yea it is similar to robot mark zuckerburg who purchased everything near his house to protect privacy, but his app is the biggest privacy nightmares, especially rayban glasses.
Flock was seed round funded by YC, not "a YC company".
It's not like they control it, manage it, and what was pitched may be significantly different than what happened since then.
YC isn't perfect, but what words you use, and their order is important. And the way you're phrasing it, you make it sound as if they are a subsidiary of YC. Or as if YC is on the board.
If any of these things are true, you should plainly state them. Otherwise, what you're saying is incorrect.
YC funds companies and we are all aware of that so by saying it's a YC company because they gave them seed money is already exactly the correct wording
I don't really have a strong opinion either way on Flock but this is a strange objection. YC is a well-known startup accelerator that makes (pre-seed!) investments. I don't know if anyone has ever sincerely taken "YC company" to mean a subsidiary of YC. That's like confusing "a Sequoia company" as a subsidiary of Sequoia.
Personally I think that having funding from investors rather than taxes doesn't preclude evil from being called out (although in this case a lot of revenue certainly comes from tax money)
I said this a few days ago and got down voted to hell. It amazes me how HN likes to abdicate YC of all wrong doing or negative outcomes from the companies they fund. YC/PG is also the reason that @sama is where he is.
Aside from "PG's blog" this is a community. People wish each other happy holidays, offer support to one another, challenge each other etc... In that sense it transcends both PG and YC. The internet is not what it used to be but HN is a real community to me and I am truly grateful for that. As such, I would like to make an effort to meet more people and hang out in real life.
I was literally not aware of this. I don't know if I'm going to be coming back to this site anymore. I've got some thinking to do. I am so ridiculously anti-Flock that I am not willing to discuss it, because it would be a pointless conversation.
I understand what you mean but I do not think the answer is to disengage. They will not stop. HN is an amazing place with brilliant people. I have been wrong so many times here and I own it; the amazing thing is the grace I have been shown, the support and all of the ways the community here has made me a better, more knowledgable person.
Sounds like you're contributing to your own narrative here. The only self-centered douche canoe of a comment I see in this thread is from you.
HN has its share of good & bad, but I've generally enjoyed talking to some of the people on this site; much more than sites like Reddit which imo fit your description much much better.
It's really both. And that applies to a lot of HN darlings. Sadly, people's perspective can get cloudy when a positive perspective is tied to their financial well-being.
OFC, YC is in the business of making money and simply doesn’t care or consider ethics whatsoever. They just don’t care.
But this is pretty standard for this class of people. To get super rich you have to fuck people over, there’s simply no way to amass a billion ethically.
Not anymore, and they killed the top comment linking Flock to YC and put your disinformation/distraction on top - literally hiding the article and ~100 comments left by users.
Your Twitter is really stupid. Kinda funny to see you’re a nobody outside this censorship hellhole
Florida is also ironically how we may get cookie banners in line and to actually opt users out as they prosecute websites there as illegal wire taps if you still put cookies on the page after or before the opt out happens.
It's true that the order only impacts state highways. It removes approximately 700 license plate readers and then also leaves thousands still up locally. However, in my county, the Sheriffs dept is actually taking them down voluntarily, because of the positive political reception of the state-road ban. And its happening in other jurisdictions near me.
A lot of people instinctively believe Florida only does dumb stuff, but we really do have quite responsive people in charge here. From where I sit, I see good movement on the whole Flock issue in my state and county.
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.
>The officer said the installer was also concerned about privacy.
"And his worry more than anything is that, you know, he's just an employee. Anybody like you and me. And now he's going to be in the news and he doesn't know if it's going to be targeted at him or his family."
Don’t you understand? He was just following orders.
Too bad somehow the face that ends up out there as the face of surveillance isn’t the CEO of Flock, not their coders, not the YC people who gave them money to do exactly what they’re doing. It’s the lowest of the low in the chain, the guy sitting in the sun to install the cameras on a post.
