We need people power to balamce it back. Something we poor people are all enjoying now (pssst me and you are poor.... kings and barons are the few and rich)
I really need to start putting /s at the ends of my comments where I merely restate the currently adopted legal theory/framework in non-sugar-coated terms, don't I? The whole liberal movement has its roots in the merchants' and industrialists' desire of having as little interference from the aristocracy-heavy governments of the yore, and it really shows even to this day.
Not only that, but it should be illegal (eg: fines for the company and potential jail time for executives) for tying consent to use/purchase of services or products.
Consent should be _voluntary_, not mandatory.
You mean something like a... general regulation for data protection?
A significant chunk of the infrastructure that farms data is now from private organizations, who sell that information because it is a source of revenue.
Government is the bogeyman we are afraid of, but ad tech is doing the actual heavy lifting.
Yeah nah I’d rather stop the criminals.
That’s cool.
The precogs over at flock say you drive too close to the criminals though, and you know what that means. Stay loyal, stay safe citizens.
Criminals are long gone baby. Stop worshipping them.
The Potus is literally a pedophile, criminals are here to stay and winning. Your camera company supports them as long as they have money and/or control of the system.
100 miles around your border is a constitution free zone anyway.
It's not Constitution-free, but CBP does claim a lot of extra rights within that zone. It covers about two-thirds of the U.S. population.
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
Necessary, but not sufficient.
Even if we somehow, perhaps via magic genie-wish, made the government totally disinterested... these systems would still enable dystopian levels of private surveillance and manipulation.
This should ironically start at the VC level - and that includes YC et al. Some one comes and says "hey, we got this idea, we collect facial recognition data for training proprietary AI models", the response from the VC should "I'm gonna stop you right there. This is unethical."
Not "Did you say I can 5x my ROI? Here, shut up and take my money!"
And mind you, VC are people who are both pretty good at earning money and also eager for even more money. That's how they got to where they are, after all, not necessarily by being virtuous (over a certain minimally required amount, or a social signaling of possessing such an amount).
YC is responsible for Sam Altman, need I say more?
Fair enough. But, to be fair to them, they did have a falling out. There was a story on here how it went all the way to PG and then they asked Sam to leave (Something like that). I think saw it in a comment here, really don't remember.
When you put it that way, the answer is obvious:
Assume VCs are brainless profit maximizers who don't understand ethics. How do you get them to say "I'm gonna stop you right there"?
Answer: Make it unprofitable to collect this data. Change the incentives.
So really, the correct answer IS on the legal level. Make a set of laws which make it burdensome at best and completely unprofitable at worst, and then the incentives within the system aligns.
Agree with your point and the solution. Make it risky to operate - so that most VCs would wash their hands off due to legal risks. Kind of like what happened to the crypto space. But, it always gets worse before it gets better. Tons of rug pulls happened before SEC took action.
It seems like in the last number of years, VC has been prioritizing becoming the beneficiary of the whims of the regime.
In short, I wonder if this has any implications about their confidence in startups' viability in private sectors
This is great sentiment. Companies can be stopped, and then the medusa grows another head. Kill the business model, make the brokering of data illegal, and if caught, fines would be paid directly to those effected. This would go a long ways to promoting privacy first.
> we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone
we are essentially already in that dystopia.
it is now more of a question of how bad it gets, and if the population will ever stand against it in any meaningful fashion.
Look at the silver lining - once the paperclip maximizers have crashed both modern civilization and the biosphere, it will be easy for any survivors to find privacy amid the metaphorical and actual ruins.
One simple remedy would be to make companies (that collect such private data) and their directors/executives jointly & severally liable[0] for any identity theft. It should come with "forever" liability equivalent to SuperFund sites[1]
Notes:
0 - Financial penalties would not be limited to "your share" of the penalty. If you have money, and the other parties don't, the plaintiffs can collect from whichever defendant has money.
1 - Everyone who ever owned the site with the toxic waste is liable for the cleanup. This is why when a gas station is sold (in the US), all of the fuel tanks are dug up and replaced - this way, none of the future leakage can be attributed to the previous owners.
When you have dedicated groups of ppl on IRC and Newsgroups showing how easy it is to access these systems and teach others, you know it’s a bad thing. There are dozens of them and most of the people gathering this information and using it is not for good. It’s a flawed system
There is a weird fetish with Flock right now. Privacy advocates have been screaming at the public for 25 years now and suddenly the public cares and is obsessed with this one very specific company.
Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7.
I mean, cool, stop Flock, but don't stop there. Flock is very much not the final boss in this fight. The cynic in me says we will all get bored once Flock is off the radar though.
It’s easier to consider responses or solutions to specific problems, rather than to solve for a broad, general principle. You can see this in many areas of life. Solving for general principles requires group effort (usually); you can get buy-in from individuals if you csn focus them on specific cases or subsets. So the Floxk fetish is reasonable at this point, IMO.
There’s also nothing inherently wrong with carrying sensors in your pocket. The “wrong” is in the providers/manufacturers exploiting the position they put themselves in. Managing data is hard, and most people don’t want to do the necessary work most of the time, so the providers/manufacturers offer to do that for their users/customers. However, they also exploit their csretaker position by tresting the data like they own it too, and extracting profit.
If the solutions to the Flock problems could be framed such that other providers/manufacturers had to build systems that were “local first” or “private by default” (as in pre-internet home computing plus explicit, finegrained shsring consents), then it would also be fine to carry sensors. I want my fitness tracker and GPS. I just don’t want the data it generates used to build advertising profiles on me such that ads (and government mass surveillance dragnets) can follow my every other move.
>Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7.
While the above is a difference in scale, the various "credit bureaus" have been doing this stuff for much, much longer.[0][1][2]
That's not to excuse the use of ALPRs and tracking on mobile devices. It's all really creepy and collection and trade in such should have strong negative incentives (company breaking fines, loss of corporate charter, jail time, etc.).
In the meantime, one has to deal with at least some of this stuff unless you're willing to go live in a leanto in the woods.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#History
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experian#History
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransUnion#History
I don't think it's a "weird fetish." It's just most of the things privacy advocates have been warning about - PRISM, warrantless metadata requests, tech companies handing over data - are all largely invisible.
A camera pointing at your child's playground or gymnastics class is much more salient.
> I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers.
Then you want to stop the company.
Which is reasonable.
Flock isn’t the only company.
One company getting destroyed could be a sign for others.
The sign won't be "don't do mass surveillance".
It'll be "make money off mass surveillance, but don't get caught like Flock did."
Without their unique business model, what is the company? The product?
What is the addressable market for ubiquitous public surveillance devices? Who is the customer?
Make HIPAA include PII.
That hits your toxic waste goal real fast.
HIPAA explicitly allows government collection.
If we can set a legal precedent then this can cascade into policy, or an enforceable standard much faster.
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I followed the shooting at Brown University last year very closely. Brown's leadership was heavily criticized for having camera blind spots and not being able to track the shooter's exact movements through campus. I can understand why people with stewardship over the safety of their students/customers/constituents would make decisions to err on the side of tracking. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I understand it.
