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- Hacker News
- When the mechanisms of government fail, violence is sometimes necessary and justified.by eudamoniac
- I think Flock had good intentions. Most of their justifications make sense -- given that you trust power. But Trump has shown us exactly what the founding fathers feared: A tyrant that will abuse and misuse these technologies with no moral grounding whatsoever. As much as people love Obama he greatly grew the capabilities of the executive branch and is directly responsible for the issues we see now with Trump. Flock is much the same in my book: sure it is great to collate a dataset of everyone's location given you trust power -- but history has shown us that you seldom can. I think the onus should be opt-in, you can allow Flock to track you if you want the protections that the company might offer you.
In general, we need a digital bill of rights -- tech has changed and exceeded what the software written by the founding fathers can handle.
by stanfordkid - I know this is an extremely hot take, but it's not the license plate reading service that bothers me.
A license plate is specifically a tracking number to identify a registered vehicle on a public road. The 4th Amendment gives you privacy inside of your car, but your car is not itself guaranteed privacy. Before Flock, police departments already had informally aggregated data from speed cameras, red light cameras, and toll booths. The distinction being that any evidence collected in such a way is purely circumstantial and still requires a warrant to investigate.
The big irony though of Flock plate readers is that because they're just tracking license plates, they're not actually that useful at solving meaningful crime. Realistically there are a small number of hit-and-runs that could be solved, and they can make certain investigations a bit shorter. And most of what we read about is officer directed stalking or harassment activities.
It's all of Flock's other advertised services that should really freak people out. The facial recognition, the audio scanners, the individual-level tracking databases - right now they're a fancy VIN lookup service. It's all the other stuff they're trying to sell departments on that are getting into really egregious 4th Amendment violations.
by legitster - They aren't just tracking license plates though. They're tracking people - let me explain. Their 'ALPR' cameras (purposefully misleading to call them ALPR btw) capture the footage and send it off to their servers where it's retained - building a long-term historical location history on every vehicle. Advanced analysis is performed on the data to provide features to their customers such as the ability to search for vehicles based on a description of its characteristics (no plate needed), real-time route prediction, location heatmaps, and identifying vehicles that travel together (convoy search). Here's the important part - data is also ingested into another service they run called 'Nova', which is essentially a people search tool that connects the vehicles they capture directly to people and their PII. Access to their platforms (Flock OS, Nova, etc.) is sold via a subscription to law enforcement where they can perform searches for individuals or vehicle whereabouts for any reason, without a warrant, and practically no oversight or regulations.by Dezvous
- Recent WIRED[1] article goes in depth on this exact problem:
> Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for “any offense,” exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and “do a workup on the top three individuals.” The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software.
> A “workup,” in Flock’s terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department’s records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts.
This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi, and it's going to be a whack-a-mole game dealing with all the baby Flocks that spring up if Flock itself can be shut down.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/
- Non-cloudflare link that basically says the same thing: https://mstdn.social/@stux/117186158784673388by CqtGLRGcukpy
- Our local governments are enabling Flock. Get involved in your local politics. Find out who made the decisions to put these cameras in the neighborhoods and hold them accountable. Until that happens they will just find another vendor if Flock folds. Just like Flock will find a new CEO if theirs is forced to resignation.by nazgulsenpai
- You should see how the datacenter companies operate. They have massive teams of lawyers bigger than the entire city staff threatening all sorts of lawsuits and even pressure cities into signing NDAs against discussing their negotiations with any other city. They have buckets of money and perks waiting to bribe a defector or fund an election campaign. Any old scummy company with a couple of billion dollars is frequently more sophisticated and powerful than a piddly local government.
- I noticed he requested to hide his house street view on google maps.
- Sounds like he doesn't want to compromise his privacy in the name of safetyby morkalork
- I have to say, I wish we lived in a society where tools like Flock were not problematic, due to abuse and other factors.
However, if we lived in such a society, we wouldn't want tools like Flock to begin with.
edit: to be clear, we are far too corrupt a society to have things like Flock. The point of my comment was this irony.
by consumer451 - i have a RIGHT to privacy, and so does everyone on American soil. end of argument.by frogperson
- We do not need Flock in this current iteration of society.
