It's commercialized stalking. A group of people who physically stood in each park every day photographing children playing and sharing those images between each other would be run out of town so quick. Laws would be invented in a heartbeat to stop this.
>It's commercialized stalking. A group of people who physically stood in each park every day photographing children playing and sharing those images between each other would be run out of town so quick. Laws would be invented in a heartbeat to stop this.
This is a systemic problem.
There's a ton of things that are considered bad and questionably legal when small timers do them but if you spend millions producing fake bullshit paperwork to legitimize it it becomes a good thing.
I put a shed in my back yard, I'm an evil person for violating the Wetland Protection Act in my state, the city fines me and tries to turn it into leverage for stealing my house, the useful idiots cheer.
Blackrock pays some engineers to produce mumbo jumbo reports, they bulldoze the exact same f-ing "wetland" 100yd further back and put up solar panels, declare themselves to be saving the planet, and the same exact useful idiots once again cheer.
You can find a litany of examples like that in any industry, I just chose that one because I feel it's particularly on point for this audience.
Yeah, but if there were people who ran around carrying other people occasionally football tackled each other killing all involved we’d probably ban that too, and yet cars are not only permitted but we give them large amounts of our common space in cities. The linebackers running around wouldn’t be treated so kindly.
This shows that in most societies mechanical devices can acceptably have certain behavior that humans cannot exhibit. People can see that a camera recording something to a video recording system is different from a person watching and photographing someone.
So these analogies by way of “what if a person were to do this other thing that implies an intent a mechanical system does not?” do not land with me.
There should not be any system that allows a person to be continuously tracked at all times short of as a consequence of criminal activity with a judge signing off on it.
In San Francisco we do have speed cameras. You’d need something like a calibrated distance measure to use Flock for speeding detection or it is (rightfully) contestable.
The cameras built for automatic speeding detection do fulfill their purpose, and I agree that it would be great to have more.
>Imagine the uproar if flock were used for automatic speeding tickets.
Imagine how much HN would be defending them if they started with speed cameras or something else that could be contrived as beneficial and kinda pandered to the whims of the demographics and then moved to 1984 rather than just going straight from zero to 1984.
The whole discussion would be framed as "these are critical safety infrastructure, besides they have strict controls around access and you have no privacy when driving a 2-ton death machine" and they could literally be doing facial recognition on pedestrians and tracking cyclists for years and years and years and it would take an insane mountain of beyond undeniable evidince to change the narrative of the discussion. Because once a bias prone vote base community picks a side, it's basically impossible to change. Welcome to modern discourse.
I'm infuriated with this narrative because I can then be in my own private backyard with a fence and still be susceptible to surveillance. What the people who own the surveillance narrative really mean is that if they can record you, whether in private or not, you have no expectation of privacy.
Despite the references to recent cases like Carpenter, this isn’t a cogent legal analysis. These recent cases have been focused on the question as to whether law enforcement activity involving cameras, cell phone locations, etc. constitutes a “search” and therefore must satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. In the challenged cases, the Government didn’t obtain a warrant and the defense was trying to suppress the introduction of evidence.
But it says nothing as to what the Government can do when they do have a warrant. If they get a judge to sign one, provided the warrant meets the particularity requirement, they can go obtain what they need.
As far as Flock is concerned, it’s mainly a process thing. Right now they might be able to share their data with law enforcement without a warrant. If the law changes, the data will still be there, except henceforth, law enforcement will need to obtain a warrant before getting it. So there will be that safety mechanism, although security vulnerabilities could make it available to hackers.
The bigger question in my mind is “should such systems even exist in free states,” but as written, our Constitution doesn’t explicitly forbid them.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 43.7 ms ] threadThis is a systemic problem.
There's a ton of things that are considered bad and questionably legal when small timers do them but if you spend millions producing fake bullshit paperwork to legitimize it it becomes a good thing.
I put a shed in my back yard, I'm an evil person for violating the Wetland Protection Act in my state, the city fines me and tries to turn it into leverage for stealing my house, the useful idiots cheer.
Blackrock pays some engineers to produce mumbo jumbo reports, they bulldoze the exact same f-ing "wetland" 100yd further back and put up solar panels, declare themselves to be saving the planet, and the same exact useful idiots once again cheer.
You can find a litany of examples like that in any industry, I just chose that one because I feel it's particularly on point for this audience.
As a German, that is precisely how Nazi Germany operated and why so few people complained: They had the proper process and paper for everything.
This shows that in most societies mechanical devices can acceptably have certain behavior that humans cannot exhibit. People can see that a camera recording something to a video recording system is different from a person watching and photographing someone.
So these analogies by way of “what if a person were to do this other thing that implies an intent a mechanical system does not?” do not land with me.
There should not be any system that allows a person to be continuously tracked at all times short of as a consequence of criminal activity with a judge signing off on it.
It's so basic that a 3rd grader gets it.
(which... we should, if we have the data to do it, why not actually enforce traffic laws?)
The cameras built for automatic speeding detection do fulfill their purpose, and I agree that it would be great to have more.
Imagine how much HN would be defending them if they started with speed cameras or something else that could be contrived as beneficial and kinda pandered to the whims of the demographics and then moved to 1984 rather than just going straight from zero to 1984.
The whole discussion would be framed as "these are critical safety infrastructure, besides they have strict controls around access and you have no privacy when driving a 2-ton death machine" and they could literally be doing facial recognition on pedestrians and tracking cyclists for years and years and years and it would take an insane mountain of beyond undeniable evidince to change the narrative of the discussion. Because once a bias prone vote base community picks a side, it's basically impossible to change. Welcome to modern discourse.
But it says nothing as to what the Government can do when they do have a warrant. If they get a judge to sign one, provided the warrant meets the particularity requirement, they can go obtain what they need.
As far as Flock is concerned, it’s mainly a process thing. Right now they might be able to share their data with law enforcement without a warrant. If the law changes, the data will still be there, except henceforth, law enforcement will need to obtain a warrant before getting it. So there will be that safety mechanism, although security vulnerabilities could make it available to hackers.
The bigger question in my mind is “should such systems even exist in free states,” but as written, our Constitution doesn’t explicitly forbid them.