I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. If the business models can't be made illegal, it should at least come with liabilities so high that no sane business would want to hold data that is essentially toxic waste.
Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong person gets access to the data, entire populations are threatened.
You want to stop the source, which is that the government and other agencies can purchase surveillance data that would otherwise be disallowed by the 4th amendment. We need to end this 'laundering' of information through third parties, and enforce the constitution by its intent.
They're also one and the same generally-- at least if the stalker has money or the right friends most kinds of law enforcement access means stalker access. It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker, and there are so many people that work in law enforcement that bribing, impersonating, or persuading your way to access is not that big a deal. Not to mention that enabled stalkers can just file a federal lawsuit and issue subpoena for records.
The only safe thing is for the records to never exist in the first place.
Honestly it should probably just be illegal for anyone, private or public, to engage in mass surveillance (or "data gathering", whatever) of anybody who didn't expressly consent to it. As long as the data exist, they will be abused.
Not only that, but it should be illegal (eg: fines for the company and potential jail time for executives) for tying consent to use/purchase of services or products.
Means of Control by Byron Tau and Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine. Can’t recommend these books enough for anyone who is skeptical of the above claim.
Look at the silver lining - once the paperclip maximizers have crashed both modern civilization and the biosphere, it will be easy for any survivors to find privacy amid the metaphorical and actual ruins.
This is great sentiment. Companies can be stopped, and then the medusa grows another head. Kill the business model, make the brokering of data illegal, and if caught, fines would be paid directly to those effected. This would go a long ways to promoting privacy first.
I followed the shooting at Brown University last year very closely. Brown's leadership was heavily criticized for having camera blind spots and not being able to track the shooter's exact movements through campus. I can understand why people with stewardship over the safety of their students/customers/constituents would make decisions to err on the side of tracking. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I understand it.
The criticism around that event, I believe, involved Brown University disablinf cameras trying to protect potential illegal immigrants being targeted by ice. It wasn't the lack of cameras. It was a purposeful disabling of said cameras that already existed.
Correct, whoever made the decision to create ICE, as it became a security risk that lead to deaths. Glad that's what you said, and no other valid interpretation.
While there were deaths, I didn't see any that were the result of a "security risk". I did see a whole lot of stupid people doing stupid things, and none of them were ICE agents, so I'm surprised there weren't more deaths.
This is the luxury believe of people who don't have to deal with the side effects of crimes committed by illegal immigrants. Just Texas has 500 rapes per year committed by illegals. Many crimes committed by illegals are against other illegals who don't report the crime, skewing statistics. Also, many states don't report migration status.
I value the lives of Mollie Tibbets and Laken Riley over Renee Good and Alex Pretti. And the latter weren't violently raped first (just advocating for rapists)
This is a very common pattern; my university pushed through a ZeroEyes AI camera/open carry weapon detection contract within 2 weeks of a shooting at a nearby school, even though it’s trivial to bypass by hiding it; it’s most probably just (gruesome as it is to think about) a bad press insurance so if anything happened, they can say they had “state of the art AI detection” and they did all they could. No one wants to be the one caught not doing “all they could” against the media cacophony in the immediate aftermath.
With most of these things, people are for state power until they are victimized by it. It's a common pattern.
:D
I've had property stolen. Cameras generally won't help, and didn't help. Limiting ingredient is often not knowing who did it in any case-- in most places most common crime is committed by a tiny number of regular characters. Go look at the mountains of threads online where someone had a tracker enabled object stolen and knew exactly who had it only to have law enforcement do nothing.
that doesn't seem to be the case always, given the data on crime reporting:
"Patterns in police reporting for property crime during 2020–2023 were similar to those for violent crime. A quarter (25%) of all property victimizations in urban areas were reported to police, which was lower than the percentages in suburban (33%) and rural (36%) areas (figure 2).
Similar to overall property victimization, a lower percentage of other theft victimizations were reported to police in urban areas (20%) compared to suburban (28%) and rural (31%) areas."
"For violent crimes, in 1997, 7% of victims
stated that “Police wouldn’t help” as the reason they did not call the police. This more than
doubled to 16% by 2021. For property crimes, the corresponding rates were 12% in 1997 and 18% in
2021"
Police work for the State. The State orders them to work for the Public when it interests the State. Intervening in violent crime and property crime can be seen, cynically, as a PR move.
To be beholden to the State for justice and protection is fine when the State is beholden to the Public for their consent. Today, in the West, the Public has been so thoroughly disarmed, and /disrobed/, that consent is a formality, consent can no longer be withheld.
Look no further than Flock and FISA for the ongoing crisis of consent.
When cops are released from the State apparatus, they'll be given the respect and admiration they deserve. Until then, it's difficult to separate them from their incentive structure.
We need a law that says if you hold any data about a person, they must be notified when anyone accesses it, including law enforcement.
I used to work in criminal investigations. I understand how this might make investigation of real crime more difficult. But so does the fact that you need a warrant to enter someone's home, and yet we manage to investigate crime anyway.
Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company. It should require a warrant and notification. You could even make the notification be 24 hours after the fact. But it should be required.
The entities holding the information here are literally police departments. The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations. It's good to want things, though.
So we're clear, you believe there should be a law that, when a police department collects information about you during a criminal investigation, they should notify you directly that they've done so?
> Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company.
Nice idea, but at least in the U.S. (with the lone exception of LE obtaining cell phone location records), courts have consistently held that if you give your data to someone else, you are no longer entitled to an expectation of privacy in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
If you want your data to be considered an extension of your home, at least for now, keep it at home.
