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Stop Flock
- 5255652 6mo agoI misread the title
- arcanemachiner 6mo ago[flagged]
- JoshTriplett 6mo agoMany of them have been.
- seattle_spring 6mo agoEvery time they're discussed, I think of that scene of Homer bashing a weather station in the 70s[1] [1] https://youtu.be/zexJJb9Lbas https://youtu.be/zexJJb9Lbas
- renewiltord 6mo ago[flagged]
- rexpop 6mo agoOP is not a king.
- renewiltord 6mo agoI didn’t say anyone was a king. I was just talking about troublesome priests.
- saghm 6mo agoAnd you're conveniently unaware of the historical context of the origin of that phrase too, if we're to take you literally, since you seem to entirely misunderstand how the whole reason it was problematic was due to the inherent power dynamics
- diordiderot 6mo agoRead some Foucauld. power is internalised. People absorb the norms of their social class and start policing themselves and others without needing orders or hierarchical power dynamics. Norm enforcement can spread faster and further than formal authority because lots of people can act on a signal whilst thinking they drew their own conclusions. Think of steve bannon's quote "politics is downstream of culture". formal rank of the speaker is less important than that the signal comes from the socially legitimate tribe whose approval, language, and standard the subject is a member.
- saghm 6mo ago> Think of steve bannon's quote "politics is downstream of culture". I'm going to be honest: if you think Steve Bannon is a thought leader, I don't think we'd agree on pretty much anything. > formal rank of the speaker is less important than that the signal comes from the socially legitimate tribe whose approval, language, and standard the subject is a member. You're claiming that a random stranger on an internet forum has as much social power as the literal monarch of a country. That's absurd, no matter how much fancy language you use to try to justify it.
- renewiltord 6mo agoIndeed, one of the great wisdoms of history is that a mobs have no power. We are very wise men so we know that there are no peer reviewed controlled trials showing mobs having power. We call this thing Science.
- saghm 6mo agoA random person on an internet forum is not a mob.
- renewiltord 6mo agoIndeed, no man is a mob. This is true and a sign of wisdom.
- nomel 6mo agoIt's fundamentally a security camera, for many people. People buy them to see what's going on, record crimes for reporting, and to feel safer. I think there's significant overlap in people who want to feel safer and people being ok with the police being able to look through their cameras, since being able to record events, for the police, was part of the motivation for the purchase of a security camera. My frail elderly grandpa, who has seen his neighborhood go to shit with the reduced police funding, would definitely see this as a "nice feature".
- nullc 6mo agoIANAL, but if you are to take action it might be most prudent to do so non-destructively. Putting a bag over the camera/solar panel or taking it down and returning the lost/abandoned property would leave it disabled just as well. The added damage of outright destroying it would make no real difference to the company (might even just make them more money) but would make it easier to characterize the action as criminally motivated rather than an act of conscience in the public interest.
- indiangenz 6mo agoI, a law abiding & legal citizen want more of these cameras in public places. Are you trying to achieve an utopia for criminals and illegal aliens?
- foltik 6mo agoDoes anyone hear that sound?
- kjkjadksj 6mo agoWould be nice if the cameras were useful. Most you get is a nice souvenir showing the crime occurring. Recording is not prevention. People don’t even bother hiding their face when they porch pirate in front of an obvious Ring camera because they know there is no real risk.
- carlivar 6mo agoHave you read "Brave New World"? It predicted the future better than "1984".
- himata4113 6mo agoThis is just reiterating same points deflock does including mentioning deflock and images from deflock? Deflock: https://deflock.org/ https://deflock.org/ Also: https://haveibeenflocked.com/ https://haveibeenflocked.com/
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Computer0 6mo agoYes I think this site is not unique, I personally have at least 2 websites I have not shared anywhere with at least all of this information, that I am developing for my local community or just for myself. Its a subject worth discussing but I am also skeptical of the value of this link. I think maybe what is most worth considering is, "does this have value over deflock?" is it more accessible? Less overwhelming? I am not sure but I think that conversation would not be a great use of time in this particular space.
