Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Flock has solved crimes in my state, including a few horrendous violent crimes.
We forget US society was configured (imperfectly) to allow families to raise their children in stability and safety, with guardrails around both sides of liberty. Surveillance has a legit role in protecting communities and their families - especially the most vulnerable.
Willing to be most of the Flock hate crowd doesn't have kids walking to school in areas where bad things happen - many probably don't have kids.
- I'm 100% in favor of LPR cameras. Any technology can be abused. The handful of corrupt officers that were caught using the cameras for nefarious reasons shouldn't overshadow the incredible benefit these are.
> Willing to [bet] most of the Flock hate crowd doesn't...
...have a reason at all to worry about LPR cameras tracking their car. Just "something something government."
by pwython - "Won't someone think of the children" has become the rally cry of authoritarians.by joquarky
- Oh, yes, "think of the children", nobody has ever explored this angle to push unpopular things before.by jamesnorden
- Sum up the number of kids harmed or murdered by the state (pick the top n dictators in the last 100 years for example).
Sum up the number of kids harmed or murdered by random people (remember that, for example, non-family abductions are 1% of abductions).
Compare.
I guarantee you that an empowered state is worse for child welfare than random criminals.
by edot - Except there was literally just a piece a few days back here on HN where a Mom was arrested for letting her kid walk half a mile alone in a gated community with active security patrols. The guardrails you describe aren’t for child safety so much as adult persecution. Surveillance may help solve some crimes, but its goal isn’t safety of the people surveilled as much as protecting the power of those doing the surveilling. Research continues pointing out that cameras don’t do shit to deter crime, and its actual ability to solve crimes is limited to the humans using said tools - and with a longer history of abuses than successes, it’s a fairly safe conclusion that mass surveillance does fuck all to actually protect the populace.by stego-tech
- We could solve even more crimes if the police were allowed to install cameras in everyone's homes.by nkrisc
- There is also a large difference between local surveillance (home/business/area CCTV), public surveillance (openly accessible cameras like traffic cams), and dragnet surveillance- I generally trust my local police precincts but don't like the fact that the alphabet soup of federal agencies has warrantless access to track me on the way to and from church or work or Facebook marketplace deals
- I tend to agree that when used correctly, a surveillance system like this could have benefits at a societal level.
The problem is the many stories we already have of misuses of this equipment, showing that people in power are not mentally capable of actually managing a surveillance system like this in a societally beneficial way.
If the use of the system was designated as only being allowed to stop heinous crimes and we had a track record and way to prove this was always the case, then I would be 100% in support. But given it has already proven to not be possible is likely why most people are against it.
I simply don't think Humans are capable of proper use of a system like this.
by Jcampuzano2 - It's kind of ironic that US built the infrastructure(adtech, social media) to track people around the world on the Internet and now their own people are getting tracked in real life.by quaintdev
- US citizens are bad at protesting. In my area these cameras would be on fire weekly.by spiderfarmer
- In Florida, we just talked to our reps and got them banned from the entire state. It was easy and didn’t require protests at all.by k33n
- na, we are just more civilized.by greenchair
- What country?by whimsicalism
- Absolutely horrible. They show up on Saturday's yelling at empty buildings. Very rarely does an American protest against a government body change policy. If you want to really do something, show up on a Tuesday morning, stop traffic, flood the phone lines, and the email systems, relentlessly day after day. Americans are far too comfortable to truly protest.by Simulacra
- US Citizens have been tamed by “social” and other media propaganda by the people in power. But we got 2A handy to you know, hunt for rabbits and shitby bdangubic
- French? I was impressed by:
Yellow vests knock out 60% of all speed cameras in France
by mikeodds - I think the long term solution to the privacy problem is going to be to switch to a vehicle marking system which can only be usefully used by law enforcement. Example, if instead of license plates you had a transponder that sends out encrypted metadata about the vehicle in a way that only law enforcement could decrypt it. Obviously there are still problems of abuse of law enforcement keys but it raises the bar significantly and it prevents private companies from building a business out of collecting the data.
You introduce a new problem, which is that eyewitness reports of crimes etc can’t identify the vehicles as easily, but that could be viewed as an acceptable loss. Or the problem could conceivably be solved with more technology if we can have dynamically changing license plates (which, again, require law enforcement keys to map back to a real identity for the vehicle).
The only other way I see is that we change laws so that a company like flock collecting this data and then offering it to the government is treated the same as if the government collected it itself. But now that the cat is out of that bag and there is big money behind it, I don’t really see it going back.
by hamburglar - I think if you're worried about being harassed by your neighbours if they find out what you do during the day, you should be thinking hard about what you do during the day.by rfrey
- Yeah! If you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear!
looks at you suspiciously
Are those… curtains?
by madaxe_again - Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49618447by driverdan
- If someone were following around and filming someone who was posting anti-Flock fliers, I would also feel that crosses into harassment after a certain amount of time.
A TV news crew filmed me when I was a freshman setting up my old travel trailer in a new university trailer park. I hated it, but it didn't last long. If they had continued following and filming indefinitely despite my protests, I would have wanted some kind of legal protection from them.
by delichon - I would feel the same way if these people weren't installing a permanent surveillance camera.
I don't think it's fair to cry harassment if you're getting filmed setting up the harassment machine.
If anything, Americans are being too nice to Flock. We're watching the villain and setup of a 1980s dystopian scifi horror, except there's no unlikely hero who can save the world by shooting a single weirdo in a suit on top of a skyscraper.
by jeroenhd - flock's business model is recording people. they do not get to complain about being recorded.by nbvgjhk
- Why do you think you can get legal protection just because the filming lasts longer? AFAIK you can film anyone however long you want as long as you do it exclusively on public property where there's no expectation of privacy and you don't harass them in anyway (maintain a safe distance). Isn't that what happens to celebrities & politicians? AOC doesn't get to complain that the press is following her with cameras everywhere she goes all day long.
- I love a good taste-of-their-own-medicine story like anyone else, but the headline is false.
It seems that this is about a YouTuber stalking a Flock employee's vehicle through traffic for 10-15 minutes, which is why the police were called.
by driggs - Watching and following everywhere someone drives is stalking? Damn, that's crazy.by morkalork
- Yeah! Nobody should be able to track your movements along public roads.by giaour
- Not a YouTuber, a local reporter in Atlantaby jLaForest
- Flock cameras do the same thing to me so I guess I'd better call the cops.by emdash