Yeah, I'm not a fan of these things. If they were just ALPRs, I could probably give them a bit of slack -if they tightened up their security-, but all the other stuff they do, makes them pretty much untenable.
However:
> This makes AI powered cameras like Flock's distinct from traditional surveillance or traffic cams, which require someone to manually look over footage in order to find a specific vehicle or individual.
Is a bit misleading. These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.
These horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adjacent to minor bridges, etc. And next time I go through there, there are more. They seem to be procreating.
As others have pointed out, they're not just ALPRs or traffic cameras, and their use-cases, official and unofficial, are extremely dynamic and expanding fast. They are not the only thing of their kind, but they justly earned the lightning rod status for their conspicuous cooperation with the administration's immigration thuggery and the douchy--but highly consequential--pronouncements of their CEO. Moreover, there's a ticker tape of daily news about police misuse of Flock's database, mainly for stalking exes and things like that.
This _is_ a stop on the way to a Chinese-style surveillance state, and there's nothing inevitable about it. But it will happen if we allow it to happen.
Ben Johnson's video on the security vulnerabilities, linked in the article, always deserves an explicit shout-out. It's likely to intrigue the tinkerers here:
If a certain group of people think that it should be their right to take others rights away and turn society into a dystopia for perceived security, then for the same reason it should be other individuals rights to assert that their rights should be protected by taking the first group's rights away to install or do whatever they think they can do for convenience/security's sake.
This includes "ancestry tests", security cameras with AI in them, upload IDs to "verify", and even social media where you are allowed to upload pictures with others in them.
And since we "supposedly" live in a democracy, we should be allowed to have a vote to decide on this, the group that wins is the majority, right? I don't understand why we're allowing our rights to erode before we have an informed election about this, in democracies.
There is a difference between one or even twenty pictures being taken of you, and hundreds or thousands of pictures. One is "public privacy" and the other is "dragnet stalking".
Got these installed all over local parking lots for wallmart, home depot, ross, every exit solar panel and camera. Was wondering if there is some sort of quickly blinking infrared light or something that would make it visible to a naked eye of a cop, but not to a recording camera. I bet you would sell millions of those license plate holders in a heartbeat.
Can anybody find trustworthy stats that these actually reduce crime? All I see are occasional anecdotes about how they were used to find one person one time.
Skeptical me seriously doubts this is an effective solution for crime. But maybe that's because this country has a history of being willing to do a million expensive and privacy violating things, and only if it's a punitive measure.
They're also getting banned fast. The city level should be the most accessible government for change.
There's been over 70[1] documented wins.
Don't feel like this is a lost cause, it clearly isn't. If everyone who was going to comment on this thread instead or additionally got involved by going to a city council meeting and explaining the problems to friends/family, many more cities could reject them.
Nothing is blocking them to spread their tech on other brands and vendors, making ghost data operator companies and aggregating it on complex layers that only produces information without the whole data.
The law that regulates it and all the validation process is flawed and they know it.
typically the state finds it has to pay out millions to those wrongly imprisoned. These cameras are not quite as good as flipping a coin in accuracy, so the tax payers are already on the hook
>there has been widespread public backlash to cameras that track everyone, whether or not they've been suspected of a crime.
Well, duh. It doesn't know your plate from anyone elses so your plate gets recorded along with everyone else. If you go about a normal person's business then there is no harm and nothing happens.
I'm sure someone will decide harm is being done even when nothing happens.
The problem isn't the surveillance of land; nobody is getting up in arms over someone pointing a camera out of their window to watch their neighborhood street occasionally. The problem is the scale. Flock is running a massive network of cams equipped with ML classification and segmentation algos, running 24/7, to identify and catalog plates, faces, and voices of everyone in view. It's a nation-scale realtime surveillance dragnet, and obviously not what our current legislation on public camera use was written to address.
In my area, I pass by at least five Flock cameras driving to my grocery store, meaning that Flock knows how often I get groceries, who rides along with me, which stores I visit, and how long I spend at each location. They can infer my working hours and routine travel routes. They have the technical capability to analyze the spatial and temporal distribution of my movements, and could "flag" me when I travel at odd hours or to unusual locations if they so chose. I would have no knowledge of or recourse against that invasion of my privacy.