Random people calling 911 on other people filming them is a staple of Youtube; banks, coffee store workers, hairdressers, most especially restaurant managers. I don't know why anyone would expect technicians from Flock to be different. It's worse for the technician in this case, because he really was being followed --- that's not unlawful but it's unnerving.
You'd think from the response that this was like the VP/Sales of Flock Safety. But it's just some installer dude probably making $65k/year to climb poles and fasten cameras. I guess that's praxis for you though.
The response is stronger because your hairdressers and baristas aren't actively providing a service for surveillance as part of their work. The bar should be higher for a company that's ostensibly being trusted to provide a law enforcement tool that's prone to misuse than for providing beverages or cosmetology.
Well, when you’re on the clock, you’re an agent of that company. And when you’re installing an indiscriminate mass-surveillance camera, calling the police on someone that’s video recording you is kind of bananas. Perhaps you don’t find that to be an interesting event, but a lot of people who are rightfully angry at the non-consensual deployment of a mass surveillance network disagree.
It's not bananas. It happens all the time. The police show up, check things out, and inform the caller that the person recording has a right to do so. In this case, it's even less bananas, because the people recording him were literally following him around, which is not what generally happens in these "audit" scenarios where someone parks themselves on the street outside a restaurant or bank.
There's pretty clearly a vibe on this thread that calling 911 is itself a use of coercive force. It is not. 911 is how you're ordinarily supposed to reach the police. In my neighborhood, it's how you'd report a stolen bicycle. It's the job of the police to handle those calls appropriately, and I don't see any indication that the call was handled inappropriately here.
The story doesn't want to give you that context because their goal isn't to inform you, it's to get your blood pumping.
> A person attaching hundreds of thousands of cameras to poles calling the police to report this act is what is noteworthy
That's one seriously impressive person. If they started as soon as Flock was founded and spend 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year installing cameras they would have to on average have installed a camera every 6 minutes.
I know several current police dispatchers, and have an expired state telecommunicator certification. Calling 911 can absolutely be a coercive force, and people use 911 to harass people all the time because in many instances the dispatcher has no choice but to send uniformed people over there to investigate. Police are equipped and trained to deal with certain kinds of problems, and they’re constantly looking for evidence to support a criminal charge. It’s their job. All they know walking into that situation— as human beings that aren’t immune to the power of suggestion— is that the caller, who is the complainant, says that the other person is doing something wrong. That is not a neutral action. If it was, many departments wouldn’t be adopting non-uniformed, unarmed social worker responses to non-violent situations.
When the police come, they bring with them a nonzero chance of violent, deadly force. Especially if the caller says me of a few magic phrases like “I fear for my life” and “I’m not sure if he has a gun but he might” and (in some areas) “Black male, six foot two.”
Calling the police on someone is like mailing them a bomb with a 0.1% chance of exploding. You have no idea if you are summoning a calm, experienced officer or a power tripping monster with an ego.
Seems like this was more an annoyance than a threat. So, to rephrase when people feel annoyed, its almost always better to ignore it than call the police.
Do they even have their own technicians? I believe there have been Dish Network technicians seen working on and setting up flock cameras and even those technicians are contractors of Dish network.
Mix of. Large metros they'll use their own staff to install, rural Americana they'll use Dish's OnTech division. Dish realized they have an entire 'trained' workforce of cable/dish techs that they can put to other technical use, so they pushed into more managed hands tech services.
I noticed a more prominently branded "OnTech" van roaming around my rural slice of life that had a smaller Dish brand logo on it that seemed to be more of that side of the business.
> one should be held to a different standard than the other.
harassing a worker is not the way to fix the problem. The worker has no agency to affect the changes desired by the harasser. It's an issue with the gov't, and needs civic procedures to change.
This behaviour is the same as harassing hospitality staff for bad prices. Harassers would be considered borderline committing terrorism if they go further.
The worker does have agency. They did not have to take a job installing mass surveillance systems. They're directly doing the bad thing, and the harassers are literally doing the same thing the worker is doing, but back to the worker.
> Isn't that exactly what Flock are doing to tens of thousands of people a day? So why the double-standard.