I'm sorry... people think that the problem with, a school shooting, is camera placement?
Something, something, forest, trees.
"No way to prevent this" says the only country where this regularly happens
Arm the teachers!
When a teacher then shoots their entire class: arm the students!
I got my BS in Computer Science legally carrying a Glock in every class. I think it's very likely I was the only person doing so; Not because I was fearful, but because I like being prepared. It takes very little long-term effort for people to carry pepper spray, a gun (if able), and a first aid kit everywhere they go. You never know who's life you might save.
There's been exercises where you simulate active shooters with some or none of the people armed. As I remember it the situation with some of the targets were armed ended up with higher casualty numbers in quite a few simulations. The solution to a bad guy with a gun might be a good guy with a gun, but it also might be easier paths to run away and lowering the probability of a bad guy getting access to a gun.
Looking at the non-US stats, it's pretty clear the latter is at least a lot more credible.
I'm actually not surprised. As a conceal carrier, I think that most people that conceal carry a firearm are woefully under-trained and potentially a liability. I still absolutely encourage people willing to put in the effort to do it, given the potential to save lives. Pretty much every single active shooter situation only ends with the suspect shooting themselves, or being shot - I want every chance to end the threat possible.
The ideal counter to one bad guy with a gun is good guys with knives!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Old_Dominion_University_s...
A majority of states have laws preventing carrying of firearms on university campuses. Were you breaking the law by doing this?
I have a license to carry a handgun, and it was at a public university in a state that allows this.
You are not clint eastwood.
Thanks for that constructive, helpful comment. I have helped several people carrying a first-aid kit.
How many have you shot down before they drew on you?
Given the teacher to student ratio: this kills the teacher.
Whoosh
We need more good cameras with guns.
Actually, give them small rotors - then they can even move and aim their guns at things!
The criticism around that event, I believe, involved Brown University disablinf cameras trying to protect potential illegal immigrants being targeted by ice. It wasn't the lack of cameras. It was a purposeful disabling of said cameras that already existed.
Yes and so the real issue is that they outsourced to the wrong compan, gave up control of their camera feeds, and violated the privacy of their campusgoers. Had they just had their own CCTV system then this would have not happened.
Whoever made that decision should be held liable.
Correct, whoever made the decision to create ICE, as it became a security risk that lead to deaths. Glad that's what you said, and no other valid interpretation.
> it became a security risk that lead to deaths
While there were deaths, I didn't see any that were the result of a "security risk". I did see a whole lot of stupid people doing stupid things, and none of them were ICE agents, so I'm surprised there weren't more deaths.
> I did see a whole lot of stupid people doing stupid things, and none of them were ICE agents, so I'm surprised there weren't more deaths.
Random masked goons in unmarked cars trying to arrest people is pretty damn stupid, yes. Same goons putting themselves in front of cars, and shooting through side windows of cars driving away, or shooting at random people on the street, is pretty damn stupid.
I'm going to provide a bit of nuance here, but would like to clarify I am not a fan of ICE's tactics in the slightest. Yes, the ICE agent was stupid for standing in front of the car, just as Renee Good was stupid for hitting the gas while he was standing in front of her car. At that moment, he became 100% legally justified to shoot. The limits of human cognitive performance significantly limit how fast your brain can send the signal to your hand to stop shooting, and the stop-signal happened when he was standing by her side window. In a split-second, he was shooting to defend himself against a reasonably perceived threat of being run over. Yes, it could have been completely avoided by both individuals, but "shooting through side windows of cars driving away" is misleading. The Alex Pretti incident, completely, totally unjustified. Just wanted to provide a bit of nuance from the perspective of someone who studies self-defense encounters.
That's a lot of words to cover for being intentionally obtuse.
The ICE agent was 100% in the wrong, completely, totally unjustified in murdering Renee Good.
Nothing you wrote changes that.
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So how can we trust any of your numbers if at the same time you say the numbers are unreliable a priori?
Stick to a lane.
Yes, let's have no federal immigration enforcement entity in this country, novel idea.
Well, while I don't know you personally. Most working people are older than ICE.
It's actually a relatively new agency and clearly not effective.
It's a relatively new agency in name (2003), but it's not really all that new. It was formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and U.S. Customs.
What would an effective immigration enforcement agency look like, in your opinion?
I think we can agree that when they're executing innocent citizens in the street, the agency is no longer effective.
I agree with you. What would an effective immigration enforcement agency look like?
Sorry but there is no chance you get a good faith reply
A little know fact is that Biden deported more illegal immigrants then previous presidents with smaller budget and without killing them. He also deported higher amount if actual criminals in the set. So, you know, whatever before ICE is now was more effective.
Also, the abuses and violence are staggering. And they managed to deport or mistreat actual citizens, because they did not cared. Again, not effective.
Here is the problem - conservative and right wing people use "effective" as euphemism for "we want to see as much cruelty and abuse as possible".
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It's pretty gross you're deciding a person's value based on if they fit your political narrative. They were all victims
There are literally only 2 options.
1. Have an enforcement agency going around killing people, and locking people up who have valid reason to exist in country waiting for status updates.
OR
2. Complete anarchy and chaos, monkeys flying planes, elephants driving taxis, dogs marrying cats.
Actually you know what, I reckon give the elephants a go.
Well, that is literally how the country was founded; it would just be going back to its roots!
Camera blind spots are solved with more cameras and correct positioning, not automated AI surveillance.
Crazy how it's always a data problem in the end.
This is a very common pattern; my university pushed through a ZeroEyes AI camera/open carry weapon detection contract within 2 weeks of a shooting at a nearby school, even though it’s trivial to bypass by hiding it; it’s most probably just (gruesome as it is to think about) a bad press insurance so if anything happened, they can say they had “state of the art AI detection” and they did all they could. No one wants to be the one caught not doing “all they could” against the media cacophony in the immediate aftermath.
and then some kid gets tackled by a team of armed police when AI flags a bag of doritos as a gun. https://abc7.com/post/student-handcuffed-doritos-bag-mistake...
Yep, here they admitted there were local revolutionary war re-enactors who were falsely flagged (although thankfully they didn't let it get past the first flag).
I recently did a dive into ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder i.e. sociopaths) and unsurprisingly most what's stopping them from outright killing people is the likelihood that they'd be caught. So one thing is clear is that as long as we have sociopaths and the like who treat crime purely as value/risk proposition some sort of powerful detective tooling will always be necessary.
Unfortunately automated surveillance is considered the best detective tool we have but in reality it doesn't seem to be the case with public self surveillance and good ol' park a policeman box in every neighborhood seems to outperform automated surveillance. So there's much more to this than "surveillance is bad or good" discussions we have right now.
Correct. The Leviathan. A reasonable person should be able to argue for and against both sides.
With most of these things, people are against state power until they are victimized. It’s a common pattern.
With most of these things, people are for state power until they are victimized by it. It's a common pattern.