Flock is profiting from arbitrage of the mismatch between current laws around camera use in public ("no reasonable expectation of privacy") that, when legislated, did not envision a future where cheap always-connected hardware would enable a single company to blanket the country in ML-enabled camera/microphone turrets. These aren't "just cameras in public", these are full-featured surveillance stations networked to a centralized database and powerful edge compute capability, enabling the systematic tracking of every citizen at a precision that rivals placing GPS tracking bugs on every car (which is typically illegal). And because it's a private company, none of this information is auditable by (or accountable to) the general public that is subjected to the surveillance. In my view, what Flock is doing is deeply unethical and a gross exploitation of both US citizens and the spirit of the law.
Imagine if your neighbor walked past your house every day and recorded your property with their phone camera. Imagine thirty strangers did that every day. Imagine being unable to walk more than two blocks out of your neighborhood before passing a random stranger standing up in a crows-nest on a telephone pole with a zoom lens camera photographing you and your kids and taking notes so they could sell your behavioral data to law enforcement and advertising agencies. Imagine several hundred strangers concurrently following you around your grocery store and silently monitoring your shopping habits.
It’s okay though, these are public spaces, and you shouldn't expect to have power of consent over who is watching you.
Both flck and pltr uses a loophole on the law that if no one holds data no one is doing anything wrong.
This needs to be fixed.
Holding information about people should have a maximum time limit and should be treated respectfully.
Given it is impossible to make them stop, it should be easy to see what's on you and anything else is illegally obtained.
I kind of want to be able to see a Flock (YC S17)-related thread on HN without feeling obligated to participate, but, alas. Just for background: I was one of the ringleaders of a community effort that successfully kicked Flock out of Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, assisted a few other community efforts, went on to help draft some of the first state legislation for ALPRs in the country (Oregon SB1516, which passed, though I have some reservations about the resulting bill), and I am still working with other groups across the country.
During the development of the legislation, my opponents included Flock Safety (YC S17) and Axon, and, later, others. I had a rather contentious meeting at one point with a legislator and several Flock (YC S17) C-levels.
This has been eating a big part of my life for over a year now, so it's deeply, deeply disappointing to see some of the same talking points repeated on HN all this time later.
1. We've known for a year now that Flock (YC S17) captures more than just license plates. We decompiled some of their code on a legally-obtained device. That code very clearly included categories of interest for their onboard object detection software, and included, "cat", "dog", "person", "bicycle", among other vehicle-related things.
2. We also obtained, through public records requests, training materials from a local police department, and training materials from other police departments, that together showed that not only did the Flock (YC S17) interface provide search options for bicycles, but that police departments were sharing tactics for finding non-automobile objects in images.
3. Flock's (YC S17) own marketing materials have been advertising their ability to find "missing people" given a description of an individual's clothing for a long time now. See e.g.: https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform
5. These systems were immediately abused by police departments across the country for non-law enforcement purposes, or for purposes contrary to local or state laws. Proponents of surveillance keep trying to steer the conversation towards "but think of all the crime we can prevent!" while pointedly avoiding all of the plethora of abuses of this system. Flock (YC S17) could have anticipated this or, by now, put controls in place to at least appear to want to reduce these forms of abuse, but they have never cooperated with any of that. There is no other way to view this at this point than that Flock tacitly approves of abuse of their system and any efforts they do undertake only ever result in less public oversight.
6. It is very much not a lost cause to fight against this. You don't have to accept a venture-capital-funded, rapid-growth, your-data-is-our-value tech company rolling out surveillance in your community because they convinced a gullible and poorly-informed police department that it's in everyone's best interest. There are many headwinds against these fights, but they are being won, and the fact that they're happening in larger population centers (which tend to be a bit more liberal) is purely a consequence of the effort required to win.
But, I've talked directly with a lot of community members across the country, and opposition to these systems cuts across political lines. Working to shut these down in your community is good work, and moreover, can help connect you to some other very decent people in your community.
And also FWIW I've had an ongoing dialogue with a local police chief on how to do a b...
33 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 53.0 ms ] threadHowever:
> This makes AI powered cameras like Flock's distinct from traditional surveillance or traffic cams, which require someone to manually look over footage in order to find a specific vehicle or individual.
Is a bit misleading. These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
As others have pointed out, they're not just ALPRs or traffic cameras, and their use-cases, official and unofficial, are extremely dynamic and expanding fast. They are not the only thing of their kind, but they justly earned the lightning rod status for their conspicuous cooperation with the administration's immigration thuggery and the douchy--but highly consequential--pronouncements of their CEO. Moreover, there's a ticker tape of daily news about police misuse of Flock's database, mainly for stalking exes and things like that.
This _is_ a stop on the way to a Chinese-style surveillance state, and there's nothing inevitable about it. But it will happen if we allow it to happen.