Nice idea (2), but many companies and govt agencies force one to give lots of data or you will not be receiving services, sometimes very important services.
I think the notion that data would be a home is beyond weak, but the explanation you gave for why isn't solid either, since the objects of data do not need to and in this case haven't consented.
That is, recordings of people in public settings (in some jurisdictions) are property of the recorder, but it still isn't a home (just imagine how that would work in some jurisdictions, someone takes a picture of you and it's trespassing? Would you be able to shoot them?)
Is there not some concept that utilizes cryptography in a way such that information about people is accessible, but if it's accessed, then the access request is added to a ledger (akin to blockchain) such that who made the access, when, and about whom becomes provably public knowledge?
And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.
Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right? But what you are saying is not just that LEA would need warrants to look at public recordings from a willingly cooperating camera owner, and that the warrants can't be gag orders (unless specified), but that the targets must be notified, even if the subject under search were someone else, the fact that I'm included in a recording would compel the LEA to notify me?
And how exactly would I be notified? Wouldn't that necessitate even more privacy invading features like facial recognition and a facial to contact information technology? Not an uncommon paradox.
Again, just want to understand the position, my position might leak as the question being leading, but I can't help it.
Alternatively, one could create serious civil damages for those capturing surveillance imagery that causes various harms including false prosecution for any data they collected, even if it was unlawfully taken or used after it was collected. ... then let the liability work out the problem by making it too risky to run non-targeted mass surveillance apparatus.
This would avoid having to define what is and isn't a mass surveillance system. Any camera recording off your property would have a legal risk for the operator-- but if you're just recording locally and only using it to discourage or solve crime you're suffering the risk would be minimal and justified.
Yes I think this site is not unique, I personally have at least 2 websites I have not shared anywhere with at least all of this information, that I am developing for my local community or just for myself. Its a subject worth discussing but I am also skeptical of the value of this link. I think maybe what is most worth considering is, "does this have value over deflock?" is it more accessible? Less overwhelming? I am not sure but I think that conversation would not be a great use of time in this particular space.
Although I oppose the surveillance state, it's important to understand the motivations and incentives involved in the move toward Flock (and its eventual successors); until those are resolved, governments are going to be implementing Flock style programs with relatively tepid opposition.
Police departments are seriously understaffed in many major cities, and officers are much less efficient than they used to be. This has led to the decline of the beat cop, who provided a kind of ambient authority that helped create, both a sense and reality, of public order. People really want the sense (even more than the reality!) of public order; without that, they will jump to faddish solutions that promise it, regardless of the data for or against it.
The best counter to Flock is to provide alternatives to it, not just reject it while keeping the status quo going. We need a new, vitalized police culture, that shares mutual trust and engagement with the community.
I've noted this in the age verification debate, and in the Android developer verification debate as well.
Just denying the tradeoffs isn't productive, if tradeoffs affect others, just pushing your position disregarding the tradeoffs as fake or not important is divisive. In actuality I think that both parties become incentivized to solve the problems of the other group of people too, but as a centrist that position often gets pushback from both sides who seem to collaborate only indirectly from a place of adversarial competition and good vs evil framing, which I think is less productive than just recognizing the conflict and negotiating, but perhaps it's more engaging...
Police departments aren’t understaffed. It’s a priority problem not a lack of resources problem. I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all. There’s occasional break ins and car break ins. When this happens it’s a big deal.
We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door to door and gathered it herself. Cops refused to do anything even though you can see the car and the plates from multiple videos, multiple angles.
Guess what the cops always have resources for? Hiding behind bushes and trees to ticket people going 5 over. Or at turns where they know they’ll get people before people see the cop car.
Our HOA came together and asked the police department about this. They gave us bullshit about how custody of evidence etc is hard and even if they put people in jail, the lenient judges will let them go anyway. It was fucked up.
Our HOA was going in hard about installing floc cameras everywhere. I had to fight hard not to get that done. One of the reasons I won wasn’t because privacy, it was because the cops literally were like unless we can directly pull video feeds from cameras, we won’t do much. And that access wasn’t available to those police department. At least at the time.
There have been many other such stories I’ve personally witnessed in the cities I’ve lived in.
Cops seem to have plenty of resources to bully people of color, seize assets and hide behind trees and bushes to ticket people, reduce the period of orange lights so people get more tickets etc. but never enough to actually do their jobs.
I agree that police department staffing is less of a real issue than people claim it is, and that many departments have target staffing levels that are artificially elevated. But I'm struck by your comment about cops "hiding behind bushes to ticket people going 5 over", because in the ultra-ultra-progressive inner-ring Chicago suburb in which I live, one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement.
On a daily basis, I see several cars that are going forty+ miles per hour over the speed limit, weaving between lanes. They go right past the cop and the cop doesn't care. Then someone going five over goes past the cop and the cop gives them a ticket. They go after the easy ones that fill their quotas, not the ones that actually make anyone safer.
> one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement.
Which traffic enforcement though?
I really do not like the fact that lefts on red are not enforced. I have numerous times seen people run a red-red light infront of a cop car with no enforcement.
That said, people going 35 in a 30? Like I care. People weaving in between lanes? Yeah that seems much more dangerous.