:D
I've had property stolen. Cameras generally won't help, and didn't help. Limiting ingredient is often not knowing who did it in any case-- in most places most common crime is committed by a tiny number of regular characters. Go look at the mountains of threads online where someone had a tracker enabled object stolen and knew exactly who had it only to have law enforcement do nothing.
People hate cops until they need one
> People hate cops until they need one
that doesn't seem to be the case always, given the data on crime reporting:
"Patterns in police reporting for property crime during 2020–2023 were similar to those for violent crime. A quarter (25%) of all property victimizations in urban areas were reported to police, which was lower than the percentages in suburban (33%) and rural (36%) areas (figure 2). Similar to overall property victimization, a lower percentage of other theft victimizations were reported to police in urban areas (20%) compared to suburban (28%) and rural (31%) areas."
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/reporting-police-ty...
"For violent crimes, in 1997, 7% of victims stated that “Police wouldn’t help” as the reason they did not call the police. This more than doubled to 16% by 2021. For property crimes, the corresponding rates were 12% in 1997 and 18% in 2021"
https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2...
Police work for the State. The State orders them to work for the Public when it interests the State. Intervening in violent crime and property crime can be seen, cynically, as a PR move.
To be beholden to the State for justice and protection is fine when the State is beholden to the Public for their consent. Today, in the West, the Public has been so thoroughly disarmed, and /disrobed/, that consent is a formality, consent can no longer be withheld.
Look no further than Flock and FISA for the ongoing crisis of consent.
When cops are released from the State apparatus, they'll be given the respect and admiration they deserve. Until then, it's difficult to separate them from their incentive structure.
Most people hate cops after they need one too.
Ah yes, a pro-cop 'hacker' in the wild
We need a law that says if you hold any data about a person, they must be notified when anyone accesses it, including law enforcement.
I used to work in criminal investigations. I understand how this might make investigation of real crime more difficult. But so does the fact that you need a warrant to enter someone's home, and yet we manage to investigate crime anyway.
Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company. It should require a warrant and notification. You could even make the notification be 24 hours after the fact. But it should be required.
The entities holding the information here are literally police departments. The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations. It's good to want things, though.
The information is not in any way restricted to use in active criminal investigations, and further, has been found to frequently be used for a variety of other purposes.
It's a bit like saying pornography is used in the study of human anatomy.
I don't know what you're talking about. I'm talking about the legislation 'jedberg proposed.
~jedberg is talking about a hypothetical law that would apply to ALPR data. In reply, you said "The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations." ("The information" here referring to ALPR data.) (You also said, "The entities holding the information here are literally police departments.", but I don't see that that's relevant unless we choose to believe that police departments are more deserving of public trust by default than any other organization.)
I was replying to the "used in active criminal investigations" part. Yes, the ALPR data managed by Flock is sometimes used in active criminal investigations. However, it's also used for many other things.
The many other things that it's used for supports ~jedberg's argument.
I know, that's why I said "including law enforcement" :)
So we're clear, you believe there should be a law that, when a police department collects information about you during a criminal investigation, they should notify you directly that they've done so?
Specifically, I believe that if information that is held by a private 3rd party I accessed by anyone, law enforcement or otherwise, that third party should be required to tell you that it was requested and by whom. Just like they can't put a gag order on a search warrant to your home, this hypothetical search would be exempt from gag orders.
Huh? There absolutely are gagged search warrants. Didn't you ever get one at Reddit? They're the norm, the default even.
Not in your home. They can’t sneak in and search your home and not tell you.
Homes might be an exception, I don't know, but I'm of the impression it's routine for police to get physical search warrants with nondisclosure orders attached.
Yes for sure. Only homes are exempt. Which is why I originally said it should be treated as though it’s still in your home.
Right, and my point was, your proposal would proscribe large classes of common law enforcement searches. I'm stipulating the homestead exemption you're talking about here (obvs. neither of us are lawyers), but, given that, you're saying it should be extended far, far outside of homes.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. :)
Are you a little concerned that by advocating a drastic change in policing extending far past ALPR cameras that you're creating room for proponents of the cameras to say that everyone who opposes them wants broadly to hamstring the police?
I watched ALPR proponents in Oak Park make exactly those kinds of arguments.
It does make sense. Police are absolutely not beyond reproach, and there's screwups all the time. They need to be held to a high standard.
It's also easy to imagine reasonable compromises, like a time delay where they only have to report after e.g. 48 hours, and allowing a system whereby a judge can issue a warrant to extend that delay.
That's more or less what a search warrant is, so yes.
Yes.
Trying to understand the position here.
This would be excluding gag orders correct?
And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.
Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right? But what you are saying is not just that LEA would need warrants to look at public recordings from a willingly cooperating camera owner, and that the warrants can't be gag orders (unless specified), but that the targets must be notified, even if the subject under search were someone else, the fact that I'm included in a recording would compel the LEA to notify me?
And how exactly would I be notified? Wouldn't that necessitate even more privacy invading features like facial recognition and a facial to contact information technology? Not an uncommon paradox.
Again, just want to understand the position, my position might leak as the question being leading, but I can't help it.
> This would be excluding gag orders correct?
Much like you can't gag a search warrant on a home, you wouldn't be able to gag these orders either.
> And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.
True, but my proposal would require that they notify you.
> Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right?
No, but I'm saying this should apply to any time a 3rd party releases information to anyone, including law enforcement. In this case the Flock cameras feed into a private database. They should disclose when someone looks something up.
> And how exactly would I be notified?
Presumably if they can identify you then there would be a way to notify you. But those details could be left to the author of the bill.
My main point is that your data, when housed with a 3rd party, should be considered an extension of your home and offer the same guarentees and protections as the items actually in your home.
You can kind of circumvent that law by keeping the recordings in house.
What we have in argentina is an Habeas Data law, if someone has data about you, you can ask for it, (or ask it be amended or deleted. Pretty simple right?
The home bit is no go though. Maybe an extension of the self? Too flimsy though, there's enough strong of a case treating it as what it is, an image, a visual representation of a person. A home is a specific of a concept that means something else
> Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company.
Nice idea, but at least in the U.S. (with the lone exception of LE obtaining cell phone location records), courts have consistently held that if you give your data to someone else, you are no longer entitled to an expectation of privacy in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
If you want your data to be considered an extension of your home, at least for now, keep it at home.
Nice idea (2), but many companies and govt agencies force one to give lots of data or you will not be receiving services, sometimes very important services.
I think the notion that data would be a home is beyond weak, but the explanation you gave for why isn't solid either, since the objects of data do not need to and in this case haven't consented.
That is, recordings of people in public settings (in some jurisdictions) are property of the recorder, but it still isn't a home (just imagine how that would work in some jurisdictions, someone takes a picture of you and it's trespassing? Would you be able to shoot them?)
Alternatively, one could create serious civil damages for those capturing surveillance imagery that causes various harms including false prosecution for any data they collected, even if it was unlawfully taken or used after it was collected. ... then let the liability work out the problem by making it too risky to run non-targeted mass surveillance apparatus.
