Posted by giuliomagnifico 10 hours ago
Soon after the cameras were installed, some thieves stole a gift my brother had sent me. Thanks to license plate data and images of their faces, Vancouver PD had little trouble catching the perpetrators. It turned out that in addition to stealing Amazon/UPS/Fedex packages, they were stealing USPS mail and using it to commit identity theft. IIRC they ended up getting a decade in federal prison.
It seems like only a few people are responsible for the majority of thefts, so catching them and locking them up drastically improves quality of life for everyone else. Obviously this technology could be abused, but that's also true for things like fingerprinting, DNA evidence, and ID requirements. Similarly to those technologies, we could have laws restricting certain uses, allowing us to reduce crime while preventing abuses. But if a private community wants to install cameras and allow law enforcement to access the data they record, I don't see any constitutional issues.
You might be shocked to discover there are subdivisions so affluent they can afford physical armed security and access control structures with far more invasive identification and logging procedures.
That’s a big misconception, flock is a car identification system not a license plate one. I have seen many videos of some crime documentaries where flock was used to ID cars with no license plates, and weeks later they still have them in the system to track, coupled with phone tracking, they know exactly all the details needed.
If you can’t disagree without belittling, maybe stick to reddit?
Either way, a networked array of license plate readers is an issue because it’s low friction and easily abused, with little space for oversight. A non-networked setup? Yeah i’m ok with that. If the gov needs to physically go to each camera and load data off them? Sounds fine to me. But somehow i don’t think that’s what you are suggesting when you say “non-cloud”. Once it’s networked, it doesn’t really matter if the network is a “cloud” based one or not.
But also, most of my comment was actually directed at alex43578‘s remarks, not yours.
Ex lovers (using flock): https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105...
Protestors (using flock): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/how-cops-are-using-flo...
Union organizers (not using flock): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/21/amaz...
https://fedscoop.com/social-media-ai-surveillance-unions-sta...
Journalists (not using flock): https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/source-leaked-documen...
Examples using flock are directly applicable, examples not using flock require a little bit of imagination to see that if they are not currently happening, they will be soon.
And a bonus i didn’t mention a woman leaving the state to obtain a legal abortion: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/te...
Government loves the product. What it doesn't like about Flock is that the peasants are aware about it and complaining.