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- Hacker News
- It is surprising to see so little thinking in the response from most of the commenters frequenting this website.
Flock cameras are a result of not enforcing existing laws. Judges are too lenient on offenders, repeat offenders are all too common, and so you have a reduction in the degree of trust in what should be a high trust society.
When there is not trust and too many people don't behave, you either start punishing offenders properly and potentially more harshly to disincentivise other would-be offenders, or you get Flock cameras.
You think only about the Flock cameras and their innate problems, but refuse to actually deal with _why_ Flock cameras are needed at all. Think a little.
by simianparrot - I'm pretty sure we're living in the prequel to Minority Report right now.by kingcauchy
- Is there realistically a chance that we won't get total surveillance in the next decades? Unless something dramatically changes, I just don't see how it won't end any other way.by vjvjvjvjghv
- To Google and apple's credit they have at the least made location history stored on device instead of dealing with the slippery slope of warrants that ask for all devices around a point. Google specifically decided after a court ruling to get out of the morass of server side storage. There is a lot wrong with how permissioning works on android and Google services but this is not one of them.by ghm2180
- > The deputy then used the woman’s travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth.
That sentence does make this less of a win tbh, given that with it, it's just an actual example of the technology doing the job it is supposed to do.
Like this, it's almost a trojan horse of something pretending to be PR for A, but actually being effective PR for B.
by hypfer - Yes, that's what they are. But does that mean are they breaking federal law or unconstitutional? I believe we've been told by the courts repeatedly that we should have no expectation of privacy out in public.by joshheitzman
- As a former city councilman of a community that installed six flock cameras I can say that the connection with law enforcement and the cameras capabilities and uses is obfuscated.
They are advertised as locally owned and data locally controlled. However when asked what the data can be used for was not given a direct answer.
I asked since the public purchased these cameras can we use the data to determine how many people attended a festival or other city event.
Not any identifiable information just general like how many people traveled to our community to attend the 4th of July fireworks show or local outdoor concert night.
Silence. Nope as the city we cannot access or use any of the data and instead trust that these will be used for law enforcement and safety.
Upon questioning how they would be used and who would be accessing the data found the answers to be quite generalized.
My two cents is if we are going to have flock cameras or not … law enforcement and the company need to be more transparent on what data is stored, how it is accessed, who can access, how it links to other cameras in other communities, how is misuse identified, what access do federal agencies have to this data (do they have to ask the local community first or can they just login with some super user account and pull data etc)
I get the sense that if Flock were to be transparent about how these truly function less communities would be willing to purchase .. but I could be wrong.
by roody15 - License plate reader?
So the device should require very specific license plates to scan for—not the current dragnet. The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)—and merely log which license plate, time stamp a single photo, and note the confidence level of it being a match.
The frame buffer should be the only place (a frame of) video is ever stored at all (excepting the high-confidence match indicated above).
The only issue remaining would be whether we trust the device/software to have complied (and not have a backdoor) and of course there needs to be a legal warrant for every license plate uploaded (and it should expire fairly frequently, likely requiring a new warrant to continue canning for the plate).
by JKCalhoun