It's not the same thing. Flock cameras have terrible privacy implications but at least when I pass by one of them they are also filming everyone else passing by. I'm not being singled out.
They are also sometimes used by stalkers that have access to improperly track people, so if I do acquire a stalker they might help my stalker.
If some person is following me personally around and filming me then I am clearly being singled out.
Guy is not just a technician, he's a technician working for Flock installing surveillance tech to monitor the public. Wrong life choices have consequences like being filmed being complicit in establishing a surveillance regime.
> It's worse for the technician in this case, because he really was being followed --- that's not unlawful but it's unnerving.
The technician was in public, bearing a company logo, performing an activity in which there is widespread public interest, and identified himself to law enforcement as an agent of Flock Safety. He is entitled to be unnerved but has no reasonable expectation of privacy here.
banks, coffee store workers, hairdressers, most especially restaurant managers.
Those people are all working in private premises, and have the right to eject customers for being belligerent or just annoying. The Flock technicians are in public, and as we're always reminded by Flock advocates, have no expectation of privacy. There's no indication that the reporter was harassing him in any way.
There's no indication that anything at all happened to the reporter, is there? A worker had a concern about someone following them and called it in, and that... is the end of the story?
I was just pointing out the problem with your initial premise, but I don't think this argument holds water either. Nobody enjoys being subject to a police stop, and the reporter's journalistic undertaking (which was very clearly signaled as such) was interrupted, although certainly he was free to resume it the next time he spotted a Flock installer at work.
It's not Summer 2020 and I'm just not going to entertain the idea that calling the police when you're alarmed by something is an act of violence. This is some random working schmoe hanging things on poles. It's a nonstory.
Sure, people working on german army in ww2 were also probably just some guy getting 10k/year salary or something like that. Person doesn’t matter if they are in uniform.
I had a situation like this against airlines recently where I am getting so obviosly screwed but unfortunately the guy that is doing the screwing is “just a guy” so I can’t go off on them.
man, these guys bungled their PR so, so hard. What they should have done is pre-seeded a ton of stories about flock catching some notorious criminal, helping solve xyz serious crimes, helping solve abc minor nuisance issue crimes, and maybe some lines about reducing direct law enforcement interactions.
On the flip side, let Axon, Motorola take some of the heat, paint your enemies as "defund the police", and stop being so obviously branded. Take a page out of Phillip Morris/Altria playbook and keep a lower profile.
Instead, they've managed to unite left and right in hatred. Clown show.
Their problem is they believed their own bullshit and thought they were offering people a good deal that basically amounted to "the government 1984s you more than they already do but your package thief gets arrested, maybe".
Ignoring the fact that that deal is not necessarily good, if they had been slightly scummier, not given two shits about actually reducing petty crimes against the people and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines (which have basically no 4th-8th amendment protections these days) they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny for a very long time and gotten their systems deeply entrenched. The useful idiots would've eaten it right up with the flimsiest of pretexts so long as each segment of useful idiots was peddled to individually.
"The truck we saw carrying 2-tons of waste tires away from your tire shop is not owned by an entity on the state approved list, pay up"
"We saw you leaving home depot with a water heater but you didn't pull a permit, prove it didn't go into your house or pay the fine"
"we saw your 2004 Altima emit a puff of blue leaving a light. Per vehicle code XYZ any vehicle that emmits a visible cloud cannot pass emissions inspection, submit proof of passing withing 30d or your resigstration is revoked"
If they had done that a lot of people would have eaten it up and asked for more. But nope, they believed their own BS and built a system for "real" law enforcement. And of course that leads to a bunch of bad interactions with cops and the public doesn't like that.
yeah, another colossal bungle. For the price that most of these DCs are going up at, offering a rebate to the local community on their electricity bills should have been a fairly easy and cheap (relative to the re-siting and planning delays!).
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."
