Posted by chirau 17 hours ago
this is easily solved with current technology, if they had an incentive to do so.
besides firing folks that get caught, flock themselves should be brought to court.
There's surely plenty of entities that need better controls around usage of technology / records / etc, but this is an example of somebody having an incentive and then following through.
you should need a warrant to monitor the products of mass surveillance and it should be as narrowly targeted towards a suspect as possible. or just not have any of the mass CCTV placements everywhere in the first place
I'm in favor of pushing for police departments (and really any governmental body with access to any kind of data) to have regulations around access to that data, access controls to restrict illegitimate access, and monitoring to detect improper access by people who do have legitimate access but don't follow the proper regulations.
I think you're correct that we don't tend to see the instances where improper usage occurs, tautologically because those entities aren't doing their homework on the above.
If government entities get good PR for rolling out strong policies, practices, and tooling for the data they have, and that makes more of them very keen to do so... mission accomplished?
Cards on the table, I am an optimist. But this feels pretty realistic: it's basically a corollary to the idea that public outrage about bad policies, bad practices, or bad tooling is problematic for these government entities. They want to avoid it. There's plenty of examples of this, even honing to just the US. Increasingly there's even examples of this specifically in the US, for police departments, for usage of Flock.
The department in this article appears to be doing just that:
> Every search run through the Flock Safety platform is automatically logged — who ran it, when, and the reason they gave for doing it. SPD said they also have other safeguards in place, including mandatory training, role-based access controls and supervisory oversight.
Good move by them, wait until nobody is paying attention anymore and they’re on to the next gig.
Very much not okay with this surveillance state bullshit.
1. Protest via yard signs and awareness (what you're doing)
2. Impermanent vandalism. I like the idea of hanging copies of the fourth amendment over the lenses
3. Permanent vandalism. I think we need bounties on camera destruction and public legal funds to assist in defense, bail, etc.
The police as a class/caste are not interested in the fundamental principles that America was founded on. Individual officers may be interested in civil freedom and privacy but as an entity they only ever march in the direction of total surveillance and domination of the citizenry.
And, which country routinely sets a bunch of shit on fire when they need to?
That's right.
Good work!
I'm betting that the number of officers who used it this way compared to the value it provides is minute to almost nil.
It would be interesting to find the number of Meta employees or Google employees who do similar activities.
Please compare the number of people who committed burglary at a location to the number who did not.
The act of violating laws has nothing to do with the number of those whom do not. Furthermore:
SPD’s administrative investigation determined the employees
violated department policies governing the authorized use
of law enforcement technology and departmental resources.
Investigators found that employees were running searches on
personal acquaintances and family members. One officer was
found to have given someone from an outside law enforcement
agency access to SPD’s Flock Safety system, which they
weren’t authorized to do.[0]
Non sequitur and irrelevant to the abuse documented.
> I'm betting that the number of officers who used it this way compared to the value it provides is minute to almost nil.
This is a variant of the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" fallacy. Or a nihilistic perspective of "the ends justify the means."
> It would be interesting to find the number of Meta employees or Google employees who do similar activities.
Again, non sequitur, irrelevant, and an assertion which can only be interpreted as a quintessential strawman[1].
0 - https://www.wtoc.com/2026/08/07/savannah-police-department-f...
Assuming the question you are referencing is:
Please compare the number of officers doing such a thing to
the number who did not.
The challenge is to find ways to catch criminals without trampling all over individual rights. This isn't that solution. It's too readily abused.
This is a conspiratorial position at best. If you can cite from a reputable source similar abuse attributed to those organizations, then do so. Otherwise, the position you are championing lacks both fact and reason.
Additionally, as others in this thread have made clear, both Google and Meta are not police departments authorized to inflict lethal force.
So there's that.
That Google and Meta employees are not law enforcement completely misses the point I'm making but I never expect people on liberal social media sites to see that
Also, not everyone has the same values system. Your post implies that you value minimizing criminality over civil liberties, which, fine, everyone has their own value system. But, other people clearly use different weights in their values, and view this as an unacceptable trade off.
I did not ask "everyone." I asked you to do so.
> That Google and Meta employees are not law enforcement completely misses the point I'm making but I never expect people on liberal social media sites to see that
You wrote, and I quote:
If you think some Google employees doesn't have MORE access
than a cop, you are WILDLY mistaken.
I wish you well in your path in life.