This would avoid having to define what is and isn't a mass surveillance system. Any camera recording off your property would have a legal risk for the operator-- but if you're just recording locally and only using it to discourage or solve crime you're suffering the risk would be minimal and justified.
We'll sooner get a law that will forbid notifying a person when such data is passed to law enforcement.
Is there not some concept that utilizes cryptography in a way such that information about people is accessible, but if it's accessed, then the access request is added to a ledger (akin to blockchain) such that who made the access, when, and about whom becomes provably public knowledge?
PATRIOT Act & Bank Secrecy laws make it illegal to notify a person that they are being investigated, or that they are a subject in an investigation.
That will never happen in America without a focused political revolution because anarcho-libertarian techbro billionaires profit extensively from personal data trafficking and bought off the majority of politicians to keep it that way.
It sounds good but the implementation would be harder than achieving single payer healthcare that's better than what Medicare is now destroyed by for-profit prior authorizations and fake healthcare with lifetime limits.
Btw, flock employees have been caught watching kids gymnastics class and pools.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-193593234
Why does the VP of strategic relations need to watch the kids gymnastics class?
I think the answer is better technology, not less of it.
This stuff is more easily available in rudimentary systems. Consider the model of recording everything and just dumping tapes somewhere. Much harder to monitor abuse than a well designed system with an audit log. Better yet, have computers process the data and only expose what's absolutely necessary. Technology lets you do that.
But I want to push back against this idea that we have anything resembling a police or surveillance state. Nothing will dispel this myth more than an experience reporting a crime to police. Think about thefts in drug stores. They have security guards, cameras, security devices, etc, but every day the same group of people walk in and walk out with stolen goods. Everyone knows who they are, but police do absolutely nothing to stop them, because there is no political will. So the solution is to put deodorant behind lock and key and close down stores in high crime areas.
So besides these one off creepy stories of people abusing the system, this stuff amounts to nothing. I want to use technology more and perhaps our murder clearance rate can stop going down.
https://www.murderdata.org/2021/10/homicide-clearance-in-uni...
Heart disease accounts for 22% of all deaths in the US; cancer is 19.8%; injuries like car accidents come in third at about 7.8%. Homicide doesn't make it anywhere near the top 10.
When it comes to firearms, the vast majority of deaths are suicides with homicides being about a third of that. And the majority of homicides are domestic violence which usually happen inside the home.
The fact that the homicide clearance rate has decreased DESPITE turning our entire society into one of the most advanced surveillance states in human history pisses me off. That's MY tax money going to subsidize these companies that are taking away ALL OF OUR rights. In 2021 China's supreme court banned the use of facial recognition technologies in public places and then further strengthened that ban in 2025. They also got the PIPL in 2021 which is an even stronger version of the GDPR. In these respects, the US has regressed beyond The People's Republic of mf'ing China.
Your answer is to give these companies MORE of my money. I think the answer is to force them to pay us all back and let us reinvest it into problems that are actually relevant to anyone who doesn't obsessively consume True Crime podcasts
My quality of life is affected by crime. Sure no one is going to kill me. But why should we accept crime? It's easy to solve. Arrest people and keep them locked up, especially for anti-social crimes. Just yesterday, Noemi Guzman, took a large kitchen knife from a Walmart, kidnapped a 3yo and nearly stabbed him. In 2024, she was involved in another violent incident (including attacking her father and breaking into a church) and was found not responsible by reason of insanity. So too insane to throw in jail so we let her out in the street?
My answer is to arrest and prosecute the people that are destroying polite society. I don't get your point in China. I could care less.
Noemi Guzman does not have nearly the impact on your life that your neighbor driving a car with the catalytic converter removed or the CEO of a company that has a facility near you that made the decision to cut corners on holding tanks for their trichloroethylene
Things that affect my life:
My children going to a park with regular drug users with convenient needle drop (remove needle drops and arrest the handful of drug users that hang around children's parks with dangerous drugs on them)
Package thefts (sting operation to arrest the handful of people organizing these thefts)
Crazy people on subway (end "showtime" and people sleeping on the train)
People driving dangerously (cameras)
Smell of weed everywhere (don't allow smoking weed in public)
But I guess the few random fully avoidable deaths is acceptable because its not that often? Kind of like a child sacrifice we have to endure because its somehow compassionate to let crazy people roam the streets and assault people randomly?
None of this involves corporate CEOs and is relatively simple to solve.
If we want to reduce avoidable deaths, you can get a lot more bang for your buck investing in almost ANYTHING other than this extremely rare event. We've already invested way too much of it. And you're paying for it with MY taxes
You are overindexing on it because you watch too much TV.
Your kids would be a lot safer and better off if we moved some of our money away from surveillance and put it into cleaning up superfund sites on the NPL
https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...
Look at this map and count how many superfund sites are within a 10 mile radius of you
There's no buck here. You just enforce the law and prosecute. They're already in the system being arrested for the umpteenth time. Just leave them in prison, society would improve considerably.
Cops already exist, they are just told they can't enforce the law.
you will not be better off in a police state. And you do not get to achieve your fantasy on everyone else's dime
The fact that the police won't use surveillance data in a way you would consider good and effective does not mean you don't live in a surveillance state.
One of the key aspects of police and surveillance states is that the incentives are structured so that the policing and surveillance need not be done with the interest of public welfare in mind. As you said there is no political will.
It's for their, and your, own safety.
That is absolutely terrifying.
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This is just reiterating same points deflock does including mentioning deflock and images from deflock?
Deflock: https://deflock.org/
Also: https://haveibeenflocked.com/
Yes I think this site is not unique, I personally have at least 2 websites I have not shared anywhere with at least all of this information, that I am developing for my local community or just for myself. Its a subject worth discussing but I am also skeptical of the value of this link. I think maybe what is most worth considering is, "does this have value over deflock?" is it more accessible? Less overwhelming? I am not sure but I think that conversation would not be a great use of time in this particular space.
I’m all for mass surveillance of roadways, but I want to see results. Every day I see and hear people breaking laws with their vehicles in ways that make life worse for others around them.
Yep. Automate the whole thing and be done with traffic cops abusing their power to meet quotas or harass minorities. It would likely make car insurance cheaper too since people would drive more safely, and the cost of investigations and arbitration drops down with readily available video evidence.
Just make quotas illegal. Make enforcing them a felony for command staff. Lock up body worn camera videos so they can't be used for "performance review." That footage belongs to the public, for legal purposes, it shouldn't be a "tool" outside of that.
More importantly, can I borrow you car? I have some, uh, stuff, to go do.
They're already illegal in a lot of states, doesn't stop it from happening. Cops aren't great at following the law.
You aren't allowed to automate law enforcement because of disparate impact
Right, because human enforcement isn’t selective or biased at all
You can at least question an officer in court. Automated stuff is incapable of testifying - which is why traffic camera "tickets" are not enforceable in every state.