I've gotta mention it because everyone seems to have a learned helplessness with this type of thing. I went and spoke at my county commissioners meeting a couple times after the initial flock roll out (voted on with no discussion a couple years prior) started becoming apparent. The first meeting, the group of me and two other people were half of the people making public comment. Every single person was against it unless they worked for the county. At the second meeting there were a whole lot more people. Again, every single person who spoke who didn't work for the county was against it, this time they had eight+ police officers speak in favor of it.
We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about.
Pasco county Florida is now removing all the cameras on the public right of ways at the end of this month.
The real trick, is to stop going to these meetings, and start running against these politicians. Get the forms, stand out in front of your local post office, collect the signatures, and primary them. Run against them. That's the only thing they listen to
Not everyone has the drive, talent, connections, time, nor resources to run a political campaign. Showing up to your townhall every 2 weeks can already be an overly high barrier given some townhall times, but is much more feasible.
Neither did AOC. Respectfully, stop talking yourself out of it. Most voters are desperate for someone different, but they are only ever given the same two choices.
> We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about.
Do you not see the problem here?
Pasco County has a $2.2B annual budget. These county commissioners have the financial resources, organizational access to expertise, and time to focus on these problems.
Do they really need an under-resourced citizen to inform them about the constitutional issues after deployment? And then they just say “Aw shucks, whoopsies, now I see the light.”
I don’t think it’s fair to call this learned helplessness (a lingering belief after the threat has vanished) when we’re facing off against an active, persistent adversarial threat.
Your county commissioners didn’t make a “whoopsies” when they took a deliberate, informed action against your interests.
Furthermore, it’s unsustainable to require citizens to pour significant time and energy into forcing their representatives to faithfully represent them. That quite literally defeats the purpose of a representative governing body.
If someone came up to me and started filming me while I was in public, and then when I got in my car they followed me, I would also call the police.
The double standard demonstrated by Flock isn't the issue, they are the pieces of shit and of course they have no moral consistency.
But "He who fights with monsters should be careful, lest he thereby become a monster." I thought we were united that people have a reasonable sense of temporal privacy in public - that being in public is ephemeral and not some permanent record to be analyzed in perpetuity. We should not be fine stalking people and making them feel threatened, even those that want to build the panopticon state.
But you're not working for Flock, are you? We could go on much further until we reach the what Popper called the Tolerance Paradox: "If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
The point is that total surveillance is like the destruction of tolerance or in thie case privacy, and it makes watching the watchmen impossible. There's a point of no return and before that one is reached resistance IS allowed or else you lose everything.
If someone were following and filming someone around who was posting anti-Flock fliers, I would also feel that crossed into harassment after a certain amount of time.
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 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.
> anti-recording without policy for use and retention
Not recording on its own, but the linking of data with other cities and making it all searchable by those with access is where it becomes unprecedented mass surveillance.
You’re right that we have to be specific.
> your phone may be recording
They are able to dodge these accusations by just selling voice command logs. “No we don’t record you or sell your audio data” and yet Siri’s AUL reads:
[PhraseSpotter] Detected wake word “Pepsi” with a score 0.942.
[com.apple.voiceactivation] Proceeding with full wake.
A lot of people don’t know there is a low power “always on” processor (AOP) that monitors a small audio buffer on-device.
So no need to sell the audio, just the unrelated logs of some app that uses the AOP.
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.
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.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 80.8 ms ] threadIt's not like they control it, manage it, and what was pitched may be significantly different than what happened since then.
YC isn't perfect, but what words you use, and their order is important. And the way you're phrasing it, you make it sound as if they are a subsidiary of YC. Or as if YC is on the board.
If any of these things are true, you should plainly state them. Otherwise, what you're saying is incorrect.
My take is that we like to hang out on PG's blog and make fun of his avarice. Is there a better place to do this?
Aside from "PG's blog" this is a community. People wish each other happy holidays, offer support to one another, challenge each other etc... In that sense it transcends both PG and YC. The internet is not what it used to be but HN is a real community to me and I am truly grateful for that. As such, I would like to make an effort to meet more people and hang out in real life.
Two things can be true at once.
As they all find out what it is, they are canceling and rejecting the contracts they had with them.