- jimmar 6mo agoI followed the shooting at Brown University last year very closely. Brown's leadership was heavily criticized for having camera blind spots and not being able to track the shooter's exact movements through campus. I can understand why people with stewardship over the safety of their students/customers/constituents would make decisions to err on the side of tracking. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I understand it.
- sfblah 6mo agoWith most of these things, people are against state power until they are victimized. It’s a common pattern.
- the_doctah 6mo agoPeople hate cops until they need one
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- engineer_22 6mo agoPolice work for the State. The State orders them to work for the Public when it interests the State. Intervening in violent crime and property crime can be seen, cynically, as a PR move. To be beholden to the State for justice and protection is fine when the State is beholden to the Public for their consent. Today, in the West, the Public has been so thoroughly disarmed, and /disrobed/, that consent is a formality, consent can no longer be withheld. Look no further than Flock and FISA for the ongoing crisis of consent. When cops are released from the State apparatus, they'll be given the respect and admiration they deserve. Until then, it's difficult to separate them from their incentive structure.
- potsandpans 6mo agoMost people hate cops after they need one too.
- 6mo ago
- bmitch3020 6mo agoI don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. If the business models can't be made illegal, it should at least come with liabilities so high that no sane business would want to hold data that is essentially toxic waste. Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong person gets access to the data, entire populations are threatened.
- stevemk14ebr 6mo agoYou want to stop the source, which is that the government and other agencies can purchase surveillance data that would otherwise be disallowed by the 4th amendment. We need to end this 'laundering' of information through third parties, and enforce the constitution by its intent.
- caconym_ 6mo agoHonestly it should probably just be illegal for anyone, private or public, to engage in mass surveillance (or "data gathering", whatever) of anybody who didn't expressly consent to it. As long as the data exist, they will be abused.
- inetknght 6mo agoNot only that, but it should be illegal (eg: fines for the company and potential jail time for executives) for tying consent to use/purchase of services or products. Consent should be _voluntary_, not mandatory.
- nandomrumber 6mo agoBut I did expressly consent. When I installed the SoundCloud app and it told me by continuing I agree to them sharing my data with their 954 partners.[1] 1. I’m not even joining. When I mostly recently installed the SoundCloud app - for the first time on a new device, that’s what’s it said: 954 partners. How can anyone reasonably understand what it is their agreeing to in that scenario.
- amazingamazing 6mo agoI’m curious if there were some consortium of all private businesses with their own surveillance cams deciding to aggregate their footage could it be stopped?
- __MatrixMan__ 6mo agoI worry about this. It's easy enough to go around putting bags over flock cameras, but it would be harder to justify targeting ones that just maybe are doing double duty. We need to find a way to make partnering with flock a liability.
- dopidopHN2 6mo agoHome depot and lowes have contract with Flock, as an example. In New Orleans, a private rogue network of surveillance camera has been erected in reaction to a too constraining live facial recognition ban. I think it would be much harder to stop.
- khuston 6mo agoI’m all for mass surveillance of roadways, but I want to see results. Every day I see and hear people breaking laws with their vehicles in ways that make life worse for others around them.
- mcmcmc 6mo agoYep. Automate the whole thing and be done with traffic cops abusing their power to meet quotas or harass minorities. It would likely make car insurance cheaper too since people would drive more safely, and the cost of investigations and arbitration drops down with readily available video evidence.
- themafia 6mo agoJust make quotas illegal. Make enforcing them a felony for command staff. Lock up body worn camera videos so they can't be used for "performance review." That footage belongs to the public, for legal purposes, it shouldn't be a "tool" outside of that. More importantly, can I borrow you car? I have some, uh, stuff, to go do.
- mcmcmc 6mo agoThey're already illegal in a lot of states, doesn't stop it from happening. Cops aren't great at following the law.
