Too many people think doxxing is the answer, because you aren't getting your way.
If you want violence, you better be prepared for it. You just can't complain when someone doesn't like what you are doing and comes right to your door.
Our founding fathers addressed this: "What country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
The CEO of a company that spies on people, and now detects signals from your phone to connect the car to a driver, got scared and had Google blur his house. That is the height of hypocrisy. His home address is also public information, available from the City Clerks office for free. People won't need to find the exact address, just look for the only blurred house on his street. It's all utterly ridiculous. Clearly the citizens of the USA do not want flock in their communities so the CEO of the company isn't going to be popular, but he could fix that by removing flock from the communities that ban it.
CEO's aren't people. When you pretend they are, you allow them to live normal lives where they seem deserving of the same social protections we all enjoy.
I would imagine that the worst thing the vast majority of people have done is probably orders of magnitude less bad than what this guy has enabled and profited from. So I'd probably safe under that regime.
You're talking about violence like its some imaginary thing that isn't already being amplified by the government against its citizenry. The violence is already here and the surveillance state exacerbates it.
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.
they'll find a particularly violent crime and use that as the strawman... "Oh you dont want this? well i guess you support violent immigrant mass murderers then!"
and then before you know it the state has implemented its mass surveillance apparatus across the entire country. And we though china's social credits were bad? just IMAGINE what those predatory tech bros are cookin up.
Exactly. Freedom isn't free. If I have to pay for it with locks on my doors and having to be discerning about which truck I buy $5 steaks out of the back of lest my house get burgled or I get ripped off that seems like a pretty fair deal.
It's not far fetched. They usually dress it up in dogwhistle words like "at risk individuals" to make it seem like help rather than the threat it is.
Go look at what HN was saying and upvoting during the big data era. Endless scheming about orwellian ways to identify and "dispatch enforcement resources" on the pettiest thing. We're talking like buy a spool of romex get a letter in the mail from the .gov reminding you about code compliance. Or combing through small business financial to try and identify businesses that probably aren't high margin enough to be complying with all the rules. Real "I'm watching you" crap like that. And we're all supposed to go along with it because these people have our best interests at heard and/or mean well.
You take these same evil individuals and replace database integrations with pervasive cameras and AI and they will impoverish us all by grinding us under the thumb of government and say it's for our own good.
As a higher level comment points out, my fear is that Flock will end up being the straw man, happily torn down in favor of more outwardly palatable but privately onerous player(s).
> 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.
you're being deliberately daft. Its not the recording, its the surveillance dragnet with zero regulation or oversight that creates an instant dossier on whatever datapoints are searched for, by whomever decides to search for them who has paid for access.
Honestly the nuance isn't that intellectually taxing and having to explain it to people in the tech space is tiresome.
What law is Flock breaking? You're calling me daft, yet you couldn't be bothered to actually answer the question.
Like it or not recording or photographing people in public and selling that information is not illegal. Paparazzi do it all the time. You can poi.nt a webcam out your window, run ALPR software on the video feed, and sell access to query that information. Nothing about that is illegal. If it is, then please reference the laws that prohibit this.
People talk about privacy laws being violated, but in general privacy laws do not cover public activity. Privacy laws mostly focus on protecting communications and activities carried out in private.
That will notion of an individual’s right to photograph a person in public held against the rights of the person being photographed, to conduct their business and affairs undisturbed, is likely to be challenged successfully before the Supreme Court when it can be shown a majority of people are under perpetual persistent technical surveillance.
You assume that some future Supreme Court case will rule that governments' use of Flock violated the Fifth Amendment, but at present Flock is violating now laws. Like I said in the my original reply: nothing is good to be legalized because nothing Flock is doing violates the law.
There's a big difference between "X is illegal" and "X is presently legal, but my prediction is that the Supreme Court will, in the future, rule that X is illegal."
This is not sealioning, this me pointing out the incorrect assumption that Flock is doing something illegal. There's a reason why none of the replies actually point to the law that Flock is supposedly breaking: because there isn't one.
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.
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.