Happening across several cities and states.
Fact check this if you’re really curious, don’t trust HN
Sounds like you're contributing to your own narrative here. The only self-centered douche canoe of a comment I see in this thread is from you.
HN has its share of good & bad, but I've generally enjoyed talking to some of the people on this site; much more than sites like Reddit which imo fit your description much much better.
Also.... who hurt you?
This is a great example.
It's such an HN way to call me an asshole without saying the word directly... it's a weird autistic vernacular.
And stupid semantic bullshit like that is why normal people hate all of you pathetic little cunts.
You're all such fucking assholes. But you all want to pretend you're something more and better... but you really aren't.
But this is pretty standard for this class of people. To get super rich you have to fuck people over, there’s simply no way to amass a billion ethically.
Your Twitter is really stupid. Kinda funny to see you’re a nobody outside this censorship hellhole
Yellow vests knock out 60% of all speed cameras in France
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46822472
They revoked permits for all license plate readers, including Flock, from state roads.
Local roads are unaffected by this order.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/florida-bans-flock-li...
> Monday’s order did not affect cameras on private property or on local rights-of-way — where 98% of the surveillance cameras are located
A lot of people instinctively believe Florida only does dumb stuff, but we really do have quite responsive people in charge here. From where I sit, I see good movement on the whole Flock issue in my state and county.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/SeminoleSheriff/posts/update-on-flo...
Don’t you understand? He was just following orders.
You'd think from the response that this was like the VP/Sales of Flock Safety. But it's just some installer dude probably making $65k/year to climb poles and fasten cameras. I guess that's praxis for you though.
I think this is just a ragebait piece.
There's pretty clearly a vibe on this thread that calling 911 is itself a use of coercive force. It is not. 911 is how you're ordinarily supposed to reach the police. In my neighborhood, it's how you'd report a stolen bicycle. It's the job of the police to handle those calls appropriately, and I don't see any indication that the call was handled inappropriately here.
The story doesn't want to give you that context because their goal isn't to inform you, it's to get your blood pumping.
A person holding a camera and following you around is an emergency or at the very least a suspicious act worthy of investigation and possible arrest.
A person attaching hundreds of thousands of cameras to poles calling the police to report this act is what is noteworthy.
Its not clickbait in the normal sense of overselling a series of un-noteworthy events IMHO.
That's one seriously impressive person. If they started as soon as Flock was founded and spend 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year installing cameras they would have to on average have installed a camera every 6 minutes.
Calling the police on someone is like mailing them a bomb with a 0.1% chance of exploding. You have no idea if you are summoning a calm, experienced officer or a power tripping monster with an ego.
Do they even have their own technicians? I believe there have been Dish Network technicians seen working on and setting up flock cameras and even those technicians are contractors of Dish network.
https://www.ontechsmartservices.com/
I noticed a more prominently branded "OnTech" van roaming around my rural slice of life that had a smaller Dish brand logo on it that seemed to be more of that side of the business.
I find it hard to be persuaded by the salary idea. A hitman who works for $100 is just as bad as one who works for $10,000.
In fact other immoral activities work the opposite, bizarrely (a whore who works for $100 is worse than one who works for $10,000)
Isn't that exactly what Flock are doing to tens of thousands of people a day? So why the double-standard.
I actually agree it is unnerving, I just don't agree that one should be held to a different standard than the other.
harassing a worker is not the way to fix the problem. The worker has no agency to affect the changes desired by the harasser. It's an issue with the gov't, and needs civic procedures to change.
This behaviour is the same as harassing hospitality staff for bad prices. Harassers would be considered borderline committing terrorism if they go further.
It's not the same thing. Flock cameras have terrible privacy implications but at least when I pass by one of them they are also filming everyone else passing by. I'm not being singled out.
They are also sometimes used by stalkers that have access to improperly track people, so if I do acquire a stalker they might help my stalker.
If some person is following me personally around and filming me then I am clearly being singled out.
This isn't how world works.