Facial recognition performs so poorly on non-white people that you'd have to find the most racist officer saying "they all look the same to me" to get that degree of defectivity.
> You can at least question an officer in court. Automated stuff is incapable of testifying - which is why traffic camera "tickets" are not enforceable in every state.
That's besides the point, you don't need to question a picture with accompanying information (such as location, detected speed).
> Facial recognition performs so poorly on non-white people
You don't need facial recognition. Car with plate XYZ (trivial character recognition) ran a red light, $1000 fine with associated picture proof of the crime sent to the owner of the car as registered in their locality. Done.
“Not sure who was driving”
Most of those red light tickets you’d be surprised but city subreddit advice will be like “ignore it, don’t even look up the ticket number because that acknowledged you received the ticket.” They only mail it to you via regular mail. They have no clue if it actually got to you.
> “Not sure who was driving”
Doesn't matter, fine the owner and let them deal with the driver.
> You can at least question an officer in court.
This is true in theory but not so much in practice. The American legal system only works for people with enough time and/or money to pursue justice (or whatever else they want from the legal system). Like traffic tickets on a road trip - very few people can actually go back to fight them.
Facial recognition is irrelevant if the liability is on whomever the vehicle is registered to.
Mass surveillance is by definition oppressive. I think you mean to say you're in favor of targeted surveillance, targeted at criminals, who are on roadways. This is the distinction that's getting lost.
Give me a database of everywhere you have ever driven, and I will find multiple ways to make you look like a criminal.
The problem is how do you know who's a criminal beforehand.
Right - we don't know. Even with mass-surveillance, you don't know if they're a criminal, because criminals can look innocent, and innocents can look criminal. That's why you need to do more than just look at the whole world and look for any pattern of criminality - you need targeted detection and analysis.
An example is cops stopping and searching you. If they're looking for a murderer, and they stop people coming out of Home Depot, and find a shovel, lye and rope in your trunk - hey, looks like a murderer! But it also could just be any customer going to Home Depot to get gardening supplies. So they can only stop people if they have probable cause: a reason they specifically think this specific person is the murderer.
(The other reason for probable cause, which is just as valid today as it was during the Framers' time, was to protect innocent civilians from unreasonable search and seizure by the Government, as well as protecting personal privacy. Mass surveillance violates all those principles.)
>The problem is how do you know who's a criminal beforehand.
Everyone is a criminal. Directed [per|pro]secution is a thing. And not a new one either[0]:
[0] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/244783They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
You want this on our roads? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud8kFCmalgg&t=112s
Driving recklessly is not an "essential liberty". Safer roads equals less deaths and injuries on them, which is not "temporary safety", it's literally life or death.
This is a dangerous attitude.
We don't need mass surveillance for traffic control. It can be done by the police if they really wanted to do it. Truth is, they don't care enough about road safety. This is about surveillance of citizens for control. First step is just infrastructure setup - next step is using it to prosecute those who dare to challenge the rise of fascism.
Be an advocate for your own rights to privacy. Don't simply accept it as normalcy.
Unless you want a police officer on every street corner at all times, no, it cannot be "done by the police".
then it doesn't need to be done in any way.
I prefer people to be held accountable for their actions while driving, actually.
Letting the state control our privacy is a huge price to pay for traffic management. Especially if said state is currently detaining people left and right, and occasionally murdering them
I'm not concerned about "privacy" on public roads. If law enforcement illegally detaining and murdering people is a concern, I'd rather increase accountability for the law enforcement officers engaging in illegal activity, instead of removing their ability to police actual crime.
Just stop. You are trying way too hard to act smart while spouting a bunch of bs that doesn't line up with reality
Thanks for the chuckle. I'm sorry you feel that way
Agreed. In the end the results and outcomes are what matter.
I really wish we had a more robust information environment where we could discuss things with more nuance.
What might be more productive is to suggest legal ways law enforcement can prevent and enforce the problems this was designed to stop. It will help you see where the laws are limited, what needs to be updated so you can balance the risk of privacy vs. the need to enforce laws (or the need for new laws all together). Right now we're osilcating between gaps criminals exploit and infringing on fundemental privacy rights.
As much as I dislike flock. There's definitely a case to be made for the business model where first responder companies can generate huge amounts of taxpayer funded ARR in "sanctuary cities" due to criminals never getting actually serving sentences. If criminals are stuck in the:
"Commit crime -> brief retention period -> activist judge lets you go" loop, then you can definitely build a business model that just capitalizes on the fact that there's no consequences to committing a crime, and local/state governments have to waste copious amount of money due to the incredibly inflated demand of first responder services.
Two points.
First: that's not what a "sanctuary city" is. That term specifically refers to cities that don't let their local law enforcement and courts assist ICE/CBP. The idea is that local crimes happen to everyone regardless of immigration status and we don't want a situation where undocumented people live lawlessly because they can't talk to police or court officers without fear of deportation.
Second: there's no "activist judge lets you go" loop. In practice judges are pretty tightly constrained by the law when it comes to pretrial detention. However, there _is_ a "cops refuse to do their job out of protest" loop.
And also: none of this is a technical problem! It's all political/social dynamics and surveillance doesn't affect it at all.
- I used "Sanctuary city" as a synonym for a "soft on crime" city.
- An example of who I classify as an "activist judge" is Teresa Stokes. She let out the repeat offender with 14 prior arrests that stabbed Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte[1].
[1] https://timmoore.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-...
Do you think the city councils who declare “sanctuary city” status turn around and tell the DAs to be tough on those same individuals?
They go hand in hand.
I think you have a very warped understanding of municipal government, policy, and how it relates to law enforcement. Because nowhere in the US that I'm aware of has a city council that can "tell the DA" anything.
Explain how it operates and why you would expect a sanctuary city to have a tough on crime DA
It's very clear to me that you're not interested in discussing things in good faith, so I'm choosing not to engage with you.
It’s clear to me that you’re not able to take a position but you pretend to be sophisticated by attacking others. Cheerio
You’ve identified an interesting loop which I reckon is deeply uncomfortable for the Progressive type.
Nonetheless, it’s true for most voters in Oakland or SF. Just last month, a judge let a homeless stabber back on the street after he threatened and tried attacking SF’s mayor and his bodyguard. The Progressive reaction was to blame the mayor and the police— and then the newly freed homeless guy immediately broke the law again and had to be re-arrested.
I’m curious if there were some consortium of all private businesses with their own surveillance cams deciding to aggregate their footage could it be stopped?
Home depot and lowes have contract with Flock, as an example.
In New Orleans, a private rogue network of surveillance camera has been erected in reaction to a too constraining live facial recognition ban.
I think it would be much harder to stop.
I worry about this. It's easy enough to go around putting bags over flock cameras, but it would be harder to justify targeting ones that just maybe are doing double duty.
We need to find a way to make partnering with flock a liability.
Here's a modest proposal: what if we made it a serious crime for anyone to retain automatically-recorded surveillance footage, or data derived from it, for longer than some limited period of time (say, 7 days) unless said footage is released to the public within that timeframe?