- diordiderot 6mo agoYou aren't allowed to automate law enforcement because of disparate impact
- mcmcmc 6mo agoRight, because human enforcement isn’t selective or biased at all
- Tangurena2 6mo ago
- chris_wot 6mo agoMichel Foucault's Panopticon is alive and well I see.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- diogenes_atx 6mo agoTo the list of references provided by this post in the section "Further Reading," I would add the following book: Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Policing/dp/0190684097 https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol... An academic study about the use of surveillance technology at the Los Angeles Police Department, the book documents the LAPD's use of data brokerage firms (e.g., Palantir) that collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, as well as automatic license plate readers like Flock, and Suspicious Activity Reports generated by police and civilians, which include reports of mundane activities such as using binoculars, drawing diagrams, or taking pictures or "video footage with no apparent aesthetic value." All this data ultimately gets parked in Fusion Center facilities, built in the aftermath of 9/11, where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information. As the author observes, "The use of data in law enforcement is not new. For almost a century, police have been gathering data, e.g., records of citations, collisions, warrants, incarcerations, sex offender and gang registries, etc. What is new and important about the current age of big data is the role in public policing of private capitalist firms who provide database systems with huge volumes of information about people, not just those in the criminal justice system."
- SonOfKyuss 6mo agoI could be convinced to support public cameras if access to the footage was tightly controlled and only used for solving serious crimes, but government officials and flock themselves have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted to use them in a responsible manner. It’s too powerful of a tool to put in the hands of untrustworthy individuals
- jedberg 6mo agoWe need a law that says if you hold any data about a person, they must be notified when anyone accesses it, including law enforcement. I used to work in criminal investigations. I understand how this might make investigation of real crime more difficult. But so does the fact that you need a warrant to enter someone's home, and yet we manage to investigate crime anyway. Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company. It should require a warrant and notification. You could even make the notification be 24 hours after the fact. But it should be required.
- tptacek 6mo agoThe entities holding the information here are literally police departments. The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations. It's good to want things, though.
- jedberg 6mo agoI know, that's why I said "including law enforcement" :)
- tptacek 6mo agoSo we're clear, you believe there should be a law that, when a police department collects information about you during a criminal investigation, they should notify you directly that they've done so?
- gbear605 6mo agoYes.
- atq2119 6mo agoIt does make sense. Police are absolutely not beyond reproach, and there's screwups all the time. They need to be held to a high standard. It's also easy to imagine reasonable compromises, like a time delay where they only have to report after e.g. 48 hours, and allowing a system whereby a judge can issue a warrant to extend that delay.
- scarmig 6mo agoAlthough I oppose the surveillance state, it's important to understand the motivations and incentives involved in the move toward Flock (and its eventual successors); until those are resolved, governments are going to be implementing Flock style programs with relatively tepid opposition. Police departments are seriously understaffed in many major cities, and officers are much less efficient than they used to be. This has led to the decline of the beat cop, who provided a kind of ambient authority that helped create, both a sense and reality, of public order. People really want the sense (even more than the reality!) of public order; without that, they will jump to faddish solutions that promise it, regardless of the data for or against it. The best counter to Flock is to provide alternatives to it, not just reject it while keeping the status quo going. We need a new, vitalized police culture, that shares mutual trust and engagement with the community.
- aldebran 6mo agoPolice departments aren’t understaffed. It’s a priority problem not a lack of resources problem. I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all. There’s occasional break ins and car break ins. When this happens it’s a big deal. We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door to door and gathered it herself. Cops refused to do anything even though you can see the car and the plates from multiple videos, multiple angles. Guess what the cops always have resources for? Hiding behind bushes and trees to ticket people going 5 over. Or at turns where they know they’ll get people before people see the cop car. Our HOA came together and asked the police department about this. They gave us bullshit about how custody of evidence etc is hard and even if they put people in jail, the lenient judges will let them go anyway. It was fucked up. Our HOA was going in hard about installing floc cameras everywhere. I had to fight hard not to get that done. One of the reasons I won wasn’t because privacy, it was because the cops literally were like unless we can directly pull video feeds from cameras, we won’t do much. And that access wasn’t available to those police department. At least at the time. There have been many other such stories I’ve personally witnessed in the cities I’ve lived in. Cops seem to have plenty of resources to bully people of color, seize assets and hide behind trees and bushes to ticket people, reduce the period of orange lights so people get more tickets etc. but never enough to actually do their jobs.