The technician was in public, bearing a company logo, performing an activity in which there is widespread public interest, and identified himself to law enforcement as an agent of Flock Safety. He is entitled to be unnerved but has no reasonable expectation of privacy here.
Your local representative who signed a contract with Flock to install and operate the cameras?
Those people are all working in private premises, and have the right to eject customers for being belligerent or just annoying. The Flock technicians are in public, and as we're always reminded by Flock advocates, have no expectation of privacy. There's no indication that the reporter was harassing him in any way.
I had a situation like this against airlines recently where I am getting so obviosly screwed but unfortunately the guy that is doing the screwing is “just a guy” so I can’t go off on them.
On the flip side, let Axon, Motorola take some of the heat, paint your enemies as "defund the police", and stop being so obviously branded. Take a page out of Phillip Morris/Altria playbook and keep a lower profile.
Instead, they've managed to unite left and right in hatred. Clown show.
Ignoring the fact that that deal is not necessarily good, if they had been slightly scummier, not given two shits about actually reducing petty crimes against the people and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines (which have basically no 4th-8th amendment protections these days) they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny for a very long time and gotten their systems deeply entrenched. The useful idiots would've eaten it right up with the flimsiest of pretexts so long as each segment of useful idiots was peddled to individually.
"The truck we saw carrying 2-tons of waste tires away from your tire shop is not owned by an entity on the state approved list, pay up"
"We saw you leaving home depot with a water heater but you didn't pull a permit, prove it didn't go into your house or pay the fine"
"we saw your 2004 Altima emit a puff of blue leaving a light. Per vehicle code XYZ any vehicle that emmits a visible cloud cannot pass emissions inspection, submit proof of passing withing 30d or your resigstration is revoked"
If they had done that a lot of people would have eaten it up and asked for more. But nope, they believed their own BS and built a system for "real" law enforcement. And of course that leads to a bunch of bad interactions with cops and the public doesn't like that.
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.
> 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."
We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about.
Pasco county Florida is now removing all the cameras on the public right of ways at the end of this month.
Look into it. Seriously consider it.
> We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about.
Do you not see the problem here?
Pasco County has a $2.2B annual budget. These county commissioners have the financial resources, organizational access to expertise, and time to focus on these problems.
Do they really need an under-resourced citizen to inform them about the constitutional issues after deployment? And then they just say “Aw shucks, whoopsies, now I see the light.”
I don’t think it’s fair to call this learned helplessness (a lingering belief after the threat has vanished) when we’re facing off against an active, persistent adversarial threat.
Your county commissioners didn’t make a “whoopsies” when they took a deliberate, informed action against your interests.
Furthermore, it’s unsustainable to require citizens to pour significant time and energy into forcing their representatives to faithfully represent them. That quite literally defeats the purpose of a representative governing body.
The double standard demonstrated by Flock isn't the issue, they are the pieces of shit and of course they have no moral consistency.
But "He who fights with monsters should be careful, lest he thereby become a monster." I thought we were united that people have a reasonable sense of temporal privacy in public - that being in public is ephemeral and not some permanent record to be analyzed in perpetuity. We should not be fine stalking people and making them feel threatened, even those that want to build the panopticon state.
The point is that total surveillance is like the destruction of tolerance or in thie case privacy, and it makes watching the watchmen impossible. There's a point of no return and before that one is reached resistance IS allowed or else you lose everything.
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.
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.
also they are just putting 24/7 recorders now in police vehicles and even delivery services
so you can't just be anti-flock, you have to be anti-recording without policy for use and retention
your phone and even your watch may be recording your audio right now
Not recording on its own, but the linking of data with other cities and making it all searchable by those with access is where it becomes unprecedented mass surveillance.
You’re right that we have to be specific.
> your phone may be recording
They are able to dodge these accusations by just selling voice command logs. “No we don’t record you or sell your audio data” and yet Siri’s AUL reads:
A lot of people don’t know there is a low power “always on” processor (AOP) that monitors a small audio buffer on-device.So no need to sell the audio, just the unrelated logs of some app that uses the AOP.