Posted by sodality2 8 hours ago
These have gotten more controversial in recent months, due to their indiscriminate large scale data collection, with 404 Media publishing many original pieces (https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/) about their adoption and (ab)use across the country. I wanted to use open source datasets to track the rapid expansion, especially per-county, as this data can be crucial for 'deflock' movements to petition counties and city governments to ban and remove them.
In some counties, the tracking becomes so widespread that most people can't go anywhere without being photographed. This includes possibly sensitive areas, like places of worship and medical facilities.
The argument for their legality rests upon the notion that these cameras are equivalent to 'mere observation', but the enormous scope and data sharing agreements in place to share and access millions of records without warrants blurs the lines of the fourth amendment.
The strange implication is that they're watching the vet office traffic to find people who are getting treated by vets instead of doctors?
also my parish reports 0.0% across the board, and all the parishes near me. you have to get on the coast to get above 25%.
I don't know the solution, but I do know that in the US we've lost 10-15 years of progress when it comes to traffic fatalities.
The fact that these cameras are already pervasive and the problem of bad drivers hasn't been solved anywhere doesn't give me a lot of hope that these cameras are the solution to that particular problem.
It seems like police can do a lot to increase enforcement without the need of these devices. We have evidence that they've been doing less traffic enforcement so maybe start there. Increasing our standards for driving tests (some of which were eliminated entirely over the first few years of the pandemic) would probably help. Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help. Bringing physical buttons and dials back to cars instead of burying common functions in touchscreen menus might help.
There's a whole lot of places to look for solutions to safer roads before we have to resort to tracking everyone's movements at all times.
I can’t think of a way to implement this that wouldn’t ban passengers from using their phone while riding in a vehicle. Which could be even a bus or limousine.
I kind of picture the cellular telcos doing this. Maybe buses and trains come with wifi hotspots allowed to connect. Otherwise auto passengers could use their devices offline, maybe read an ebook or something. Not the end of the world.
If they really wanted to push this they could do it directly in the baseband chipset and bypass the OS entirely when deciding to lock down the device to some kind of "travel mode" with limited functionality (such as no texting or no browser)
Not that I'm advocating for that sort of thing, but it's good to keep in mind that we don't really own the cellular devices we pay for and that even in the rare case we have root we can't stop them from doing what they want to our devices as long as they control the closed hardware.
> but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.
Across the US we have roads and infrastructure that encourage speed right next to decaying pedestrian infrastructure. It's very difficult to get state DOTs to roll back or do traffic calming. They often prohibit the use of bollards or barriers near these roadways.
In a lot, not all, physical changes to the environment could drastically reduce traffic fatalities without surveillance.
My city spent a few million dollars installing Flock cameras to all its municipal parking garages in a matter of months, but has been hemming and hawing over adding a few speed cameras for years, despite petitioning the state for an allowance do so back in 2023.
Traffic enforcement cameras don't even have to become the networked surveillance system that Flock offers. Most are still cameras triggered by radar rather than perpetually recording all drivers.
We could of had a system where we used the technology we already had in our hands to democratize speed enforcement, instead of corporatizing it
People unable to recognize this and only driving by the feels are the problem. Hand wavy comments like yours suggesting using the feels as being okay do not help the situation
Not over the long term, no. There may have been a recent uptick in the post-pandemic US but it's mostly just noise. Fatalities per mile driven have been going down markedly in recent decades. Driving was twice as dangerous in the 80's as it is now.
This is not a statistical anomaly that can be handwaved by pointing out that things were worse 40 years ago. Roads in the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso.
Sigh. I hate that phrasing. But OK, fine: you are misreading me, misanalysing the data, or just plain spinning to mislead readers.
Fatalities per capita and per mile driven go steadily downward until covid, and maybe there's a bump after that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... If you have numbers (you don't cite any) showing otherwise, they are being polluted by demographic trends (the US having higher population growth doesn't say anything about driver behavior).
> Roads in the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso.
So spinning it is. Would you rather drive in Germany in 2002 or the US in 2025? Seems like "uniquely lethal" doesn't really constitute a good faith representation of the truth.
Anyway, not to pile on but you are absolutely incorrect. Forgive the phrasing.
> Per capita road accident deaths in the US reversed their decline in the early 2010s.
Amusing that you accuse me of bad faith framing and then pose a nonsense question like this:
> Would you rather drive in Germany in 2002 or the US in 2025?
I cannot time travel and neither can you. The comparison that matters is US in 2025 vs other developed nations in 2025, and with that framing the US is uniquely lethal.
Of course, a good faith reader of my comment would understand this, but we already know that's not you since you did the research and have decided to be wrong anyway.
The cyclist puts the stick between his spokes.
The cyclist lies on the road, cursing the government, for causing this.
I'll add a link to the OSM relation for the county to each county page, so you can see the source data on OSM to verify/edit.
It really doesn't have to be though. The rights of individuals to record in public doesn't have to translate to the right of corporations (flock, amazon, etc.) to do it without restriction. Time, place, and manner restrictions on our rights already exist, it just needs to be found that this manner is unacceptable as an imposition on our freedom which should be protected under the fourth amendment.
The difference between ring cameras and paparazzi using a canon camera is that the photos recorded to film/local storage can't be automatically compiled with the footage captured from everyone else's canon camera to create databases of people and track their movements, activities, attributes, etc.
It really depends on where the data goes and who can access it. I'd even go so far as to say that keeping that data on the cloud is fine as long as the data is encrypted, amazon doesn't access it beyond storage and deliver to the customer (meaning that they can no longer mine it for personal data) and amazon cannot give access to anyone else (including police who should have to request footage directly from the camera owners).
The law doesn't make this distinction you're making. If you replace Canon with "iPhone/Android with cloud photo backup enabled" then your issue with Ring cameras applies to all smartphones. Maybe you'd prefer that not be the case, but it is.
In any case, I'd prefer we not get hung up on this lossy analogy since neither activity is restricted by current law which is my actual point.
It's not clear to me that photos taken with an iphone with cloud backup enabled are compiled into national databases that track people's movements like ring and flock cameras are today either.
Currently flock and ring cameras are tracking people at a scale that canon cameras just aren't. Therefore it is fair to blame Amazon and flock but not cannon for the manner in which amazon and flock uses the footage their cameras collect to violate our rights.
As with everything, there's much nuance to this "right".
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Common_Questions,_Arguments,_%...
Imagining a universe where companies are also bound by that is an interesting thought exercise. Many products (cloud photo backup, foursquare style "check-ins," location sharing with friends, etc) would be simply impossible because the aggregated data amounts to comprehensive surveillance.
However I think there’s a significant difference between a single household and a centralised network of cameras across dozens of states.
For me the core issue of this is private enterprise holding gigantic amounts of PII, and the forms that is taking.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46170302
(Repeating: in a few months sites like this will be replaceable with a static HTML page that says "yes, you've been tagged by an ALPR".)
Then I had an intrusive thought of a small squad of cybertruck 'enforcers' running around autonomously, tracking these drivers down via the live network of incoming video and doling out punishment to the chief offenders.
I’ve watched a lot of the coverage by Benn Jordan on Flock cameras and their inherent vulnerabilities, and it’s deeply concerning.
The applications of these technologies far outpaces appropriate checks and balances, and the increasing fusion between law enforcement, intelligence and private industry is largely ignored by the larger population.
Thanks for developing this, it’s important to visualise the virus-like spread of these technologies and see where it is concentrated.