It's fundamentally a security camera, for many people. People buy them to see what's going on, record crimes for reporting, and to feel safer. I think there's significant overlap in people who want to feel safer and people being ok with the police being able to look through their cameras, since being able to record events, for the police, was part of the motivation for the purchase of a security camera. My frail elderly grandpa, who has seen his neighborhood go to shit with the reduced police funding, would definitely see this as a "nice feature".
IANAL, but if you are to take action it might be most prudent to do so non-destructively.
Putting a bag over the camera/solar panel or taking it down and returning the lost/abandoned property would leave it disabled just as well.
The added damage of outright destroying it would make no real difference to the company (might even just make them more money) but would make it easier to characterize the action as criminally motivated rather than an act of conscience in the public interest.
I’m all for mass surveillance of roadways, but I want to see results. Every day I see and hear people breaking laws with their vehicles in ways that make life worse for others around them.
Mass surveillance is by definition oppressive. I think you mean to say you're in favor of targeted surveillance, targeted at criminals, who are on roadways. This is the distinction that's getting lost.
Give me a database of everywhere you have ever driven, and I will find multiple ways to make you look like a criminal.
We don't need mass surveillance for traffic control. It can be done by the police if they really wanted to do it. Truth is, they don't care enough about road safety. This is about surveillance of citizens for control. First step is just infrastructure setup - next step is using it to prosecute those who dare to challenge the rise of fascism.
Be an advocate for your own rights to privacy. Don't simply accept it as normalcy.
Yep. Automate the whole thing and be done with traffic cops abusing their power to meet quotas or harass minorities. It would likely make car insurance cheaper too since people would drive more safely, and the cost of investigations and arbitration drops down with readily available video evidence.
Just make quotas illegal. Make enforcing them a felony for command staff. Lock up body worn camera videos so they can't be used for "performance review." That footage belongs to the public, for legal purposes, it shouldn't be a "tool" outside of that.
More importantly, can I borrow you car? I have some, uh, stuff, to go do.
Here's a modest proposal: what if we made it a serious crime for anyone to retain automatically-recorded surveillance footage, or data derived from it, for longer than some limited period of time (say, 7 days) unless said footage is released to the public within that timeframe?
That is, you can put up cameras wherever you want, but you can't gain any kind of competitive advantage by doing so.
I think the public would be more alert to the dangers of mass surveillance if the magnitude of that surveillance was more obvious. And if everyone was watching everyone, at least it wouldn't as easily abused for purposes such as selective prosecution or blackmail.
An academic study about the use of surveillance technology at the Los Angeles Police Department, the book documents the LAPD's use of data brokerage firms (e.g., Palantir) that collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, as well as automatic license plate readers like Flock, and Suspicious Activity Reports generated by police and civilians, which include reports of mundane activities such as using binoculars, drawing diagrams, or taking pictures or "video footage with no apparent aesthetic value." All this data ultimately gets parked in Fusion Center facilities, built in the aftermath of 9/11, where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information. As the author observes, "The use of data in law enforcement is not new. For almost a century, police have been gathering data, e.g., records of citations, collisions, warrants, incarcerations, sex offender and gang registries, etc. What is new and important about the current age of big data is the role in public policing of private capitalist firms who provide database systems with huge volumes of information about people, not just those in the criminal justice system."
I’m curious if there were some consortium of all private businesses with their own surveillance cams deciding to aggregate their footage could it be stopped?
I worry about this. It's easy enough to go around putting bags over flock cameras, but it would be harder to justify targeting ones that just maybe are doing double duty.
We need to find a way to make partnering with flock a liability.
For the Canadians sitting at home, tut tutting more American foolishness that could never happen up here... Flock started their expansion into Ontario this very month[1].
Why do people consistently and falsely believe that they have privacy in public settings? You are literally out in public. If you don't want your behavior in public to be observed, then either don't behave in such a way that you wouldn't want observed, or stay home.
UPDATE: don't conflate stalking with observation. These are not the same. You can observe, but you cannot intimidate.
Every entrance to my neighborhood has a Flock camera from my local police department. Tracking the exact time I enter and leave my home is at the very least right at this line you’re trying to draw.
What's the difference in outcome between passive stalking by having sufficient cameras to capture everyone's actions at all times and active stalking with a film crew?
It is intimidating and threatening to most normal people for their wearabouts to be tracked at all times, regardless of the mode.
Take this opportunity to learn that different people might have different thresholds to feel intimidated and that normal people don't feel comfortable being tracked at all times in real life, regardless of the mechanism by which it's being executed.
In the above example, maybe you feel uncomfortable because the film crew is following you around in broad daylight? Would you feel better if they stayed hidden like the flock cameras in this example?
They're not being tracked at all times in real life. They're potentially being tracked in public.
I get that some people have a desire for privacy in public. And I'm even sympathetic to it. However, with the exception of the EU, privacy in public not is a right, nor is it a thing most people believe they possess. (And even ECHR Article 8 has a carveout for recording public activities for legitimate purposes.)
If you think you should have such privacy rights, by all means, use the political process to achieve it.
In the film crew example, what is the difference if the crew is sufficiently far away from you such that you won't know? The paparazzi already do it to celebrities, seems reasonable for individuals to just track each other at a distance if we're all okay with your proposed path.
Would you mind if I parked near your house, such that every morning, when you drove past, I could follow you. To work, to the store, to the gym, you know, wherever.
Then on the way home I'll park where I left off. If anyone asks me I'll them everything I know about you. It's "public" information after all.
Having this surveillance done by human beings rate limits the process to, in theory, focus it on actual criminals. Requiring warrants for the more invasive and persistent techniques adds another layer of accountability.