I think the point you're trying to make is undermined slightly by the fact that the word I think you're looking for is "Kleenex" not Cleanex. It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about, and I did some searching online to make sure I wasn't missing something about "Cleanex" in particular
I still agree with you though ."Flock Camera" is very likely to become the general term for "public surveillance camera" and it will carry a negative weight.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi
I feel like that's a bit of a false equivalency. The soviet secret police had surprisingly little hard evidence on anyone - part of the terror of these regimes is that they could act decisively with little more than a rumor or gossip and be free from scrutiny for any mistakes.
You're right: the current US regime has been gleefully weaponizing the legal system against political enemies, and the difference is that they don't care about scrutiny for mistakes because there have been zero consequences for anyone involved. The Soviets were at least somewhat worried about bad PR.
My thinking is if we can stop pervasive AI-driven surveillance we might be saved from a totalitarian regime who views The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual, and instead be able to settle for a run-of-the-mill corrupt authoritarian one.
There's the one where a guy was surrounded by cops with their guns pointing at him because of a flock fuckup. He had a partial plate match (as in, some of the digits matched, but not an exact match) with a plate that was lost or stolen (as in the plate itself was stolen, not the car it was attached to.) That one went viral because the guy was an editor at a magazine driving a loaner car
There's this one where a lady was pulled out of her car at gunpoint after flock flagged her as a murder suspect. This happened twice in a weekend. She was never suspected of murder, it was a mistaken flag. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/aug/28/milwaukee-p...
Flock doesn't require evidence for an alert to be put in their system. If you have access you can apparently just put out an alert saying someone is a murder suspect, and some police department will repeatedly drag a woman out of her car until the media embarrasses them publicly
Right the US government definitely isn’t detaining people, sending them to foreign gulags or sending mobs of masked morons shooting innocent people like Pretti in broad daylight. We don’t even know the names of the ICE officers who did that to this day so they seem pretty free of scrutiny as well.
Purely statistically, this is a good first-pass filter if you are looking for perps. Chance a random adult is arrested in a 8-year window: ~5%. Chance a former convict gets arrested in an 8-year window: ~49%. So, it is ~10x the rate. Makes sense, statistically, to start there.
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.
Warrants (are supposed to) have judicial oversight and are limited in their scope. There's also a paper trail attached to information obtained from a warrant.
A warrant required for the searches should already be the bare minimum. If the constitution were being upheld it would have been a requirement from day 1. So, I suppose I would be 'okay' with this in a sense. What really irks me is the fact that Flock, Axon, etc. are acting almost exclusively as a proxy for the government to conduct mass surveillance that would otherwise be unconstitutional. If the government were directly doing the indiscriminate tracking these companies are, it would be unconstitutional even before a traditional "search" (query) of the data took place, so instead they pay a proxy (i.e. Flock, Axon, etc.) to perform the tracking for them and offer the searches as a subscription service.
That’s what the auditing needs to cover. Every search should be tied to a case number and the police putting in fake numbers to stalk people need to be dealt with.
Maybe in liberal California (where your 80 year old grandmother has a duty to retreat), not in my state. A punch to the face can be fatal, and you don't have to take one.
Would a cop in your state tolerate a punch to the face? How would you expect him to respond?
I mean, if the guy is going to knife you you can shoot him. Feel free to release your clutched pearls.
The law is not moral license. You can legally do lots of disgusting things, like threaten to shoot someone who would eat your ass for being a cry bully hiding behind lethal violence. Lots of those disgusting things warrant a nice punch in the face, and crying about it or declaring the moral high ground isn't going to move the needle. Pretty ironic that someone who would criticize "liberal" states for not letting you get away with murder is also too much of a pussy to deal with run of the mill combat. Definitely "bully mentality" to think fisticuffs shouldn't result in unilateral execution by unhinged randos is definitely the "civilized take". You astonish me.
I'm sorry you don't get it: punching people for exercising their rights is a criminal act, and people have a right to defend themselves.
> than run of the mill combat
"Run of the mill combat" - what world are you living in where this is acceptable?
> not letting you get away with murder
But you can get away with violently assaulting people for peacefully exercising their rights? Also, "murder" is a very specific crime, and justifiable homicide is not legally murder.