- mike_d 6mo agoThe "Take Action" section is missing the most obvious solution. Everyone just goes and takes down a camera. We as a society do not consent to this use of public space and simply have a national "Take out the trash day." There is no way Flock could practically ramp up production or manpower to replace the entire fleet before failing to meet contractual requirements with their customers that keep money flowing in.
- daxaxelrod 6mo agoWho are you to speak on behalf of society? Wouldn't society also be better off if those who stole your car got caught? Further, I'm not sure why there is an expectation of privacy in public places. You don't have to consent to being filmed when you're walking down a public sidewalk.
- eemax 6mo ago> The Illusion of Security > Flock advertises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a culture of mistrust and preemptive suspicion. As the EFF warns, communities are being sold a false promise of safety - at the expense of civil rights* (EFF). ... > True safety comes from healthy, empowered communities; not automated suspicion. Community-led safety initiatives have demonstrated significant results: North Lawndale saw a 58% decrease in gun violence after READI Chicago began implementing their program there. In cities nationwide, the presence of local nonprofits has been statistically linked to reductions in homicide, violent crime, and property crime (Brennan Center, The DePaulia, American Sociological Association). These are incredibly weak arguments. I haven't personally looked into how good Flock cameras are at actually preventing crime and catching criminals, but if this is the best counterargument their detractors can come up with, it makes me suspect they're actually pretty good. Crime is extremely bad. Mass surveillance is bad too, especially if abused, but being glib or dismissive about the real trade-offs is counterproductive. Also, recording in public spaces (or private spaces that you own) is an important and fundamental right just like the right to privacy; simply banning this kind of surveillance would also infringe on civil liberties in a different way. I agree that laws and norms need adjusting in light of new technology, but that discussion needs more nuance than this.
- icapybara 6mo agoI also thought it was interesting that the author basically argues Flock cameras are too effective at figuring out where criminals are, but then also argues they aren’t effective enough at reducing crime.
- daxaxelrod 6mo ago[dead]
- nullc 6mo agoI am somewhat skeptical that either the ACLU or EFF are effective organizations for this cause. The ACLU in particular have drifted significantly from a civil liberties focus, and EFF's privacy track-record for corporate run surveillance has never been the best and of late they seem to be following the ACLU away from civil liberties.
- greyface- 6mo agoThere is an increasingly popular idea that all libertarianism, including civil libertianism, is inherently partisan and specifically right-wing. I think it has done a lot of damage to these organizations' ability to effectively fight this and other issues. I've shifted a lot of my support for ACLU/EFF towards IJ in recent years.
- beloch 6mo agoFor the Canadians sitting at home, tut tutting more American foolishness that could never happen up here... Flock started their expansion into Ontario this very month[1]. We should probably oppose this. _________ [1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/07/toronto-rosedale-row-virtual-gated-community-ai-surveillance-flock https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/07/toronto-r...
- VladVladikoff 6mo agoGood luck. Dougie and the popo are BFFs.
- VladVladikoff 6mo agoBoy would it just be terrible if someone hacked into the flock network and manipulated all the camera results ever so slightly. A letter here a number there, license plates or matches never quite lining up. It would take years for them to find the source of the “bugs”. Not saying I know anyone doing this or anything, just saying it would be oh soooooo terrible.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- teraflop 6mo agoHere's a modest proposal: what if we made it a serious crime for anyone to retain automatically-recorded surveillance footage, or data derived from it, for longer than some limited period of time (say, 7 days) unless said footage is released to the public within that timeframe? That is, you can put up cameras wherever you want, but you can't gain any kind of competitive advantage by doing so. I think the public would be more alert to the dangers of mass surveillance if the magnitude of that surveillance was more obvious. And if everyone was watching everyone, at least it wouldn't as easily abused for purposes such as selective prosecution or blackmail.