You're bootstrapping your argument with an assumption that there's something to account for. Public activities are public. You're shifting the accountability from the actor to the observer.
> Flock advertises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a culture of mistrust and preemptive suspicion. As the EFF warns, communities are being sold a false promise of safety - at the expense of civil rights* (EFF).
...
> True safety comes from healthy, empowered communities; not automated suspicion. Community-led safety initiatives have demonstrated significant results: North Lawndale saw a 58% decrease in gun violence after READI Chicago began implementing their program there. In cities nationwide, the presence of local nonprofits has been statistically linked to reductions in homicide, violent crime, and property crime (Brennan Center, The DePaulia, American Sociological Association).
These are incredibly weak arguments. I haven't personally looked into how good Flock cameras are at actually preventing crime and catching criminals, but if this is the best counterargument their detractors can come up with, it makes me suspect they're actually pretty good.
Crime is extremely bad. Mass surveillance is bad too, especially if abused, but being glib or dismissive about the real trade-offs is counterproductive.
Also, recording in public spaces (or private spaces that you own) is an important and fundamental right just like the right to privacy; simply banning this kind of surveillance would also infringe on civil liberties in a different way. I agree that laws and norms need adjusting in light of new technology, but that discussion needs more nuance than this.
I also thought it was interesting that the author basically argues Flock cameras are too effective at figuring out where criminals are, but then also argues they aren’t effective enough at reducing crime.
Boy would it just be terrible if someone hacked into the flock network and manipulated all the camera results ever so slightly. A letter here a number there, license plates or matches never quite lining up. It would take years for them to find the source of the “bugs”. Not saying I know anyone doing this or anything, just saying it would be oh soooooo terrible.
I am somewhat skeptical that either the ACLU or EFF are effective organizations for this cause. The ACLU in particular have drifted significantly from a civil liberties focus, and EFF's privacy track-record for corporate run surveillance has never been the best and of late they seem to be following the ACLU away from civil liberties.
There is an increasingly popular idea that all libertarianism, including civil libertianism, is inherently partisan and specifically right-wing. I think it has done a lot of damage to these organizations' ability to effectively fight this and other issues. I've shifted a lot of my support for ACLU/EFF towards IJ in recent years.
I could be convinced to support public cameras if access to the footage was tightly controlled and only used for solving serious crimes, but government officials and flock themselves have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted to use them in a responsible manner. It’s too powerful of a tool to put in the hands of untrustworthy individuals
If someone breaks into my car and a Flock camera sees it, is their right to privacy in a public space more important than my right to not have my property get stolen?
Edit: not a low effort comment. This is something you should all read and demand the same of. I consternated on how not to call your regime moronic. It _is_ moronic that you don’t have these basic protections and we keep having to listen to you all whine about that.
The "Take Action" section is missing the most obvious solution. Everyone just goes and takes down a camera. We as a society do not consent to this use of public space and simply have a national "Take out the trash day."
There is no way Flock could practically ramp up production or manpower to replace the entire fleet before failing to meet contractual requirements with their customers that keep money flowing in.
Who are you to speak on behalf of society? Wouldn't society also be better off if those who stole your car got caught?
Further, I'm not sure why there is an expectation of privacy in public places. You don't have to consent to being filmed when you're walking down a public sidewalk.
I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. If the business models can't be made illegal, it should at least come with liabilities so high that no sane business would want to hold data that is essentially toxic waste.
Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong person gets access to the data, entire populations are threatened.
You want to stop the source, which is that the government and other agencies can purchase surveillance data that would otherwise be disallowed by the 4th amendment. We need to end this 'laundering' of information through third parties, and enforce the constitution by its intent.
Not just the government. It shouldn't be possible for any random stalker to find someone's daily movements.
They're also one and the same generally-- at least if the stalker has money or the right friends most kinds of law enforcement access means stalker access. It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker, and there are so many people that work in law enforcement that bribing, impersonating, or persuading your way to access is not that big a deal. Not to mention that enabled stalkers can just file a federal lawsuit and issue subpoena for records.
The only safe thing is for the records to never exist in the first place.
100 miles around your border is a constitution free zone anyway.
Honestly it should probably just be illegal for anyone, private or public, to engage in mass surveillance (or "data gathering", whatever) of anybody who didn't expressly consent to it. As long as the data exist, they will be abused.
Not only that, but it should be illegal (eg: fines for the company and potential jail time for executives) for tying consent to use/purchase of services or products.
Consent should be _voluntary_, not mandatory.
Means of Control by Byron Tau and Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine. Can’t recommend these books enough for anyone who is skeptical of the above claim.
> we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone
we are essentially already in that dystopia.
it is now more of a question of how bad it gets, and if the population will ever stand against it in any meaningful fashion.
Look at the silver lining - once the paperclip maximizers have crashed both modern civilization and the biosphere, it will be easy for any survivors to find privacy amid the metaphorical and actual ruins.
This is great sentiment. Companies can be stopped, and then the medusa grows another head. Kill the business model, make the brokering of data illegal, and if caught, fines would be paid directly to those effected. This would go a long ways to promoting privacy first.
> I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers.
Then you want to stop the company.
Which is reasonable.
Flock isn’t the only company.
I followed the shooting at Brown University last year very closely. Brown's leadership was heavily criticized for having camera blind spots and not being able to track the shooter's exact movements through campus. I can understand why people with stewardship over the safety of their students/customers/constituents would make decisions to err on the side of tracking. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I understand it.
