Posted by chaps 16 hours ago
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo – This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers
Or how it has become increasingly trivial to identify by face or license plate such that combining tools reaches "movie Interpol" levels, without any warrant or security credentials?
If Big Brother surveillance is unavoidable I don't think "everyone has access" is the solution. The best defense is actually the glut of data and the fact nobody is actively watching you picking your nose in the elevator. If everyone can utilize any camera and its history for any reason then expect fractal chaos and internet shaming.
If it's inappropriate for any pedo to see when kids are in a park then certainly it should inappropriate when those pedos just happen to be police officers or Flock employees. The nice thing about the "everyone has access" case is that it forces the public to decide what they think is acceptable instead of making it some abstract thing that their brains aren't able to process correctly.
People will happily stand under mounted surveillance cameras all day long, but the moment they actually see someone point a camera at them they consider that a hostile action. The surveillance camera is an abstract concept they don't understand. The stranger pointing a camera in their direction is something they do understand and it makes their true feelings on strangers recording them very clear.
We might need a little bit of "everyone has access" to convince people of the truth that "no one should have access" instead.
Sure. It also lets parents watch. Or others see when parents are repeatedly leaving their kids unattended. Or lets you see some person that keeps showing up unattended and watching the kids.
> Or how it has become increasingly trivial to identify by face or license plate such that combining tools reaches "movie Interpol" levels, without any warrant or security credentials?
That already exists and it is run by private companies and sold to government agencies. That’s a huge power grab.
> The best defense is actually the glut of data and the fact nobody is actively watching you picking your nose in the elevator. If everyone can utilize any camera and its history for any reason then expect fractal chaos and internet shaming.
This argument holds whether it is public or not. It is worse if Flock or the government can do this asymmetrically than if anyone can do it IMO, they already have enough coercive tools.
... which is the expected, default use-case for a playground ...
If you leave your kids unattended at a playground I don't see how the camera changes the risk factor in any meaningful way. Either a pedophile can expect there to be unattended children or not.
Most people don’t like the idea that strangers could easily stalk their child remotely.
It’s the easy of access to surveillance technology that is different. Has nothing to do with the park being safe or not.
Try to think like an evil person with no life and very specific and demonic aims if you’re still having trouble seeing why this would be an issue.
That person already has incredible power to stalk and ruin someone's life. Making Flock cameras public would change almost nothing for that person. It fascinates me how fast people jump to "imagine the worst person" when we talk about making data public.
We have the worst people, they're the ones who profit off of it being private, with no public accountability, who don't build secure systems. The theater of privacy is, IMO, worse than not having privacy.
I imagined a "white list" though (or whatever the new term is—"permitted list"?) so that only certain license plates are posted/tracked.
Cities will remove Flock cameras at the first council meeting that sits after council-members learn their families can be stalked.
Or, at the very least, that we can go back and look later.
> I know in theory we all can continuously download and datamine these video feeds but can everyone really?
To which my response is "this is like OSS." What I mean by that is that, in theory, people audit and review code submitted to OSS software, in reality most people trust that there are other people who do it.
> Public feeds would enable someone to document and sell people's whereabouts in real time. The fact that I could do the same or go back and look later is no defense.
This is a different argument to me and one that I'm still torn about. I think that if the feeds exist and the government and private entities have access to them, the trade-offs may be better if everyone has access to them. In my mind this results in a few things:
1. Diffusion of power - You said public feeds would "enable someone to document and sell people's whereabouts in real time." Well, private feeds allow this too. I'd rather have everyone know about some misdeed than Flock or the local PD blackmail someone with it.
2. Second guessing deployment - I think if the people making the decisions know that the data will be publicly available, they're more likely to second guess deploying it in the first place.
3. Awareness - if you can just open an app on your phone and look at the feed from a camera then you become aware of the amount of surveillance you are subject to. I think being aware of it is better than not.
There's trade-offs to this. The cameras become less effective if everyone knows where they are. It doesn't help with the location selection bias - if they're only installed in areas of town where decision makers don't live and don't go, the power is asymmetric again. Plenty of other reasons it is bad. None of them worse than the original sin of installing them in the first place.
I do buy your argument that open access could help check the worst abuses. But, if widespread, it'd be so catastrophic for national security that I can't see how it would ever fly.
If I were an enemy nation state, flock would definitely be a target.
Good thing nobody tried to pop a shell on the camera OS and move laterally through the network. That would be bad.
I'm sure it's all very secure though.
If they're going to exist, it may be better for that to be spread among the public than to be left in the hands of the few.
What you're staring at is the gateway tech that brings in a dystopian society. At first stuff like this is fairly benign, but slowly over time it ramps up into truly awful outcomes.
You don't even need to drop an air tag now, you can use the license plate reader to track them everywhere they go. There is no hiding.
It also makes it easy to say, track a person's movements to an abortion clinic if your state would like to prosecute that (this is happening).
There thing to fear isn't some higher state; it's each other. We happily will surveil each other under the auspices of safety.
Hell, these days, our kids grow up with cameras pointing at them in their own rooms. What did we expect?
Until we are willing to accept more "risk" in exchange for more privacy, this will only get worse. (It's why I believe most tech/services that tout privacy are DoA, because nobody actually cares)
Specifically:
If a flock (or similar) camera is deployed on public land/infra there should exist default permission for any alternate vendor to deploy a camera in the same location.
I wonder how that could be used and/or abused and, further, what the response from a company like flock would be ...
Multiple cases have revealed that it seemed like police and Shotspotter worked hand-in-glove to tweak Shotspotter data and demographics to help shore up a case and make things appear more reliable than they were.
And multiple cases where, sufficiently pushed, DAs have dropped cases or dropped Shotspotter as evidence rather than have the narrative challenged too closely.
I notice they generally watch busy roads and intersections, off and on ramps to highways, retail malls…
Smaller roads through neighborhoods were mostly unmolested.