- otterley 6mo agoWhy do people consistently and falsely believe that they have privacy in public settings? You are literally out in public. If you don't want your behavior in public to be observed, then either don't behave in such a way that you wouldn't want observed, or stay home. UPDATE: don't conflate stalking with observation. These are not the same. You can observe, but you cannot intimidate.
- themafia 6mo agoWould you mind if I parked near your house, such that every morning, when you drove past, I could follow you. To work, to the store, to the gym, you know, wherever. Then on the way home I'll park where I left off. If anyone asks me I'll them everything I know about you. It's "public" information after all.
- otterley 6mo agoShould I be concerned that you're stalking me, or that you know this information? The former is illegal, the latter is not.
- themafia 6mo agoFlock can alert when any specific car drives by. No warrant is required to use this feature. So, I won't follow you, but when you _do_ leave, I'm going to call some people to let them know that happened. Still cool?
- otterley 6mo agoEat your heart out. It's also a completely legitimate law enforcement technique.
- lucaspm98 6mo agoHaving this surveillance done by human beings rate limits the process to, in theory, focus it on actual criminals. Requiring warrants for the more invasive and persistent techniques adds another layer of accountability.
- ianpenney 6mo agoObligatory reference to PIPEDA and GDPR. Edit: not a low effort comment. This is something you should all read and demand the same of. I consternated on how not to call your regime moronic. It _is_ moronic that you don’t have these basic protections and we keep having to listen to you all whine about that.
- freakynit 6mo agoWe are heading towards the exact future shown in the show "Person of Interest".
- reboot81 6mo agoSo with 100k cameras crime is down how much?
- casey2 6mo agoStopping crime is a horrible business model. Committing it on the other hand...
- contagiousflow 6mo ago> Stopping crime is a horrible business model You've obviously not read the 13th amendment...
- stopachka 6mo agoI am surprised how overwhelmingly negative the comments are here. I would have expected at least a few voices defending Flock. I'll step in and add a voice. Ultimately, Flock is solving a real problem with crime. This is why police departments when them. Stopping Flock doesn't address the need that got police departments to use them. If you want to "stop flock", you need to address that need better.
- ryanjshaw 6mo agoI am not American, but in my extremely dangerous country we have many privately-operated cameras and I don’t know a single person who is against them. We also have strict privacy laws. So I was disappointed by what felt like very weak arguments in the article. Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused. The solution is to fix the abuse problem. I’d like to hear stronger arguments against these devices, so that I’m better informed locally.
- whilenot-dev 6mo ago> Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused. This isn't your life pro tip to get you some additional 20% discount on the next McDonald's order, or some ethical kind of abuse that gets you your needed treatment, because the healthcare system is just too nonexistent to care, though. Any criticism against the use of surveillance technology needs to resort to the rhetoric of COULD, because any other choice of words would put the final nail in any surveillance companies' coffin, with evidence from either whistleblowers or circumvented security issues. It's certainly hard to look behind the curtains - fair, but in a world where the top companies are selling advertisements by accumulating and correlating large-scale tracking information from every person on earth, regardless whether they're users of the products or not, it should be much harder to shrug off such a possibility as dystopian nonsense than to see it as the fucked up reality (circumvention of fundamental rights included) that it is.
- latexr 6mo ago> The solution is to fix the abuse problem. No, the solution is to fix the societal issues leading people to resort to crime. Surveillance cameras are not a solution, they are a band-aid placed several steps away from the wound.
- fffernan 6mo agoLive in a neighborhood that privately installed cameras. The city also installed cameras. Before the camera's cars used to come and raid houses and worker's trucks. It was quite common. The neighborhood has statistics and tracks how many stolen cars / plates drove through the neighborhood. All crime statistics dropped, police show up and arrest people. Saying its an illusion of safety is bullshit. It's all fake until you're a victim of a crime. We need our own way to fight back against gangs, etc. I'd rather have more cameras and less police. Also lets get some drones as well, they work fantastic in SF. The city owns the data its not getting sold. It gets erased unless a crime is reported.