The criticism around that event, I believe, involved Brown University disablinf cameras trying to protect potential illegal immigrants being targeted by ice. It wasn't the lack of cameras. It was a purposeful disabling of said cameras that already existed.
Whoever made that decision should be held liable.
Correct, whoever made the decision to create ICE, as it became a security risk that lead to deaths. Glad that's what you said, and no other valid interpretation.
> it became a security risk that lead to deaths
While there were deaths, I didn't see any that were the result of a "security risk". I did see a whole lot of stupid people doing stupid things, and none of them were ICE agents, so I'm surprised there weren't more deaths.
This is the luxury believe of people who don't have to deal with the side effects of crimes committed by illegal immigrants. Just Texas has 500 rapes per year committed by illegals. Many crimes committed by illegals are against other illegals who don't report the crime, skewing statistics. Also, many states don't report migration status.
Yes, let's have no federal immigration enforcement entity in this country, novel idea.
Well, while I don't know you personally. Most working people are older than ICE.
It's actually a relatively new agency and clearly not effective.
What would an effective immigration enforcement agency look like, in your opinion?
I think we can agree that when they're executing innocent citizens in the street, the agency is no longer effective.
Not effective because dissenters were killed?
I value the lives of Mollie Tibbets and Laken Riley over Renee Good and Alex Pretti. And the latter weren't violently raped first (just advocating for rapists)
Well, that is literally how the country was founded; it would just be going back to its roots!
I'm sorry... people think that the problem with, a school shooting, is camera placement?
Something, something, forest, trees.
Camera blind spots are solved with more cameras and correct positioning, not automated AI surveillance.
This is a very common pattern; my university pushed through a ZeroEyes AI camera/open carry weapon detection contract within 2 weeks of a shooting at a nearby school, even though it’s trivial to bypass by hiding it; it’s most probably just (gruesome as it is to think about) a bad press insurance so if anything happened, they can say they had “state of the art AI detection” and they did all they could. No one wants to be the one caught not doing “all they could” against the media cacophony in the immediate aftermath.
and then some kid gets tackled by a team of armed police when AI flags a bag of doritos as a gun. https://abc7.com/post/student-handcuffed-doritos-bag-mistake...
With most of these things, people are against state power until they are victimized. It’s a common pattern.
With most of these things, people are for state power until they are victimized by it. It's a common pattern.
:D
I've had property stolen. Cameras generally won't help, and didn't help. Limiting ingredient is often not knowing who did it in any case-- in most places most common crime is committed by a tiny number of regular characters. Go look at the mountains of threads online where someone had a tracker enabled object stolen and knew exactly who had it only to have law enforcement do nothing.
People hate cops until they need one
> People hate cops until they need one
that doesn't seem to be the case always, given the data on crime reporting:
"Patterns in police reporting for property crime during 2020–2023 were similar to those for violent crime. A quarter (25%) of all property victimizations in urban areas were reported to police, which was lower than the percentages in suburban (33%) and rural (36%) areas (figure 2). Similar to overall property victimization, a lower percentage of other theft victimizations were reported to police in urban areas (20%) compared to suburban (28%) and rural (31%) areas."
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/reporting-police-ty...
"For violent crimes, in 1997, 7% of victims stated that “Police wouldn’t help” as the reason they did not call the police. This more than doubled to 16% by 2021. For property crimes, the corresponding rates were 12% in 1997 and 18% in 2021"
https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2...
Police work for the State. The State orders them to work for the Public when it interests the State. Intervening in violent crime and property crime can be seen, cynically, as a PR move.
To be beholden to the State for justice and protection is fine when the State is beholden to the Public for their consent. Today, in the West, the Public has been so thoroughly disarmed, and /disrobed/, that consent is a formality, consent can no longer be withheld.
Look no further than Flock and FISA for the ongoing crisis of consent.
When cops are released from the State apparatus, they'll be given the respect and admiration they deserve. Until then, it's difficult to separate them from their incentive structure.
Most people hate cops after they need one too.
We need a law that says if you hold any data about a person, they must be notified when anyone accesses it, including law enforcement.
I used to work in criminal investigations. I understand how this might make investigation of real crime more difficult. But so does the fact that you need a warrant to enter someone's home, and yet we manage to investigate crime anyway.
Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company. It should require a warrant and notification. You could even make the notification be 24 hours after the fact. But it should be required.
The entities holding the information here are literally police departments. The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations. It's good to want things, though.
I know, that's why I said "including law enforcement" :)
So we're clear, you believe there should be a law that, when a police department collects information about you during a criminal investigation, they should notify you directly that they've done so?
Yes.
> Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company.
Nice idea, but at least in the U.S. (with the lone exception of LE obtaining cell phone location records), courts have consistently held that if you give your data to someone else, you are no longer entitled to an expectation of privacy in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
If you want your data to be considered an extension of your home, at least for now, keep it at home.
Nice idea (2), but many companies and govt agencies force one to give lots of data or you will not be receiving services, sometimes very important services.
I think the notion that data would be a home is beyond weak, but the explanation you gave for why isn't solid either, since the objects of data do not need to and in this case haven't consented.
That is, recordings of people in public settings (in some jurisdictions) are property of the recorder, but it still isn't a home (just imagine how that would work in some jurisdictions, someone takes a picture of you and it's trespassing? Would you be able to shoot them?)
