5 ms·

Yeah, I'm not a fan of these things. If they were just ALPRs, I could probably give them a bit of slack -if they tightened up their security-, but all the other

Yeah, I'm not a fan of these things. If they were just ALPRs, I could probably give them a bit of slack -if they tightened up their security-, but all the other stuff they do, makes them pretty much untenable. However: > This makes AI powered cameras like Flock's distinct from traditional surveillance or traffic cams, which require someone to manually look over footage in order to find a specific vehicle or individual. Is a bit misleading. These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.

erikerikson 4mo ago
I think there's a limit to how misleading. There's a very important difference between "anyone could walk through my door and steal my stuff" and "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff".
- TheRealPomax 4mo ago
  But not so much between "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff" and "I left the door to my house open and then I put my stuff in the doorway." Flock cameras are roughly that secure.
  - lesuorac 4mo ago
    Isn't Flock more like a house sitter in the analogy though? "I gave the person keys to my house and then I trusted they wouldn't open bathroom doors while somebody was there". Like law enforcement is being given access to the systems, the door isn't "left open", a key was given to them.
cyanydeez 4mo ago
>These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information. Is a bit misleading itself, to do this at scale requires all those iffy data centers.
- xnx 4mo ago
  What's an iffy data center?
  - goatlover 4mo ago
    One that gets built over the public's objection because just maybe the company building it will create an AGI that will take everyone's jobs?
llm_nerd 4mo ago
What makes Flock bizarre is that it's a private business, and this is precisely how police departments are getting around a lot of traditional gates and checks on this sort of thing. Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc. Some private business doing the same, and then letting the same police use it at will as a paying customer -- yay, all of the invasive monitoring with none of the oversight.
- TheRealPomax 4mo ago
  That's actually the one thing that does make sense: police has always wanted to be able to do this, but they legally can't. But they can reward a private company willing to do it for them, so that they can "ask for the data" without ever breaking the law.
  - Manuel_D 4mo ago
    The police can, in fact, operate cameras in public spaces and they have done so for decades. ALPRs have been widely deployed since the 1990s. I'm frequent surprised by how many people think that privacy laws block the police from recording their activities in public. For whatever reason, Flock is getting a lot of press, but this is hardly a new field.
    - KennyBlanken 4mo ago
      ANPR has not been widely deployed since the 1990's in the US and the US court system has consistently held that the degree to which a technology automates monitoring, searching, etc is very relevant to whether it violates people's reasonable expectations of privacy for very obvious reasons.
      - Manuel_D 4mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni... > However, ANPR did not become widely used until new developments in cheaper and easier to use software were pioneered during the 1990s. The collection of ANPR data for future use (i.e., in solving then-unidentified crimes) was documented in the early 2000s.
maccard 4mo ago
What LLM can I get and feed hundreds of hours of video into that will give me the position of a specific vehicle alongside when that happened? An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.
- handoflixue 4mo ago
  If you were able to write one 20 years ago, I dare say an LLM could whip one up super-fast. Or just search the internet and tell you where to find one. One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"
  - jubilanti 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tough 4mo ago
      why wouldn't codex or claude just reach for whatever FOSS https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
      - jubilanti 4mo ago
        [flagged]
        microgpt 4mo ago
        Yes, an ALPR is basically just a glorified [thing that an ALPR does]
        SR2Z 4mo ago
        I honestly can't tell if this is ragebait or you believe this. My friend, if you have a database of license plates extracted from single images taken by multiple cameras, YOU ARE TRACKING UNIQUE VEHICLES ACROSS A REGION. Terabytes of data don't matter because you don't need to search terabytes, you need to search a few MB of text data. You don't even have to store the original video.
jubilanti 4mo ago
[flagged]
tptacek 4mo ago
That's interesting, because the ALPR part of Flock is what caused all the problems here; the rest of it, of characterizing vehicles with attributes beyond just plates, wasn't really problematic at all.
- KennyBlanken 4mo ago
  Characterizing vehicles based on stickers (which easily can indicate political leanings) is absolutely problematic. It's just not considered problematic by conservatives, given police in the US are overwhelmingly conservative.
  - tptacek 4mo ago
    Look, I agree that's problematic conceptually, but it's absolutely not what's happening. ALPRs don't select cars on spec, like, "this car looks out of place here". Nobody has time for that. They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents, like, "this vehicle has been present at the site of 5 previous package thefts". Here's another way to look at this. Municipalities are the primary operators of ALPR cameras. Any municipality that would scan bumper stickers looking for Trump opponents is not going to be receptive to any appeals for regulation. One problem with this whole debate is that people are coming to it with movie plot concerns rather than understanding what's actually happening with them. That wouldn't be a big deal if this was a slam dunk public policy case, but it isn't: there is broad bipartisan support for these devices. There are deeply problematic things happening just with license plate pings!
    - chaps 4mo ago
      They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents, like, "this vehicle has been present at the site of 5 previous package thefts". You're hand-waving a hell of a lot of things away and you expect that everyone knows what you're talking about. Please stop doing that. - Who is "They"? - Why do you say "nobody has time for that"? What is "that"? - Why are you dismissing genuine concerns through unhelpful language like, "coming to it with movie plot concerns". - Why wouldn't "that" be a big deal? What is "that"?! - What are the deeply problematic things? - "They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents" -- no they're not. Just looking at Bloomingdale's audit logs, there are 13k examples of searches done for the simple reason, "suspicious". - Why does municipalities being the primary operators matter? Asking from a place of genuine confusion by how you think about these things.
SilverElfin 4mo ago
Personally I don’t mind having Flock cameras or other surveillance to make it easier to stop crime. Right now in many cities there is simply no consequence for various crimes - especially property crimes. But I want these tools to be protected - requiring imminent danger or warrants for access. I don’t think the answer is to get rid of them entirely.

erikerikson 4mo ago

I think there's a limit to how misleading. There's a very important difference between "anyone could walk through my door and steal my stuff" and "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff".