Ben Johnson's video on the security vulnerabilities, linked in the article, always deserves an explicit shout-out. It's likely to intrigue the tinkerers here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
This includes "ancestry tests", security cameras with AI in them, upload IDs to "verify", and even social media where you are allowed to upload pictures with others in them.
And since we "supposedly" live in a democracy, we should be allowed to have a vote to decide on this, the group that wins is the majority, right? I don't understand why we're allowing our rights to erode before we have an informed election about this, in democracies.
Skeptical me seriously doubts this is an effective solution for crime. But maybe that's because this country has a history of being willing to do a million expensive and privacy violating things, and only if it's a punitive measure.
There's been over 70[1] documented wins.
Don't feel like this is a lost cause, it clearly isn't. If everyone who was going to comment on this thread instead or additionally got involved by going to a city council meeting and explaining the problems to friends/family, many more cities could reject them.
[1] https://deflock.org/council/#wins
The law that regulates it and all the validation process is flawed and they know it.
Well, duh. It doesn't know your plate from anyone elses so your plate gets recorded along with everyone else. If you go about a normal person's business then there is no harm and nothing happens.
I'm sure someone will decide harm is being done even when nothing happens.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
In my area, I pass by at least five Flock cameras driving to my grocery store, meaning that Flock knows how often I get groceries, who rides along with me, which stores I visit, and how long I spend at each location. They can infer my working hours and routine travel routes. They have the technical capability to analyze the spatial and temporal distribution of my movements, and could "flag" me when I travel at odd hours or to unusual locations if they so chose. I would have no knowledge of or recourse against that invasion of my privacy. Flock is profiting from arbitrage of the mismatch between current laws around camera use in public ("no reasonable expectation of privacy") that, when legislated, did not envision a future where cheap always-connected hardware would enable a single company to blanket the country in ML-enabled camera/microphone turrets. These aren't "just cameras in public", these are full-featured surveillance stations networked to a centralized database and powerful edge compute capability, enabling the systematic tracking of every citizen at a precision that rivals placing GPS tracking bugs on every car (which is typically illegal). And because it's a private company, none of this information is auditable by (or accountable to) the general public that is subjected to the surveillance. In my view, what Flock is doing is deeply unethical and a gross exploitation of both US citizens and the spirit of the law.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/vandals-strike-cut-flock-c...
During the development of the legislation, my opponents included Flock Safety (YC S17) and Axon, and, later, others. I had a rather contentious meeting at one point with a legislator and several Flock (YC S17) C-levels.
This has been eating a big part of my life for over a year now, so it's deeply, deeply disappointing to see some of the same talking points repeated on HN all this time later.
1. We've known for a year now that Flock (YC S17) captures more than just license plates. We decompiled some of their code on a legally-obtained device. That code very clearly included categories of interest for their onboard object detection software, and included, "cat", "dog", "person", "bicycle", among other vehicle-related things.
2. We also obtained, through public records requests, training materials from a local police department, and training materials from other police departments, that together showed that not only did the Flock (YC S17) interface provide search options for bicycles, but that police departments were sharing tactics for finding non-automobile objects in images.
3. Flock's (YC S17) own marketing materials have been advertising their ability to find "missing people" given a description of an individual's clothing for a long time now. See e.g.: https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform
4. Newer devices are also running http://happytimesoft.com/products/rtsp-server/index.html RTSP software but I can't speak publicly about how I know that.
5. These systems were immediately abused by police departments across the country for non-law enforcement purposes, or for purposes contrary to local or state laws. Proponents of surveillance keep trying to steer the conversation towards "but think of all the crime we can prevent!" while pointedly avoiding all of the plethora of abuses of this system. Flock (YC S17) could have anticipated this or, by now, put controls in place to at least appear to want to reduce these forms of abuse, but they have never cooperated with any of that. There is no other way to view this at this point than that Flock tacitly approves of abuse of their system and any efforts they do undertake only ever result in less public oversight.
6. It is very much not a lost cause to fight against this. You don't have to accept a venture-capital-funded, rapid-growth, your-data-is-our-value tech company rolling out surveillance in your community because they convinced a gullible and poorly-informed police department that it's in everyone's best interest. There are many headwinds against these fights, but they are being won, and the fact that they're happening in larger population centers (which tend to be a bit more liberal) is purely a consequence of the effort required to win.
But, I've talked directly with a lot of community members across the country, and opposition to these systems cuts across political lines. Working to shut these down in your community is good work, and moreover, can help connect you to some other very decent people in your community.
And also FWIW I've had an ongoing dialogue with a local police chief on how to do a b...