That is, you can put up cameras wherever you want, but you can't gain any kind of competitive advantage by doing so.
I think the public would be more alert to the dangers of mass surveillance if the magnitude of that surveillance was more obvious. And if everyone was watching everyone, at least it wouldn't as easily abused for purposes such as selective prosecution or blackmail.
For the Canadians sitting at home, tut tutting more American foolishness that could never happen up here... Flock started their expansion into Ontario this very month[1].
We should probably oppose this.
_________
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/07/toronto-r...
Good luck. Dougie and the popo are BFFs.
Why do people consistently and falsely believe that they have privacy in public settings? You are literally out in public. If you don't want your behavior in public to be observed, then either don't behave in such a way that you wouldn't want observed, or stay home.
UPDATE: don't conflate stalking with observation. These are not the same. You can observe, but you cannot intimidate.
Every entrance to my neighborhood has a Flock camera from my local police department. Tracking the exact time I enter and leave my home is at the very least right at this line you’re trying to draw.
How that information is accessed and/or used is where the distinction lies.
So you'd be cool with us crowdsourcing a film crew to follow you and your family around in public at all times?
Should I be concerned that you're stalking me, or that you know this information? The former is illegal, the latter is not.
What's the difference in outcome between passive stalking by having sufficient cameras to capture everyone's actions at all times and active stalking with a film crew?
Intimidation and threatening behavior. Context matters.
It is intimidating and threatening to most normal people for their wearabouts to be tracked at all times, regardless of the mode.
Take this opportunity to learn that different people might have different thresholds to feel intimidated and that normal people don't feel comfortable being tracked at all times in real life, regardless of the mechanism by which it's being executed.
In the above example, maybe you feel uncomfortable because the film crew is following you around in broad daylight? Would you feel better if they stayed hidden like the flock cameras in this example?
They're not being tracked at all times in real life. They're potentially being tracked in public.
I get that some people have a desire for privacy in public. And I'm even sympathetic to it. However, with the exception of the EU, privacy in public not is a right, nor is it a thing most people believe they possess. (And even ECHR Article 8 has a carveout for recording public activities for legitimate purposes.)
If you think you should have such privacy rights, by all means, use the political process to achieve it. But note that it's not cost-free, and there will be tradeoffs.
> They're potentially being tracked in public.
In the film crew example, what is the difference if the crew is sufficiently far away from you such that you won't know? The paparazzi already do it to celebrities, seems reasonable for individuals to just track each other at a distance if we're all okay with your proposed path.
> seems reasonable for individuals to just track each other at a distance if we're all okay with your proposed path.
They often do. What am I gonna do, run up to anyone who's taking cell phone videos that might have me in it and try to force them to stop recording? That would make me look unhinged.
So, full circle, you're okay with a film crew recording you and your family in public at all times?
It’s a false equivalence. Passive surveillance cameras aren’t the same as having a bunch of annoying people trailing me, which gives rise to the concern for the personal safety of me and my family. So I reject the comparison.
> Passive surveillance cameras aren’t the same as having a bunch of annoying people trailing me, which gives rise to the concern for the personal safety of me and my family. So I reject the comparison.
Rejecting reality doesn't mean it's not real. The direction passive surveillance is going and is at is already approaching active surveillance in terms of outcomes. The only difference is it's being applied more uniformly, rather than just to a specific individual. But the outcomes in terms of tracking all of our whereabouts are indistinguishable.
This is the entire premise of the post, which you are tiptoeing around and never directly answering the question of "is it fine for everyone to be tracked in public at all times"? A yes or no here would be helpful.
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What about if/when those cameras are no longer really passive, and everything they see gets autonomously compiled into a dossier on your activities and movements?
That’s a separate issue. Real time observation is one thing. What happens with the data afterwards is another.
Now, the obvious response to that is “if you’re not watching, it can’t be recorded in the first place.” But we have legitimate reasons for wanting to observe public activities. The question is, how do we strike the right balance between legitimate use and abuse?
Would you mind if I parked near your house, such that every morning, when you drove past, I could follow you. To work, to the store, to the gym, you know, wherever.
Then on the way home I'll park where I left off. If anyone asks me I'll them everything I know about you. It's "public" information after all.
Should I be concerned that you're stalking me, or that you know this information? The former is illegal, the latter is not.
Flock can alert when any specific car drives by. No warrant is required to use this feature.
So, I won't follow you, but when you _do_ leave, I'm going to call some people to let them know that happened. Still cool?
Eat your heart out. It's also a completely legitimate law enforcement technique.
Having this surveillance done by human beings rate limits the process to, in theory, focus it on actual criminals. Requiring warrants for the more invasive and persistent techniques adds another layer of accountability.
You're bootstrapping your argument with an assumption that there's something to account for. Public activities are public. You're shifting the accountability from the actor to the observer.
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Lawmakers won't care until it is them and their kids that are being tracked by "hackers". Flock API's are poorly protected and the individual cameras are hackable as shown by Benn Jordan in multiple YouTube videos.
This movement reminds me of the "protecting democracy" message that was run on the national stage that pailed against the backdrop of rising inflation.
Privacy is important just as democracy is important, but crime and lawlessness feel more immediate and will always take center stage.
Any message to try to address the spread of flock and flock-like business models have to address what replaces it. If the only choice people are given is either having flock, or car break-ins, then I think we can probably guess what people would choose.
SFPD at least, has credited flock and flock-like tech for why property crime has dropped so much in recent years.
It's taxpayer-funded dragnet-warrantless surveillance, data harvesting, and stalking. And it is local elected officials' deliberate voluntary or bribed choice to invite Big Mommy into the lives of their constituents and people passing through. The anti-privacy doomers don't get to force their invasive anti-values on everyone else who wants respect for and to preserve their right to not be autonomously surveilled and monitored every single second when not in a business or organization premises.
I am surprised how overwhelmingly negative the comments are here. I would have expected at least a few voices defending Flock.
I'll step in and add a voice. Ultimately, Flock is solving a real problem with crime. This is why police departments when them.
Stopping Flock doesn't address the need that got police departments to use them. If you want to "stop flock", you need to address that need better.
"stopping a real problem with crime" i.e. employing mass surveillance to hunt down women who want to terminate a pregnancy
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...
Agreed. Flock has been a key contributor in solving numerous crimes. I'm happy for Flock to be in my county and would like the police to have more access to technology like this, not less.
Does your country also have a recurring problem of police shooting unarmed citizens? If not, it probably helps to understand the dynamics of why the police are not widely trusted here
County was not a typo. It's awful whenever there's an overuse of force in the USA. I'd recommend watching a few police bodycam videos on youtube before judging them wholesale though. The experience of a police officer in the United States seems to be long periods of tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror and adrenaline. Anyone out there can have a gun and encounters can unexpectedly escalate to deadly violence in seconds. Some of them should not be police officers. There are many great officers out there just trying to protect their communities.
