Posted by chaps 20 hours ago
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo – This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers
While both are a problem I am far more concerned about the power this gives our, increasingly authoritarian, government than about individual stalkers/creeps.
There have been cases of people getting into baby monitors and yelling at the baby.
But as a tech company, this is extremely irresponsible
BTW, Benn Jordan is also known as The Flashbulb, an ambient legend
If you find yourself sympathetic to Flock, you should ask yourself: do we have a right to any kind of privacy in a public space or is public space by definition a denial of any sort of privacy? This is the inherent premise in this technology that's problematic.
In Japan, for instance, there are very strict laws about broadcasting people's faces in public because there is a cultural assumption that one deserves anonymity as a form of privacy, regardless of the public visibility of their person.
I think I'd prefer to live in a place where I have some sort of recourse over when and how I'm recorded. Something more than "avoid that public intersection if you don't like it."
The necessary and sufficient steps to stop property crime are:
1. Secure the stuff.
2. Take repeat criminals off the street.
Against random 'crime of opportunity' with new parties nothing but proactive security is particularly effective because even if you catch the person after the fact the damage is already done. The incentive to commit a crime comes from the combination of the opportunity and the deterrence-- and not everyone is responsive to deterrence so controlling the opportunity is critical.
Against repeated or organized criminals nothing but taking them out of society is very effective. Because they are repeated extensive surveillance is not required-- eventually they'll be caught even if not in the first instance. If you fail to take them off the streets no amount of surveillance will ever help, as they'll keep doing it again and again.
Many repeat criminals are driven by mental illness, stupidity, emotional regulation, or sometimes desperation. They're committing crimes at all because for whatever reason they're already not responding to all the incentives not to. Adding more incentives not to has a minor effect at most.
The conspiratorially minded might wonder if the failure to enforce and incarcerate for property crime in places like California isn't part of a plot to manufacture consent for totalitarian surveillance. But sadly, life isn't a movie plot-- it would be easier to fight against a plot rather than just collective failure and incompetence. In any case, many many people have had the experience of having video or know exactly who the criminal is only to have police, prosecutors, or the court do absolutely nothing about it. But even when they do-- it pretty much never undoes the harm of the crime.
The argument for these cameras is that they save lives. The argument against them is that they destroy freedom.
That's why these cameras are so prevalent, the case for them is extremely obvious and easy to make (give police more tools to stop bad guys), while the case against them is a lot more subtle (human freedom, government abuse, expectations of privacy, risk of data breaches, etc).
Helping to solve a crime after the fact is certainly a thing, and that discussion has merit, but I think you’re taking creative license again with stopping a serial killer or spree killer “before they kill again.” That’s not really how murders play out, which is why there are special names for them.
It would be helpful for discourse, and for making your own argument, if the discussion was grounded in the reality of the sour world we live in now.
I think my example of helping police catch a murderer "before they kill again" is not only "grounded in reality" but has, in fact, quite plausibly already happened thousands of times throughout the course of Flock's existence.
Now, whether I think that justifies mass surveillance is another matter entirely.
It's a good steelman/devil's advocate of their position, but I wonder if proponents realize how much wishful thinking drives those supposed outcomes.
The question isn't whether these cameras help law enforcement. Of course they do. The question is whether that's sufficient justification for continuous government surveillance of the public movements of millions of law abiding citizens.
We didn't sleep walk into it, we ran into it because of poor basic civics education and a cynical media cycle that biases towards making everyone terrified of crime.
The latter is driven by two forces - a profit motive (sensational, gruesome stories sell), and a political motive (media carrying water for far-right-wing candidates loves to keep you scared on this issue).
The optimal level of crime or unsolved crime in a society is not zero, but a lot of people will look at you like you've got three eyes if you tell them that. Talk to them for another ten minutes, and most of them will see why what you say makes sense, but that's not a conversation their television will ever have with them.
>With such surveillance, administration can [...]
Have you missed all the cries of "fascism" back in 2016/2017? The problem isn't "people are too afraid to admit". It's that "wolf!" was cried too many times and people tuned it out. Ironically this invocation "fascism" is arguably also crying wolf. From wikipedia:
>Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Is an ANPR network terrible for privacy? Yes, obviously. Is it authoritarian? Maybe[1]. Is everything vaguely authoritarian "fascism"? No.