> to think fisticuffs shouldn't result in unilateral execution
Here's a good lesson for you: don't hit people in public and you probably won't get shot. Nobody has to engage in fisticuffs with you, and you don't have any right to force them to. See how that works?
> Summary execution
Or, you know, justifiable self-defense in the vast majority of the free United States.
> Would-be murderers
Good luck with your theories. Think twice before punching people, tough guy.
I have been researching family genealogy, and this alleged "privacy" has never actually been a thing at all, much less a "human right". First, it is well-known for anyone who lived in a small town, that every small town had rumor mills, gossip grapevines, and everyone knew everyone else's business, to the extent that there was a daily soap opera drama about relationships, and hard times and good times as well.
So this small-town attitude was imported when people urbanized, and a lot of neighborhoods had this sort of grapevine as well. Furthermore, the urban centers established some distinct "brother's keepers" practices.
There were the City Directories. Before telephones, these were the White Pages and Yellow Pages. Your name, your occupation, your address. All your neighbors and the businesses on your street. All indexed and alphabetized handily. Everyone in the city would know what you did; they all got subscribed to these directories. These are invaluable resources for researchers today, so that we can find folks and know their professions, sometimes on a year-by-year basis.
Census reports were taken every 10 years. These can be highly unreliable resources! The census takers had no way of verifying information or investigating answers! They always took citizens at face-value, so it was the practice of new immigrants and criminals, and others in the shadows, to conceal the truth from the census takers. But nevertheless, some facts were obvious, and so there was good information gathered, and released by USGov, about household compositions.
Also, the newspapers have been a crazy treasure trove of information since their inception. I was literally able to track the movements of some of my relatives, because the newspapers in each town would report when a family member, or friend, visited someone. They would say if they came by car, and how long they planned to stay, and where they're from and all that. So anyone traveling in the 1930s and 1940s and so on, their movements were never "private" and you had journalists who acted as Human License Plate Reporters, ensuring that the whole town knew you were hanging out for the weekend!
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.
Human rights are routinely revoked from those that impede on the rights of others. This is the premise that underpins prisons.
Privacy being a human right still holds true.
Privacy absolutely should be a human right. But currently it isn't, and part of why is there is lots of money to be made with surveillance on ordinary people. And things will not change unless the people who exploit the privacy of other for monetary gain feel the effects of their privacy being violated.
You are equating installing personal security camera(s) to knowingly selling extra-judiciary mass-surveillance hardware and software to law enforcement. What's the point you're trying to make with this, exactly?
If they are sharing the footage with a dragnet, tracking people across the country, and giving access to unaccountable cops with a history of abusing that data?
Yes.
If they are using it to see when their amazon package got delivered, or for bog standard security purposes?
I think the point is these home systems are controlled centrally and can be used the same way flock can. I personally removed ring and installed my own system that doesnt export video out of concern with the governments lack of checks and balances anymore.
Paprazzi take effort and money. It's laughable to say "because paparazzi exists, we should give up all our rights".
No one took away private detectives or paprazzi. But if you replace both with a 24/7 never resting and no additional money tracking system, everyone will be tracked. It's litterally the business model because the mass tracking of americans without a warrant is what makes these companies money, not the hardware.
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.
Flock had some prompts (/queries or something like that) leak and apparently something as innocuous as visiting multiple gas stations after hours within a short period of time could have it's system mark you as an armed robbery suspect.
I think we all have to fear police responding violently because Flock's sycophantic AI system told them with 100% confidence that we're the bad guy.
The fundamental issue here is the same one that led inevitably to Google's corruption: profit motive.
Flock's customers are data consumers.
Flock has every financial incentive to knowingly over-represent the reliability of their predictive analytics and actively conceal any issues with it.
If legally empowered and often armed end users are taking those representations at face value... well, there's the fundamental problem with Flock's business model.
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.
It's extremely obnoxious that these big tech CEOs subject us to surveillance then use their wealth to buy back their privacy. They should have none, for that is the world they have created. Doxxing? It's called sousveillance.
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.
111 comments
[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 20.8 ms ] threadIf you want violence, you better be prepared for it. You just can't complain when someone doesn't like what you are doing and comes right to your door.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
I can appreciate Jefferson as much as the next guy but thank goodness his voice just one amongst many.