- mark124mj 6mo ago[dead]
- self_awareness 6mo agoI understand the privacy argument. There are a few questions though: 1) Suppose there will be another shooting. Don't you want to know what exactly has happened before you go to the protest? Suppose your child will be hurt. Wouldn't you do anything to capture the culprit? How exactly would you feel if the police would tell you that they couldn't get the video with culprits face, because watching it would be a violation of someone's privacy? 2) Everyone has a camera in their pocket. Someone is filming all the time. Police can seize this video. Isn't that a privacy risk? Should we ban cameras in smartphones? 3) Should we even be private in the public? Doesn't privacy in public spaces encourage crime? I will die on a battle to keep the privacy in my home, but in public? I personally prefer to be safe, than private, in public. 4) What about private cameras near homes filming 24/7? Are those risks for privacy? 5) People in power will always be corrupt, have bad intentions, will use public goods for personal gain. Should we disregard broader benefits because there will be isolated cases where those benefits will be exploited? Happy downvoting.
- hmry 6mo ago1) If someone killed my child, I would probably want to kill them back. And yet we don't consider that sufficient reason to make revenge killing legal. The wishes of the victims need to be weighed against the cost it imposes on everyone else, including those who are innocent. The cost of violating everyone's right to privacy, the social impacts of mass surveillance, and the risk of that data being abused. 2) > Isn't that a privacy risk? Yes, it is! > Should we ban cameras in smartphones? No? How about making it difficult for the police to seize everyone's videos without a good reason? We already do that for phone videos, it's called warrants. But Flock doesn't. They just ask cops to enter any arbitrary "reason" text into a HTML textbox and instantly get access to everyone's videos. And if the people explicitly said they don't want those specific cops to have access, like many people decided about ICE? Well, just ask the next county over and use their system, it's not checked in any way.
- self_awareness 6mo ago[flagged]
- hariseldom 6mo agoa missed opportunity, going with StopFlock instead of FlockOff dot com
- Lio 6mo agoThe best way to block Flock is probably to find a way to track billionaire celebs like Taylor Swift and Elon Musk. If they were able to successfully change laws so they can fly anonymously they can probably change laws on cameras in public places, at least for them anyway. Privacy for the special people. https://gizmodo.com/taylor-swift-and-elon-can-finally-fly-private-without-being-tracked-thanks-to-new-faa-rule-2000582887 https://gizmodo.com/taylor-swift-and-elon-can-finally-fly-pr...
- burnt-resistor 6mo agoIt's taxpayer-funded dragnet-warrantless surveillance, data harvesting, and stalking. And it is local elected officials' deliberate voluntary or bribed choice to invite Big Mommy into the lives of their constituents and people passing through. The anti-privacy doomers don't get to force their invasive anti-values on everyone else who wants respect for and to preserve their right to not be autonomously surveilled and monitored every single second when not in a business or organization premises.
- jimnotgym 6mo agoEvery time I see Flock mentioned, it makes me think it will be about the Linux lock file tool Flock, and I wonder why people want to stop it
- solaarphunk 6mo agoCounterpoint: vehicle related crime is way down in SF. Which is great.
- LurkandComment 6mo agoWhat might be more productive is to suggest legal ways law enforcement can prevent and enforce the problems this was designed to stop. It will help you see where the laws are limited, what needs to be updated so you can balance the risk of privacy vs. the need to enforce laws (or the need for new laws all together). Right now we're osilcating between gaps criminals exploit and infringing on fundemental privacy rights.
- josefritzishere 6mo agoFlock should be illegal. Full stop. These people should be in prison.
- 0ldblu3 6mo agoLawmakers won't care until it is them and their kids that are being tracked by "hackers". Flock API's are poorly protected and the individual cameras are hackable as shown by Benn Jordan in multiple YouTube videos.