[1] Consider cell phones. They're terrible for privacy, but nobody would seriously consider them "authoritarian".
These things don't just happen overnight. It's not crying wolf when you see the wolf on the horizon running towards you.
So were vaccine mandates and passports "fascism" as well, even though they melted away after the pandemic ended, contrary to some who thought it was going to be part of some new world order?
Group B: "Throwing non-citizens into concentration camps using 'wartime' laws without trial is fascism! Watch out!"
You: "Group A was foolish, therefore Group B is foolish, because all warnings against fascism are equally un-grounded and meritless for some reason."
>You: "Group A was foolish, therefore Group B is foolish, because all warnings against fascism are equally un-grounded and meritless for some reason."
So it's only "fascism" if it's not for a Good Reason? Who decides whether something is a good reason? Is it us, because we're obviously the Good Guys? Doesn't this seem suspiciously close to a defense of Flock that others have referenced[1]? ie. "Doesn't vaccine passports seem pretty dystopian? You're thinking of [other group] authoritarianism. Our authoritarianism helps granny from getting sick and stops the spread of covid". This kind of attitude is exactly the reason why people tuned "fascism" out. It just became a tool for partisan in-group signaling.
That's quite a *whooooosh* of missing-the-point. Perhaps because you've confused me with another poster, and you're smushing a bunch of unfinished tu-quoque accusations together?
I'll simplify it further, you're acting like these are equivalent:
1. Yelling "Wolf! Danger!" ... because you were in downtown Chicago and saw a fur hoodie.
2. Yelling "Wolf! Danger!" ... because you were in rural Albania and saw a paw-print and a dead deer.
It's foolish to consider them the same just because the same two words were uttered. The accuracy or reasonableness of one does not reflect on the other.
> Who decides whether something is a good reason?
Well, in this case I decide that seeing a fur hoodie downtown is a bad reason to warn of an imminent wolf attack, and that seeing a paw-print in the European hinterlands is... a much-less-bad reason.
If I (or you) are somehow not permitted to make that decision about 1-vs-2, please explain why.
No, you're missing the point. You're just doubling down on "our claims of fascism is so obviously correct, whereas their claims of fascism is so obliviously meritless and hyperbolic!". Yes. The person yelling "fascism!" obviously belies it's so obviously correct, otherwise he wouldn't be yelling it.
>Well, seeing a fur hoodie downtown is a bad reason, and seeing a pawprint in the forest is a less-bad reason. I can comfortably declare it so and the vast majority of people will agree.
"vast majority"? If only things were so obvious. Otherwise Trump wouldn't have gotten elected in both 2016 and 2024, despite exasperated cries of "fascism!" for 8+ years.
Not every counterexample you don't like is "Whataboutism".
>because the vaccine mandates "melted away" due to the checks and balances of the government operating to make them go away.
No, it would be "checks and balances" if there was actually some conflict between the branches of government. If like in most jurisdictions, the restrictions were imposed by the executive, and then lifted by the executive, it's just the executive changing its mind. The Trump administration starting a trade war against china, and then backing down isn't "checks and balance", for instance. The supreme court telling the executive to stop, would be "checks and balance".
The old PIPS ALPR devices aren't online anymore but they had horrible security as well. Just sending a newline to their UDP port would cause them to send you all images as they were being collected in real-time - no authentication needed. And the images had the license plate information encoded in the JPG metadata. I did a talk about it at some point (https://imgur.com/HHcpJOr) and worked with EFF to take them offline
and they were going to get it all shut down
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS NOW
so good luck getting rid of flock where people don't even know it's happening
Not sure if people realize that cellphone locations, several layers in the firmware and software, can be had without warrant by anyone YEARS LATER
The funniest part though is you pay $80 every five years and just bypass it entirely. I guess they assume terrorists are too stupid to figure out TSA precheck is available.
Not-that-easy solution is legal ban for such surveillance.
None of these both will happen though.
You accepted TSA and PRISM, you will get used to Flock too.
Next is Flock but for people, with face recognition.
> if the object class of the identified object is that of a human being, then the object detection module 154 may further analyze the image 501 using a neural network module 507B configured to identify different classes of people (male, female, race, etc.)
As major investors in Flock, being aware of the long term law enforcement strategy, I’m guessing ycombinator can comment on what all of this investment is for.