We just need a ton of people to film his house and whereabouts 24x7 for a while so he gets a taste of his own medicine.
It would be horrible if he didn’t like it.
Note celebrities have to put up with the paparazzi. At this point he’s a celebrity.
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.
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 then before you know it the state has implemented its mass surveillance apparatus across the entire country. And we though china's social credits were bad? just IMAGINE what those predatory tech bros are cookin up.
I'd like a national poll on this principle. My guess is a vast majority would disagree with it.
Not as far fetched as it sounds even. Plenty of not-quite-a-crime things they could track if desired.
Go look at what HN was saying and upvoting during the big data era. Endless scheming about orwellian ways to identify and "dispatch enforcement resources" on the pettiest thing. We're talking like buy a spool of romex get a letter in the mail from the .gov reminding you about code compliance. Or combing through small business financial to try and identify businesses that probably aren't high margin enough to be complying with all the rules. Real "I'm watching you" crap like that. And we're all supposed to go along with it because these people have our best interests at heard and/or mean well.
You take these same evil individuals and replace database integrations with pervasive cameras and AI and they will impoverish us all by grinding us under the thumb of government and say it's for our own good.
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.
Honestly the nuance isn't that intellectually taxing and having to explain it to people in the tech space is tiresome.
Like it or not recording or photographing people in public and selling that information is not illegal. Paparazzi do it all the time. You can poi.nt a webcam out your window, run ALPR software on the video feed, and sell access to query that information. Nothing about that is illegal. If it is, then please reference the laws that prohibit this.
People talk about privacy laws being violated, but in general privacy laws do not cover public activity. Privacy laws mostly focus on protecting communications and activities carried out in private.
There's a big difference between "X is illegal" and "X is presently legal, but my prediction is that the Supreme Court will, in the future, rule that X is illegal."
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.
I still agree with you though ."Flock Camera" is very likely to become the general term for "public surveillance camera" and it will carry a negative weight.
At that point, though, there will be a large group of people trained on how to defeat a company like Flock.
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.
> 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/
I feel like that's a bit of a false equivalency. The soviet secret police had surprisingly little hard evidence on anyone - part of the terror of these regimes is that they could act decisively with little more than a rumor or gossip and be free from scrutiny for any mistakes.
My thinking is if we can stop pervasive AI-driven surveillance we might be saved from a totalitarian regime who views The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual, and instead be able to settle for a run-of-the-mill corrupt authoritarian one.
There's the one where a guy was surrounded by cops with their guns pointing at him because of a flock fuckup. He had a partial plate match (as in, some of the digits matched, but not an exact match) with a plate that was lost or stolen (as in the plate itself was stolen, not the car it was attached to.) That one went viral because the guy was an editor at a magazine driving a loaner car
There's this one where a lady was pulled out of her car at gunpoint after flock flagged her as a murder suspect. This happened twice in a weekend. She was never suspected of murder, it was a mistaken flag. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/aug/28/milwaukee-p...
Flock doesn't require evidence for an alert to be put in their system. If you have access you can apparently just put out an alert saying someone is a murder suspect, and some police department will repeatedly drag a woman out of her car until the media embarrasses them publicly
Purely statistically, this is a good first-pass filter if you are looking for perps. Chance a random adult is arrested in a 8-year window: ~5%. Chance a former convict gets arrested in an 8-year window: ~49%. So, it is ~10x the rate. Makes sense, statistically, to start there.
https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...
The potential for abuse is obviously massive, but the benefit to society is too.
as the ml improves, its tracking absolutely everything. they could rwll you the migration paths of the local racoons and coyotes, for instance
Warrants (are supposed to) have judicial oversight and are limited in their scope. There's also a paper trail attached to information obtained from a warrant.
Flock CEO gets his house blurred out on Google Maps and Zillow
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467750
I suppose if we lived in such a society, we wouldn't need tools like Flock to begin with.
In utopia, we would also not need Flock.
Privacy should be a human right.
I feel like the best solution is very tightly regulating and auditing this technology so it can only be used to benefit society.