Is there not some concept that utilizes cryptography in a way such that information about people is accessible, but if it's accessed, then the access request is added to a ledger (akin to blockchain) such that who made the access, when, and about whom becomes provably public knowledge?
Trying to understand the position here.
This would be excluding gag orders correct?
And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.
Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right? But what you are saying is not just that LEA would need warrants to look at public recordings from a willingly cooperating camera owner, and that the warrants can't be gag orders (unless specified), but that the targets must be notified, even if the subject under search were someone else, the fact that I'm included in a recording would compel the LEA to notify me?
And how exactly would I be notified? Wouldn't that necessitate even more privacy invading features like facial recognition and a facial to contact information technology? Not an uncommon paradox.
Again, just want to understand the position, my position might leak as the question being leading, but I can't help it.
Alternatively, one could create serious civil damages for those capturing surveillance imagery that causes various harms including false prosecution for any data they collected, even if it was unlawfully taken or used after it was collected. ... then let the liability work out the problem by making it too risky to run non-targeted mass surveillance apparatus.
This would avoid having to define what is and isn't a mass surveillance system. Any camera recording off your property would have a legal risk for the operator-- but if you're just recording locally and only using it to discourage or solve crime you're suffering the risk would be minimal and justified.
This is just reiterating same points deflock does including mentioning deflock and images from deflock?
Deflock: https://deflock.org/
Also: https://haveibeenflocked.com/
Yes I think this site is not unique, I personally have at least 2 websites I have not shared anywhere with at least all of this information, that I am developing for my local community or just for myself. Its a subject worth discussing but I am also skeptical of the value of this link. I think maybe what is most worth considering is, "does this have value over deflock?" is it more accessible? Less overwhelming? I am not sure but I think that conversation would not be a great use of time in this particular space.
Although I oppose the surveillance state, it's important to understand the motivations and incentives involved in the move toward Flock (and its eventual successors); until those are resolved, governments are going to be implementing Flock style programs with relatively tepid opposition.
Police departments are seriously understaffed in many major cities, and officers are much less efficient than they used to be. This has led to the decline of the beat cop, who provided a kind of ambient authority that helped create, both a sense and reality, of public order. People really want the sense (even more than the reality!) of public order; without that, they will jump to faddish solutions that promise it, regardless of the data for or against it.
The best counter to Flock is to provide alternatives to it, not just reject it while keeping the status quo going. We need a new, vitalized police culture, that shares mutual trust and engagement with the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47124169
I've noted this in the age verification debate, and in the Android developer verification debate as well.
Just denying the tradeoffs isn't productive, if tradeoffs affect others, just pushing your position disregarding the tradeoffs as fake or not important is divisive. In actuality I think that both parties become incentivized to solve the problems of the other group of people too, but as a centrist that position often gets pushback from both sides who seem to collaborate only indirectly from a place of adversarial competition and good vs evil framing, which I think is less productive than just recognizing the conflict and negotiating, but perhaps it's more engaging...
Police departments aren’t understaffed. It’s a priority problem not a lack of resources problem. I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all. There’s occasional break ins and car break ins. When this happens it’s a big deal.
We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door to door and gathered it herself. Cops refused to do anything even though you can see the car and the plates from multiple videos, multiple angles.
Guess what the cops always have resources for? Hiding behind bushes and trees to ticket people going 5 over. Or at turns where they know they’ll get people before people see the cop car.
Our HOA came together and asked the police department about this. They gave us bullshit about how custody of evidence etc is hard and even if they put people in jail, the lenient judges will let them go anyway. It was fucked up.
Our HOA was going in hard about installing floc cameras everywhere. I had to fight hard not to get that done. One of the reasons I won wasn’t because privacy, it was because the cops literally were like unless we can directly pull video feeds from cameras, we won’t do much. And that access wasn’t available to those police department. At least at the time.
There have been many other such stories I’ve personally witnessed in the cities I’ve lived in.
Cops seem to have plenty of resources to bully people of color, seize assets and hide behind trees and bushes to ticket people, reduce the period of orange lights so people get more tickets etc. but never enough to actually do their jobs.
> I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all.
Compare to e.g. Oakland, which recently approved a Flock expansion:
https://oaklandside.org/2025/12/17/oakland-flock-safety-coun...
Why?
https://sfstandard.com/2023/06/09/oakland-crime-police-respo...
https://oaklandside.org/2025/10/08/oakland-watchdog-audit-po...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-police-off...
Now, will Flock help with this? No. But the visceral lack of safety people feel makes them more likely to see it as a necessary evil, not snake oil.
I agree that police department staffing is less of a real issue than people claim it is, and that many departments have target staffing levels that are artificially elevated. But I'm struck by your comment about cops "hiding behind bushes to ticket people going 5 over", because in the ultra-ultra-progressive inner-ring Chicago suburb in which I live, one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement.
On a daily basis, I see several cars that are going forty+ miles per hour over the speed limit, weaving between lanes. They go right past the cop and the cop doesn't care. Then someone going five over goes past the cop and the cop gives them a ticket. They go after the easy ones that fill their quotas, not the ones that actually make anyone safer.
> one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement.
Which traffic enforcement though?
I really do not like the fact that lefts on red are not enforced. I have numerous times seen people run a red-red light infront of a cop car with no enforcement.
That said, people going 35 in a 30? Like I care. People weaving in between lanes? Yeah that seems much more dangerous.