- enaaem 6mo agoBtw, flock employees have been caught watching kids gymnastics class and pools. https://substack.com/home/post/p-193593234 https://substack.com/home/post/p-193593234 Why does the VP of strategic relations need to watch the kids gymnastics class?
- rolph 6mo ago[flagged]
- d3rockk 6mo agoThat is absolutely terrifying.
- rdevilla 6mo agoIt's for their, and your, own safety.
- bko 6mo agoI think the answer is better technology, not less of it. This stuff is more easily available in rudimentary systems. Consider the model of recording everything and just dumping tapes somewhere. Much harder to monitor abuse than a well designed system with an audit log. Better yet, have computers process the data and only expose what's absolutely necessary. Technology lets you do that. But I want to push back against this idea that we have anything resembling a police or surveillance state. Nothing will dispel this myth more than an experience reporting a crime to police. Think about thefts in drug stores. They have security guards, cameras, security devices, etc, but every day the same group of people walk in and walk out with stolen goods. Everyone knows who they are, but police do absolutely nothing to stop them, because there is no political will. So the solution is to put deodorant behind lock and key and close down stores in high crime areas. So besides these one off creepy stories of people abusing the system, this stuff amounts to nothing. I want to use technology more and perhaps our murder clearance rate can stop going down. https://www.murderdata.org/2021/10/homicide-clearance-in-united-states.html https://www.murderdata.org/2021/10/homicide-clearance-in-uni...
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- czhu12 6mo agoThis movement reminds me of the "protecting democracy" message that was run on the national stage that pailed against the backdrop of rising inflation. Privacy is important just as democracy is important, but crime and lawlessness feel more immediate and will always take center stage. Any message to try to address the spread of flock and flock-like business models have to address what replaces it. If the only choice people are given is either having flock, or car break-ins, then I think we can probably guess what people would choose. SFPD at least, has credited flock and flock-like tech for why property crime has dropped so much in recent years.
- tbojanin 6mo agoAs much as I dislike flock. There's definitely a case to be made for the business model where first responder companies can generate huge amounts of taxpayer funded ARR in "sanctuary cities" due to criminals never getting actually serving sentences. If criminals are stuck in the: "Commit crime -> brief retention period -> activist judge lets you go" loop, then you can definitely build a business model that just capitalizes on the fact that there's no consequences to committing a crime, and local/state governments have to waste copious amount of money due to the incredibly inflated demand of first responder services.
- duped 6mo agoTwo points. First: that's not what a "sanctuary city" is. That term specifically refers to cities that don't let their local law enforcement and courts assist ICE/CBP. The idea is that local crimes happen to everyone regardless of immigration status and we don't want a situation where undocumented people live lawlessly because they can't talk to police or court officers without fear of deportation. Second: there's no "activist judge lets you go" loop. In practice judges are pretty tightly constrained by the law when it comes to pretrial detention. However, there _is_ a "cops refuse to do their job out of protest" loop. And also: none of this is a technical problem! It's all political/social dynamics and surveillance doesn't affect it at all.
- tonymet 6mo agoDo you think the city councils who declare “sanctuary city” status turn around and tell the DAs to be tough on those same individuals? They go hand in hand.
- duped 6mo agoI think you have a very warped understanding of municipal government, policy, and how it relates to law enforcement. Because nowhere in the US that I'm aware of has a city council that can "tell the DA" anything.
- 6mo ago
- ccorcos 6mo agoIts worth checking out a recent interview with the Flock CEO on Cheeky Pint (Stripe's podcast with John Collison) [1] As much as I fear the Orwellian future this could turn into, I think its important to recognize that the burden of preventing that is on lawmakers, not companies. He explains in the interview that he would love for laws to be passed to create tighter controls over how these systems are used. The problem is that police departments don't want it! Perhaps they can elect to do it themselves, but then they expose themselves to competitors who have "more powerful features". Something like 70% of homocides go unresolved! I think its cool that Flock is trying to help police departments fight crime. But it's time to yell at your lawmakers. Don't hate the player, hate the game! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYm2nXFDaB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYm2nXFDaB0