I really don't believe this, nor do i believe any amount of regulation will actually prevent dipshit US cops from abusing it
Like when a cop wants to stalk his ex-girlfriend, or wife. Who else is gonna solve this problem if not flock?
I disagree. What problems does it solve better than anything else? Any examples?
The best solution is to NOT LIVE IN A SURVEILLANCE STATE.
"If you exercise your rights, you will be hurt" - what a world to live in.
Would a cop in your state tolerate a punch to the face? How would you expect him to respond?
The law is not moral license. You can legally do lots of disgusting things, like threaten to shoot someone who would eat your ass for being a cry bully hiding behind lethal violence. Lots of those disgusting things warrant a nice punch in the face, and crying about it or declaring the moral high ground isn't going to move the needle. Pretty ironic that someone who would criticize "liberal" states for not letting you get away with murder is also too much of a pussy to deal with run of the mill combat. Definitely "bully mentality" to think fisticuffs shouldn't result in unilateral execution by unhinged randos is definitely the "civilized take". You astonish me.
> than run of the mill combat
"Run of the mill combat" - what world are you living in where this is acceptable?
> not letting you get away with murder
But you can get away with violently assaulting people for peacefully exercising their rights? Also, "murder" is a very specific crime, and justifiable homicide is not legally murder.
> to think fisticuffs shouldn't result in unilateral execution
Here's a good lesson for you: don't hit people in public and you probably won't get shot. Nobody has to engage in fisticuffs with you, and you don't have any right to force them to. See how that works?
> Summary execution
Or, you know, justifiable self-defense in the vast majority of the free United States.
> Would-be murderers
Good luck with your theories. Think twice before punching people, tough guy.
2) If your argument is that flock cameras are illegal, take them to court.
So this small-town attitude was imported when people urbanized, and a lot of neighborhoods had this sort of grapevine as well. Furthermore, the urban centers established some distinct "brother's keepers" practices.
There were the City Directories. Before telephones, these were the White Pages and Yellow Pages. Your name, your occupation, your address. All your neighbors and the businesses on your street. All indexed and alphabetized handily. Everyone in the city would know what you did; they all got subscribed to these directories. These are invaluable resources for researchers today, so that we can find folks and know their professions, sometimes on a year-by-year basis.
Census reports were taken every 10 years. These can be highly unreliable resources! The census takers had no way of verifying information or investigating answers! They always took citizens at face-value, so it was the practice of new immigrants and criminals, and others in the shadows, to conceal the truth from the census takers. But nevertheless, some facts were obvious, and so there was good information gathered, and released by USGov, about household compositions.
Also, the newspapers have been a crazy treasure trove of information since their inception. I was literally able to track the movements of some of my relatives, because the newspapers in each town would report when a family member, or friend, visited someone. They would say if they came by car, and how long they planned to stay, and where they're from and all that. So anyone traveling in the 1930s and 1940s and so on, their movements were never "private" and you had journalists who acted as Human License Plate Reporters, ensuring that the whole town knew you were hanging out for the weekend!
I suppose we can start with all Blink, Ring and Nest Cams. Then we will continue with dash cam owners.
Like the CEO of Flock.
2. Building a mass surveillance dragnet and purpose-built tracking software and marketing it heavily to random local authorities.
Yep, totally the same thing...
Yes.
If they are using it to see when their amazon package got delivered, or for bog standard security purposes?
No.
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
No one took away private detectives or paprazzi. But if you replace both with a 24/7 never resting and no additional money tracking system, everyone will be tracked. It's litterally the business model because the mass tracking of americans without a warrant is what makes these companies money, not the hardware.
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.
I think we all have to fear police responding violently because Flock's sycophantic AI system told them with 100% confidence that we're the bad guy.
Flock's customers are data consumers.
Flock has every financial incentive to knowingly over-represent the reliability of their predictive analytics and actively conceal any issues with it.
If legally empowered and often armed end users are taking those representations at face value... well, there's the fundamental problem with Flock's business model.
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.
It's extremely obnoxious that these big tech CEOs subject us to surveillance then use their wealth to buy back their privacy. They should have none, for that is the world they have created. Doxxing? It's called sousveillance.
In general, we need a digital bill of rights -- tech has changed and exceeded what the software written by the founding fathers can handle.