I would never advocate criminal behavior, but I don't understand how these these things aren't destroyed en masse by, like... everyone.
It's fundamentally a security camera, for many people. People buy them to see what's going on, record crimes for reporting, and to feel safer. I think there's significant overlap in people who want to feel safer and people being ok with the police being able to look through their cameras, since being able to record events, for the police, was part of the motivation for the purchase of a security camera. My frail elderly grandpa, who has seen his neighborhood go to shit with the reduced police funding, would definitely see this as a "nice feature".
Many of them have been.
Every time they're discussed, I think of that scene of Homer bashing a weather station in the 70s[1]
[1] https://youtu.be/zexJJb9Lbas
IANAL, but if you are to take action it might be most prudent to do so non-destructively.
Putting a bag over the camera/solar panel or taking it down and returning the lost/abandoned property would leave it disabled just as well.
The added damage of outright destroying it would make no real difference to the company (might even just make them more money) but would make it easier to characterize the action as criminally motivated rather than an act of conscience in the public interest.
Yeah, I don’t advocate criminal behavior either but I don’t understand how these troublesome priests aren’t rid of by, like…everyone.
OP is not a king.
I didn’t say anyone was a king. I was just talking about troublesome priests.
I’m all for mass surveillance of roadways, but I want to see results. Every day I see and hear people breaking laws with their vehicles in ways that make life worse for others around them.
Mass surveillance is by definition oppressive. I think you mean to say you're in favor of targeted surveillance, targeted at criminals, who are on roadways. This is the distinction that's getting lost.
Give me a database of everywhere you have ever driven, and I will find multiple ways to make you look like a criminal.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
You want this on our roads? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud8kFCmalgg&t=112s
This is a dangerous attitude.
We don't need mass surveillance for traffic control. It can be done by the police if they really wanted to do it. Truth is, they don't care enough about road safety. This is about surveillance of citizens for control. First step is just infrastructure setup - next step is using it to prosecute those who dare to challenge the rise of fascism.
Be an advocate for your own rights to privacy. Don't simply accept it as normalcy.
Yep. Automate the whole thing and be done with traffic cops abusing their power to meet quotas or harass minorities. It would likely make car insurance cheaper too since people would drive more safely, and the cost of investigations and arbitration drops down with readily available video evidence.
Just make quotas illegal. Make enforcing them a felony for command staff. Lock up body worn camera videos so they can't be used for "performance review." That footage belongs to the public, for legal purposes, it shouldn't be a "tool" outside of that.
More importantly, can I borrow you car? I have some, uh, stuff, to go do.
Here's a modest proposal: what if we made it a serious crime for anyone to retain automatically-recorded surveillance footage, or data derived from it, for longer than some limited period of time (say, 7 days) unless said footage is released to the public within that timeframe?
That is, you can put up cameras wherever you want, but you can't gain any kind of competitive advantage by doing so.
I think the public would be more alert to the dangers of mass surveillance if the magnitude of that surveillance was more obvious. And if everyone was watching everyone, at least it wouldn't as easily abused for purposes such as selective prosecution or blackmail.
We are heading towards the exact future shown in the show "Person of Interest".
To the list of references provided by this post in the section "Further Reading," I would add the following book:
Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press
https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...
An academic study about the use of surveillance technology at the Los Angeles Police Department, the book documents the LAPD's use of data brokerage firms (e.g., Palantir) that collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, as well as automatic license plate readers like Flock, and Suspicious Activity Reports generated by police and civilians, which include reports of mundane activities such as using binoculars, drawing diagrams, or taking pictures or "video footage with no apparent aesthetic value." All this data ultimately gets parked in Fusion Center facilities, built in the aftermath of 9/11, where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information. As the author observes, "The use of data in law enforcement is not new. For almost a century, police have been gathering data, e.g., records of citations, collisions, warrants, incarcerations, sex offender and gang registries, etc. What is new and important about the current age of big data is the role in public policing of private capitalist firms who provide database systems with huge volumes of information about people, not just those in the criminal justice system."
I’m curious if there were some consortium of all private businesses with their own surveillance cams deciding to aggregate their footage could it be stopped?
Home depot and lowes have contract with Flock, as an example.
In New Orleans, a private rogue network of surveillance camera has been erected in reaction to a too constraining live facial recognition ban.
I think it would be much harder to stop.
I worry about this. It's easy enough to go around putting bags over flock cameras, but it would be harder to justify targeting ones that just maybe are doing double duty.
We need to find a way to make partnering with flock a liability.
For the Canadians sitting at home, tut tutting more American foolishness that could never happen up here... Flock started their expansion into Ontario this very month[1].
We should probably oppose this.
_________
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/07/toronto-r...
Good luck. Dougie and the popo are BFFs.
Why do people consistently and falsely believe that they have privacy in public settings? You are literally out in public. If you don't want your behavior in public to be observed, then either don't behave in such a way that you wouldn't want observed, or stay home.
UPDATE: don't conflate stalking with observation. These are not the same. You can observe, but you cannot intimidate.
Every entrance to my neighborhood has a Flock camera from my local police department. Tracking the exact time I enter and leave my home is at the very least right at this line you’re trying to draw.
So you'd be cool with us crowdsourcing a film crew to follow you and your family around in public at all times?
Should I be concerned that you're stalking me, or that you know this information? The former is illegal, the latter is not.
What's the difference in outcome between passive stalking by having sufficient cameras to capture everyone's actions at all times and active stalking with a film crew?