TheRealPomax 4mo ago
But not so much between "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff" and "I left the door to my house open and then I put my stuff in the doorway." Flock cameras are roughly that secure.
- lesuorac 4mo ago
  Isn't Flock more like a house sitter in the analogy though? "I gave the person keys to my house and then I trusted they wouldn't open bathroom doors while somebody was there". Like law enforcement is being given access to the systems, the door isn't "left open", a key was given to them.

cyanydeez 4mo ago

>These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information. Is a bit misleading itself, to do this at scale requires all those iffy data centers.

xnx 4mo ago
What's an iffy data center?
- goatlover 4mo ago
  One that gets built over the public's objection because just maybe the company building it will create an AGI that will take everyone's jobs?

llm_nerd 4mo ago

What makes Flock bizarre is that it's a private business, and this is precisely how police departments are getting around a lot of traditional gates and checks on this sort of thing. Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc. Some private business doing the same, and then letting the same police use it at will as a paying customer -- yay, all of the invasive monitoring with none of the oversight.

TheRealPomax 4mo ago
That's actually the one thing that does make sense: police has always wanted to be able to do this, but they legally can't. But they can reward a private company willing to do it for them, so that they can "ask for the data" without ever breaking the law.
- Manuel_D 4mo ago
  The police can, in fact, operate cameras in public spaces and they have done so for decades. ALPRs have been widely deployed since the 1990s. I'm frequent surprised by how many people think that privacy laws block the police from recording their activities in public. For whatever reason, Flock is getting a lot of press, but this is hardly a new field.
  - KennyBlanken 4mo ago
    ANPR has not been widely deployed since the 1990's in the US and the US court system has consistently held that the degree to which a technology automates monitoring, searching, etc is very relevant to whether it violates people's reasonable expectations of privacy for very obvious reasons.
    - Manuel_D 4mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni... > However, ANPR did not become widely used until new developments in cheaper and easier to use software were pioneered during the 1990s. The collection of ANPR data for future use (i.e., in solving then-unidentified crimes) was documented in the early 2000s.

maccard 4mo ago

What LLM can I get and feed hundreds of hours of video into that will give me the position of a specific vehicle alongside when that happened? An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.

handoflixue 4mo ago
If you were able to write one 20 years ago, I dare say an LLM could whip one up super-fast. Or just search the internet and tell you where to find one. One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"
- jubilanti 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tough 4mo ago
    why wouldn't codex or claude just reach for whatever FOSS https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
    - jubilanti 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - microgpt 4mo ago
        Yes, an ALPR is basically just a glorified [thing that an ALPR does]
      - SR2Z 4mo ago
        I honestly can't tell if this is ragebait or you believe this. My friend, if you have a database of license plates extracted from single images taken by multiple cameras, YOU ARE TRACKING UNIQUE VEHICLES ACROSS A REGION. Terabytes of data don't matter because you don't need to search terabytes, you need to search a few MB of text data. You don't even have to store the original video.

jubilanti 4mo ago

[flagged]

tptacek 4mo ago

That's interesting, because the ALPR part of Flock is what caused all the problems here; the rest of it, of characterizing vehicles with attributes beyond just plates, wasn't really problematic at all.

KennyBlanken 4mo ago
Characterizing vehicles based on stickers (which easily can indicate political leanings) is absolutely problematic. It's just not considered problematic by conservatives, given police in the US are overwhelmingly conservative.
- tptacek 4mo ago
  Look, I agree that's problematic conceptually, but it's absolutely not what's happening. ALPRs don't select cars on spec, like, "this car looks out of place here". Nobody has time for that. They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents, like, "this vehicle has been present at the site of 5 previous package thefts". Here's another way to look at this. Municipalities are the primary operators of ALPR cameras. Any municipality that would scan bumper stickers looking for Trump opponents is not going to be receptive to any appeals for regulation. One problem with this whole debate is that people are coming to it with movie plot concerns rather than understanding what's actually happening with them. That wouldn't be a big deal if this was a slam dunk public policy case, but it isn't: there is broad bipartisan support for these devices. There are deeply problematic things happening just with license plate pings!
  - chaps 4mo ago
    They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents, like, "this vehicle has been present at the site of 5 previous package thefts". You're hand-waving a hell of a lot of things away and you expect that everyone knows what you're talking about. Please stop doing that. - Who is "They"? - Why do you say "nobody has time for that"? What is "that"? - Why are you dismissing genuine concerns through unhelpful language like, "coming to it with movie plot concerns". - Why wouldn't "that" be a big deal? What is "that"?! - What are the deeply problematic things? - "They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents" -- no they're not. Just looking at Bloomingdale's audit logs, there are 13k examples of searches done for the simple reason, "suspicious". - Why does municipalities being the primary operators matter? Asking from a place of genuine confusion by how you think about these things.

SilverElfin 4mo ago

Personally I don’t mind having Flock cameras or other surveillance to make it easier to stop crime. Right now in many cities there is simply no consequence for various crimes - especially property crimes. But I want these tools to be protected - requiring imminent danger or warrants for access. I don’t think the answer is to get rid of them entirely.