In utopia, we would also not need Flock.
Privacy should be a human right.
by hightrix - Related:
Flock CEO gets his house blurred out on Google Maps and Zillow
- by senectus1
- I worry that Flock is going to take the fall, and some other bad actor with political connections (my money would be on Palantir) will just quietly pick up where they left off while everyone's patting themselves on the back for defeating Flock.
The stuff Flock is doing is going to be standard AI-driven surveillance in the future, and unless the actual practices are made into political third rails and made into criminal code violations, they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
Don't make it 'stop Flock,' make it 'criminalize AI-driven surveillance.' Denounce 'conspiracy to implement ai-driven surveillance' as an inherently immoral activity punishable by prison time.
- > they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
What would be legalized? You realize that recording people in public is already legal, right? I'm puzzled where people are getting the idea that Flock is doing something illegal.
by Manuel_D - Exactly my thoughts. Flock has been brazen on so many things, that second-movers with a modicum of political savvy can come assuage all the major Flock-FUD, while in fact being significantly worse.by nemosaltat
- >they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
Or they'll be legalized piecemeal and you'll get sneered at by the useful idiots for opposing each incremental step based on principal.
- > and some other bad actor with political connections (my money would be on Palantir) will just quietly pick up where they left off while everyone's patting themselves on the back for defeating Flock
At that point, though, there will be a large group of people trained on how to defeat a company like Flock.
by mcphage - Legislation guardrails around surveillance technology are a necessary component to defend against future corporate surveillance apparatus establishment and operation, as this surveillance could take many forms (video, audio, geolocation, RF signatures, etc). Flock and Axon today, whatever unsavory folks come along in the future.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes
Guardrails because we cannot trust the human.
by toomuchtodo - This is still a useful first step. Once “flock” becomes eponymous and a toxic political football, it can be applied to all future companies who do the same thing.
The word “Flock” is quickly becoming toxic, in the future we’ll be able to use it as a shorthand for all companies of this type. e.g. if I call something a cleanex everyone knows what I’m talking about regardless of whether Cleanex the company actually made the item being referred to. Similarly we’ll be able to just say “flock camera” and everyone will know what it is regardless of who makes the camera.
by Dig1t - My money would be on Axon. They at least have a claim to the "hold police accountable" angle with bodycams and less-lethal weapons. Compared with Flock's "we'll watch you and what're you gonna do about it"
- Doxxing is bad of course but does "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" apply here? Or is that only for us working folk?by m4ck_
- Do you believe anyone with a surveillance camera should have the owners name and address published if in any way a “public” area is recorded?
I suppose we can start with all Blink, Ring and Nest Cams. Then we will continue with dash cam owners.
- Reminds me of the "if you don't want people to know, you probably shouldn't be doing it" comment from Eric Schmidt, the Google executive.
It was hilarious and well deserved when people immediately started digging up his dirt in response and exposing stuff like extramarital affairs to the point he had to deploy lawyers. Even before that quote, journalists were using Google itself to search and discover his personal information, and Google's response was to blacklist the journalists. Funny how angry these billionaires get when their privacy gets violated, huh.
It's extremely obnoxious that these big tech executives subject us to surveillance only to turn around and buy back their privacy with their wealth. They should have exactly zero privacy. Doxxing? It's called sousveillance.
- doxxing is about pseudonymous internet accounts, not people who are very public with their real name and lobbying the government.
this is whitepages reverse lookup
if he was just a guy chatting on the internet about cameras, sure, it would be doxxing, but he isnt. paparazzi have existed sonce forever
by 8note - Question for me is "Will something you can do free now, be suspicious in the future?" Like voting, or taking your kids to a private school, or going to an EFF meeting?
As long as you feel fine having the government know absolutely everything you do, then keep supporting surveillance. I personally have nothing to fear, but I hate the idea that I am being surveilled by a private company.
by BatFastard - I would typically agree with the statement, but I have a lot of trouble giving a flying shit about the people literally selling Doxxing-As-A-Service getting doxxed in return.by folkrav