Intimidation and threatening behavior. Context matters.
It is intimidating and threatening to most normal people for their wearabouts to be tracked at all times, regardless of the mode.
Take this opportunity to learn that different people might have different thresholds to feel intimidated and that normal people don't feel comfortable being tracked at all times in real life, regardless of the mechanism by which it's being executed.
In the above example, maybe you feel uncomfortable because the film crew is following you around in broad daylight? Would you feel better if they stayed hidden like the flock cameras in this example?
They're not being tracked at all times in real life. They're potentially being tracked in public.
I get that some people have a desire for privacy in public. And I'm even sympathetic to it. However, with the exception of the EU, privacy in public not is a right, nor is it a thing most people believe they possess. (And even ECHR Article 8 has a carveout for recording public activities for legitimate purposes.)
If you think you should have such privacy rights, by all means, use the political process to achieve it.
> They're potentially being tracked in public.
In the film crew example, what is the difference if the crew is sufficiently far away from you such that you won't know? The paparazzi already do it to celebrities, seems reasonable for individuals to just track each other at a distance if we're all okay with your proposed path.
> seems reasonable for individuals to just track each other at a distance if we're all okay with your proposed path.
They often do. What am I gonna do, run up to anyone who's taking cell phone videos that might have me in it and try to force them to stop recording?
Would you mind if I parked near your house, such that every morning, when you drove past, I could follow you. To work, to the store, to the gym, you know, wherever.
Then on the way home I'll park where I left off. If anyone asks me I'll them everything I know about you. It's "public" information after all.
Should I be concerned that you're stalking me, or that you know this information? The former is illegal, the latter is not.
Flock can alert when any specific car drives by. No warrant is required to use this feature.
So, I won't follow you, but when you _do_ leave, I'm going to call some people to let them know that happened. Still cool?
Eat your heart out. It's also a completely legitimate law enforcement technique.
Having this surveillance done by human beings rate limits the process to, in theory, focus it on actual criminals. Requiring warrants for the more invasive and persistent techniques adds another layer of accountability.
You're bootstrapping your argument with an assumption that there's something to account for. Public activities are public. You're shifting the accountability from the actor to the observer.
> The Illusion of Security
> Flock advertises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a culture of mistrust and preemptive suspicion. As the EFF warns, communities are being sold a false promise of safety - at the expense of civil rights* (EFF).
...
> True safety comes from healthy, empowered communities; not automated suspicion. Community-led safety initiatives have demonstrated significant results: North Lawndale saw a 58% decrease in gun violence after READI Chicago began implementing their program there. In cities nationwide, the presence of local nonprofits has been statistically linked to reductions in homicide, violent crime, and property crime (Brennan Center, The DePaulia, American Sociological Association).
These are incredibly weak arguments. I haven't personally looked into how good Flock cameras are at actually preventing crime and catching criminals, but if this is the best counterargument their detractors can come up with, it makes me suspect they're actually pretty good.
Crime is extremely bad. Mass surveillance is bad too, especially if abused, but being glib or dismissive about the real trade-offs is counterproductive.
Also, recording in public spaces (or private spaces that you own) is an important and fundamental right just like the right to privacy; simply banning this kind of surveillance would also infringe on civil liberties in a different way. I agree that laws and norms need adjusting in light of new technology, but that discussion needs more nuance than this.
I also thought it was interesting that the author basically argues Flock cameras are too effective at figuring out where criminals are, but then also argues they aren’t effective enough at reducing crime.
Boy would it just be terrible if someone hacked into the flock network and manipulated all the camera results ever so slightly. A letter here a number there, license plates or matches never quite lining up. It would take years for them to find the source of the “bugs”. Not saying I know anyone doing this or anything, just saying it would be oh soooooo terrible.
I am somewhat skeptical that either the ACLU or EFF are effective organizations for this cause. The ACLU in particular have drifted significantly from a civil liberties focus, and EFF's privacy track-record for corporate run surveillance has never been the best and of late they seem to be following the ACLU away from civil liberties.
There is an increasingly popular idea that all libertarianism, including civil libertianism, is inherently partisan and specifically right-wing. I think it has done a lot of damage to these organizations' ability to effectively fight this and other issues. I've shifted a lot of my support for ACLU/EFF towards IJ in recent years.
I could be convinced to support public cameras if access to the footage was tightly controlled and only used for solving serious crimes, but government officials and flock themselves have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted to use them in a responsible manner. It’s too powerful of a tool to put in the hands of untrustworthy individuals
Why only serious crimes?
If someone breaks into my car and a Flock camera sees it, is their right to privacy in a public space more important than my right to not have my property get stolen?
Yes.
Obligatory reference to PIPEDA and GDPR.
Edit: not a low effort comment. This is something you should all read and demand the same of. I consternated on how not to call your regime moronic. It _is_ moronic that you don’t have these basic protections and we keep having to listen to you all whine about that.
The "Take Action" section is missing the most obvious solution. Everyone just goes and takes down a camera. We as a society do not consent to this use of public space and simply have a national "Take out the trash day."
There is no way Flock could practically ramp up production or manpower to replace the entire fleet before failing to meet contractual requirements with their customers that keep money flowing in.
Who are you to speak on behalf of society? Wouldn't society also be better off if those who stole your car got caught?
Further, I'm not sure why there is an expectation of privacy in public places. You don't have to consent to being filmed when you're walking down a public sidewalk.
You should.
Michel Foucault's Panopticon is alive and well I see.