All it takes is one cop acting badly to ruin things for quite a lot of people though, and the fact that police uniformly circle ranks around any of their members who is accused of something regardless of the validity makes "well, not all of them are bad!" a pretty useless sentiment. I'll consider them individually when they start holding individuals accountable, but not before then.
I think you're making some hasty generalizations here. They don't "uniformly" cover for their colleagues. Do you expect the police service to be perfect and never make mistakes? Can you point me towards a single human-run service where that's the case?
Having a monopoly on violence means the bar should be higher for them than for other "human-run services".
I am not American, but in my extremely dangerous country we have many privately-operated cameras and I don’t know a single person who is against them. We also have strict privacy laws.
So I was disappointed by what felt like very weak arguments in the article. Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused. The solution is to fix the abuse problem.
I’d like to hear stronger arguments against these devices, so that I’m better informed locally.
> Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused.
This isn't your life pro tip to get you some additional 20% discount on the next McDonald's order, or some ethical kind of abuse that gets you your needed treatment, because the healthcare system is just too nonexistent to care, though.
Any criticism against the use of surveillance technology needs to resort to the rhetoric of COULD, because any other choice of words would put the final nail in any surveillance companies' coffin, with evidence from either whistleblowers or circumvented security issues.
It's certainly hard to look behind the curtains - fair, but in a world where the top companies are selling advertisements by accumulating and correlating large-scale tracking information from every person on earth, regardless whether they're users of the products or not, it should be much harder to shrug off such a possibility as dystopian nonsense than to see it as the fucked up reality (circumvention of fundamental rights included) that it is.
> The solution is to fix the abuse problem.
No, the solution is to fix the societal issues leading people to resort to crime. Surveillance cameras are not a solution, they are a band-aid placed several steps away from the wound.
I could be convinced to support public cameras if access to the footage was tightly controlled and only used for solving serious crimes, but government officials and flock themselves have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted to use them in a responsible manner. It’s too powerful of a tool to put in the hands of untrustworthy individuals
Why only serious crimes?
If someone breaks into my car and a Flock camera sees it, is their right to privacy in a public space more important than my right to not have my property get stolen?
Yes.
Its worth checking out a recent interview with the Flock CEO on Cheeky Pint (Stripe's podcast with John Collison) [1]
As much as I fear the Orwellian future this could turn into, I think its important to recognize that the burden of preventing that is on lawmakers, not companies.
He explains in the interview that he would love for laws to be passed to create tighter controls over how these systems are used. The problem is that police departments don't want it! Perhaps they can elect to do it themselves, but then they expose themselves to competitors who have "more powerful features".
Something like 70% of homocides go unresolved! I think its cool that Flock is trying to help police departments fight crime. But it's time to yell at your lawmakers. Don't hate the player, hate the game!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYm2nXFDaB0
To the list of references provided by this post in the section "Further Reading," I would add the following book:
Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press
https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...
An academic study about the use of surveillance technology at the Los Angeles Police Department, the book documents the LAPD's use of data brokerage firms (e.g., Palantir) that collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, as well as automatic license plate readers like Flock, and Suspicious Activity Reports generated by police and civilians, which include reports of mundane activities such as using binoculars, drawing diagrams, or taking pictures or "video footage with no apparent aesthetic value." All this data ultimately gets parked in Fusion Center facilities, built in the aftermath of 9/11, where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information. As the author observes, "The use of data in law enforcement is not new. For almost a century, police have been gathering data, e.g., records of citations, collisions, warrants, incarcerations, sex offender and gang registries, etc. What is new and important about the current age of big data is the role in public policing of private capitalist firms who provide database systems with huge volumes of information about people, not just those in the criminal justice system."
Every time I see Flock mentioned, it makes me think it will be about the Linux lock file tool Flock, and I wonder why people want to stop it
Live in a neighborhood that privately installed cameras. The city also installed cameras. Before the camera's cars used to come and raid houses and worker's trucks. It was quite common. The neighborhood has statistics and tracks how many stolen cars / plates drove through the neighborhood. All crime statistics dropped, police show up and arrest people. Saying its an illusion of safety is bullshit. It's all fake until you're a victim of a crime. We need our own way to fight back against gangs, etc. I'd rather have more cameras and less police. Also lets get some drones as well, they work fantastic in SF. The city owns the data its not getting sold. It gets erased unless a crime is reported.
So with 100k cameras crime is down how much?
Stopping crime is a horrible business model. Committing it on the other hand...
> Stopping crime is a horrible business model
You've obviously not read the 13th amendment...
I am somewhat skeptical that either the ACLU or EFF are effective organizations for this cause. The ACLU in particular have drifted significantly from a civil liberties focus, and EFF's privacy track-record for corporate run surveillance has never been the best and of late they seem to be following the ACLU away from civil liberties.
There is an increasingly popular idea that all libertarianism, including civil libertianism, is inherently partisan and specifically right-wing. I think it has done a lot of damage to these organizations' ability to effectively fight this and other issues. I've shifted a lot of my support for ACLU/EFF towards IJ in recent years.
We are heading towards the exact future shown in the show "Person of Interest".
> The Illusion of Security
> Flock advertises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a culture of mistrust and preemptive suspicion. As the EFF warns, communities are being sold a false promise of safety - at the expense of civil rights* (EFF).
...
> True safety comes from healthy, empowered communities; not automated suspicion. Community-led safety initiatives have demonstrated significant results: North Lawndale saw a 58% decrease in gun violence after READI Chicago began implementing their program there. In cities nationwide, the presence of local nonprofits has been statistically linked to reductions in homicide, violent crime, and property crime (Brennan Center, The DePaulia, American Sociological Association).
These are incredibly weak arguments. I haven't personally looked into how good Flock cameras are at actually preventing crime and catching criminals, but if this is the best counterargument their detractors can come up with, it makes me suspect they're actually pretty good.
Crime is extremely bad. Mass surveillance is bad too, especially if abused, but being glib or dismissive about the real trade-offs is counterproductive.
Also, recording in public spaces (or private spaces that you own) is an important and fundamental right just like the right to privacy; simply banning this kind of surveillance would also infringe on civil liberties in a different way. I agree that laws and norms need adjusting in light of new technology, but that discussion needs more nuance than this.
I also thought it was interesting that the author basically argues Flock cameras are too effective at figuring out where criminals are, but then also argues they aren’t effective enough at reducing crime.
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Counterpoint: vehicle related crime is way down in SF. Which is great.
Flock should be illegal. Full stop. These people should be in prison.
a missed opportunity, going with StopFlock instead of FlockOff dot com
I understand the privacy argument. There are a few questions though:
1) Suppose there will be another shooting. Don't you want to know what exactly has happened before you go to the protest? Suppose your child will be hurt. Wouldn't you do anything to capture the culprit? How exactly would you feel if the police would tell you that they couldn't get the video with culprits face, because watching it would be a violation of someone's privacy?
2) Everyone has a camera in their pocket. Someone is filming all the time. Police can seize this video. Isn't that a privacy risk? Should we ban cameras in smartphones?
3) Should we even be private in the public? Doesn't privacy in public spaces encourage crime? I will die on a battle to keep the privacy in my home, but in public? I personally prefer to be safe, than private, in public.
4) What about private cameras near homes filming 24/7? Are those risks for privacy?
5) People in power will always be corrupt, have bad intentions, will use public goods for personal gain. Should we disregard broader benefits because there will be isolated cases where those benefits will be exploited?
Happy downvoting.
1) If someone killed my child, I would probably want to kill them back. And yet we don't consider that sufficient reason to make revenge killing legal. The wishes of the victims need to be weighed against the cost it imposes on everyone else, including those who are innocent. The cost of violating everyone's right to privacy, the social impacts of mass surveillance, and the risk of that data being abused.
2) > Isn't that a privacy risk?
Yes, it is!
> Should we ban cameras in smartphones?
No? How about making it difficult for the police to seize everyone's videos without a good reason? We already do that for phone videos, it's called warrants. But Flock doesn't. They just ask cops to enter any arbitrary "reason" text into a HTML textbox and instantly get access to everyone's videos. And if the people explicitly said they don't want those specific cops to have access, like many people decided about ICE? Well, just ask the next county over and use their system, it's not checked in any way.
People don't have a right to privacy in public (at least in the US). Do people not realize anyone can photograph or film them in public at any time. Heck, photographers can even then around and sell the without the subject's consent. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia
I'm really struggling to see the parallel between being filmed in public and committing revenge murder.
Sorry if I was unclear. My point was just that "if you were a victim, wouldn't you want this?" is not a very strong argument. What victims want does matter. But when it affects other people, their needs matter too.
Especially with mass-surveillance, which affects everyone. It's not possible to mass-surveil only people who would commit crimes, you need to surveil all innocent people too.
> My point was just that "if you were a victim, wouldn't you want this?" is not a very strong argument. What victims want does matter. But when it affects other people, their needs matter too.
Right and you used murder as an example. Do you think murder is even remotely comparable to putting up a security camera in a public space?
Yes, a victim might want some sort of response that is socially unacceptable, sure. But if you want to make a convincing argument you have to explain why the proposed response is unacceptable. Not some different, extreme, response of your own invention.
I'm really not sure how "committing vigilante murder is wrong" is supposed to be a good argument against putting up security cameras in a public space.
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Which points do you disagree with?
The part that you prioritise your convenience over life-long tragedy of someone else.
Privacy is not "convenience", I'm not sure how you arrive at that. And it's also not mine, it's everyone's.
I don't want children to die (obviously). I also don't want governments to track the movement of protestors and dissidents, police to stalk their ex-girlfriends, etc.
I don't think the effectiveness of mass AI surveillance in preventing crime is high enough to justify the drawbacks.
I misread the title
Boy would it just be terrible if someone hacked into the flock network and manipulated all the camera results ever so slightly. A letter here a number there, license plates or matches never quite lining up. It would take years for them to find the source of the “bugs”. Not saying I know anyone doing this or anything, just saying it would be oh soooooo terrible.
Michel Foucault's Panopticon is alive and well I see.
The "Take Action" section is missing the most obvious solution. Everyone just goes and takes down a camera. We as a society do not consent to this use of public space and simply have a national "Take out the trash day."
There is no way Flock could practically ramp up production or manpower to replace the entire fleet before failing to meet contractual requirements with their customers that keep money flowing in.
Who are you to speak on behalf of society? Wouldn't society also be better off if those who stole your car got caught?
Further, I'm not sure why there is an expectation of privacy in public places. You don't have to consent to being filmed when you're walking down a public sidewalk.
You should.
Why?
The best way to block Flock is probably to find a way to track billionaire celebs like Taylor Swift and Elon Musk.
If they were able to successfully change laws so they can fly anonymously they can probably change laws on cameras in public places, at least for them anyway.
Privacy for the special people.
https://gizmodo.com/taylor-swift-and-elon-can-finally-fly-pr...
Obligatory reference to PIPEDA and GDPR.
Edit: not a low effort comment. This is something you should all read and demand the same of. I consternated on how not to call your regime moronic. It _is_ moronic that you don’t have these basic protections and we keep having to listen to you all whine about that.
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It's fundamentally a security camera, for many people. People buy them to see what's going on, record crimes for reporting, and to feel safer. I think there's significant overlap in people who want to feel safer and people being ok with the police being able to look through their cameras, since being able to record events, for the police, was part of the motivation for the purchase of a security camera. My frail elderly grandpa, who has seen his neighborhood go to shit with the reduced police funding, would definitely see this as a "nice feature".
I, a law abiding & legal citizen want more of these cameras in public places. Are you trying to achieve an utopia for criminals and illegal aliens?
Would be nice if the cameras were useful. Most you get is a nice souvenir showing the crime occurring. Recording is not prevention. People don’t even bother hiding their face when they porch pirate in front of an obvious Ring camera because they know there is no real risk.
Does anyone hear that sound?
Have you read "Brave New World"? It predicted the future better than "1984".
Many of them have been.
IANAL, but if you are to take action it might be most prudent to do so non-destructively.
Putting a bag over the camera/solar panel or taking it down and returning the lost/abandoned property would leave it disabled just as well.
The added damage of outright destroying it would make no real difference to the company (might even just make them more money) but would make it easier to characterize the action as criminally motivated rather than an act of conscience in the public interest.
Every time they're discussed, I think of that scene of Homer bashing a weather station in the 70s[1]
[1] https://youtu.be/zexJJb9Lbas
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OP is not a king.
I didn’t say anyone was a king. I was just talking about troublesome priests.
And you're conveniently unaware of the historical context of the origin of that phrase too, if we're to take you literally, since you seem to entirely misunderstand how the whole reason it was problematic was due to the inherent power dynamics
Read some Foucauld. power is internalised.
People absorb the norms of their social class and start policing themselves and others without needing orders or hierarchical power dynamics.
Norm enforcement can spread faster and further than formal authority because lots of people can act on a signal whilst thinking they drew their own conclusions. Think of steve bannon's quote "politics is downstream of culture".
formal rank of the speaker is less important than that the signal comes from the socially legitimate tribe whose approval, language, and standard the subject is a member.
> Think of steve bannon's quote "politics is downstream of culture".
I'm going to be honest: if you think Steve Bannon is a thought leader, I don't think we'd agree on pretty much anything.
> formal rank of the speaker is less important than that the signal comes from the socially legitimate tribe whose approval, language, and standard the subject is a member.
You're claiming that a random stranger on an internet forum has as much social power as the literal monarch of a country. That's absurd, no matter how much fancy language you use to try to justify it.
Indeed, one of the great wisdoms of history is that a mobs have no power. We are very wise men so we know that there are no peer reviewed controlled trials showing mobs having power. We call this thing Science.
A random person on an internet forum is not a mob.
Indeed, no man is a mob. This is true and a sign of wisdom.
Smartass. What're you accomplishing, here?