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Because most of the American public is not as reflexively anti-Flock as HN would lead you to believe. People acting like cameras recording their activities in p

Because most of the American public is not as reflexively anti-Flock as HN would lead you to believe. People acting like cameras recording their activities in public is some sort of grave privacy violation are not the norm. Cameras recording tour activity in malls, and on public roads has been the case since the 90s. Flock became a lightning rod of attention due to ICE, but they don't actually represent any change from the status quo.

dw_arthur 3mo ago
A camera in 2026 is not the camera of 1996. Cameras today are connected to active and passive monitoring systems which are much more invasive to privacy. What will a camera be able to do in 2036?
- Manuel_D 3mo ago
  To the contrary, cameras have been able to automatically read license plates since the 70s, and the technology became cheaper and more widely deployed in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni... At the end of the day, a camera in public can only record images of people in public. That does not and never did require a warrant.
  - eightysixfour 3mo ago
    One of the things that is really interesting to me is when people don't update their opinions of some thing when the level of difficulty and cost associated with that thing change. A few decades ago, if a police officer wanted to find the whereabouts of some individual, they would have to do some serious leg work, even with ALPRs, potentially watch many hours of videos, etc. With Flock that can be reduced to a mere search query across many locales (maybe not even their locale!) with effectively no effort spent. When the cost changes so dramatically it effectively changes the balance of power and that is something we should, at the very least, deeply consider.
    - Manuel_D 3mo ago
      > A few decades ago, if a police officer wanted to find the whereabouts of some individual, they would have to do some serious leg work, even with ALPRs, potentially watch many hours of videos, etc. The whole point about ALPRs is that the license plate reading is automatic. Even during the 90s, all a police officer had to do was query a database.
      - eightysixfour 3mo ago
        In the US, up until the mid to late 2000s, the majority of ALPRs were mounted on the police cruisers. Even when they moved on to installing them in fixed locations, they had two major limitations: • There were few of them • The databases were managed by the jurisdiction To my exact point, by increasing the number of readers and SaaS-ifying the process to enable jurisdictions to opt-in to information sharing, you have meaningfully changed what the technology is capable of and how it can be used.
        Manuel_D 3mo ago
        Motorola built the first national ALPR database in the mid 2000s. Again, what Flock is doing is decades old. It doesn't even look like you dispute this fact.
        eightysixfour 3mo ago
        You keep ignoring my only point. > Again, what Flock is doing is decades old. It doesn't even look like you dispute this fact. Scale and level of effort involved matter. How many cameras were reporting to the Motorola database in 2000? 2010? Flock today? How easy was it to type in “white Chevrolet Tahoe at [intersection]” until you see the one you want, get its license plate and run through the rest of the database? Who was able to do that? How easy was it? The sum of many small changes can create a meaningfully different result that we need to evaluate different than the thing that came before.
        3mo ago
fc417fc802 3mo ago
> they don't actually represent any change from the status quo. Only in the sense that the frog has been boiled gradually. The mere presence of cameras in public spaces is not the inconsistency that you seem to think it is. A nationwide centralized aggregator is not even remotely the same thing as a privately owned corner store having a purely private video feed of the front door.
- Manuel_D 3mo ago
  How do you think ALPR cameras worked during the 90s? Do you think a technician had to go through each camera individually looking for license plates? The data was aggregated and indexed even during the 90s. Some of those databases were national. The same criticisms being levied at flock would also apply to the status quo 20+ years ago.
  - fc417fc802 3mo ago
    Again you are pointing out the similarities while conveniently ignoring the things that have changed. It has been a continuous gradual slide. The publicized flock examples make clear that the nature and scope of the queries that can be run against modern systems are far beyond what was possible in the 90s. The databases are also far larger. You are the person arguing that because you're allowed to pick up a pebble it follows that you are permitted to scoop up a handful in a bag thus by extension it's okay to grab a small bucket full thus it must logically follow that filling up the trunk of your car is acceptable therefore no one has any grounds to object to the dump truck and excavator that you've engaged to illegally mine gravel along the side of the road.
    - Manuel_D 3mo ago
      Where's the basis for the claim that Flock was the first nation-wide ALPR aggregator? The source mentions that Flock aggregated data on a national level, but doesn't say that it was the first to do so. In fact it doesn't really offer any tangible thing that differentiates this from the decades old systems that predate flock. It's more like trucks are have been mining gravel from this pit for decades, and the courts have repeatedly affirmed that it's legal to one gravel.
deaux 3mo ago
Can you find a dozen cases of cops using these to stalk people in the 90s? If not, that's a large change in the status quo, as that's what's been happening with Flock.

dw_arthur 3mo ago

A camera in 2026 is not the camera of 1996. Cameras today are connected to active and passive monitoring systems which are much more invasive to privacy. What will a camera be able to do in 2036?

Manuel_D 3mo ago
To the contrary, cameras have been able to automatically read license plates since the 70s, and the technology became cheaper and more widely deployed in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni... At the end of the day, a camera in public can only record images of people in public. That does not and never did require a warrant.
- eightysixfour 3mo ago
  One of the things that is really interesting to me is when people don't update their opinions of some thing when the level of difficulty and cost associated with that thing change. A few decades ago, if a police officer wanted to find the whereabouts of some individual, they would have to do some serious leg work, even with ALPRs, potentially watch many hours of videos, etc. With Flock that can be reduced to a mere search query across many locales (maybe not even their locale!) with effectively no effort spent. When the cost changes so dramatically it effectively changes the balance of power and that is something we should, at the very least, deeply consider.
  - Manuel_D 3mo ago
    > A few decades ago, if a police officer wanted to find the whereabouts of some individual, they would have to do some serious leg work, even with ALPRs, potentially watch many hours of videos, etc. The whole point about ALPRs is that the license plate reading is automatic. Even during the 90s, all a police officer had to do was query a database.
    - eightysixfour 3mo ago
      In the US, up until the mid to late 2000s, the majority of ALPRs were mounted on the police cruisers. Even when they moved on to installing them in fixed locations, they had two major limitations: • There were few of them • The databases were managed by the jurisdiction To my exact point, by increasing the number of readers and SaaS-ifying the process to enable jurisdictions to opt-in to information sharing, you have meaningfully changed what the technology is capable of and how it can be used.
      - Manuel_D 3mo ago
        Motorola built the first national ALPR database in the mid 2000s. Again, what Flock is doing is decades old. It doesn't even look like you dispute this fact.
        eightysixfour 3mo ago
        You keep ignoring my only point. > Again, what Flock is doing is decades old. It doesn't even look like you dispute this fact. Scale and level of effort involved matter. How many cameras were reporting to the Motorola database in 2000? 2010? Flock today? How easy was it to type in “white Chevrolet Tahoe at [intersection]” until you see the one you want, get its license plate and run through the rest of the database? Who was able to do that? How easy was it? The sum of many small changes can create a meaningfully different result that we need to evaluate different than the thing that came before.
        3mo ago

fc417fc802 3mo ago

> they don't actually represent any change from the status quo. Only in the sense that the frog has been boiled gradually. The mere presence of cameras in public spaces is not the inconsistency that you seem to think it is. A nationwide centralized aggregator is not even remotely the same thing as a privately owned corner store having a purely private video feed of the front door.

Manuel_D 3mo ago
How do you think ALPR cameras worked during the 90s? Do you think a technician had to go through each camera individually looking for license plates? The data was aggregated and indexed even during the 90s. Some of those databases were national. The same criticisms being levied at flock would also apply to the status quo 20+ years ago.
- fc417fc802 3mo ago
  Again you are pointing out the similarities while conveniently ignoring the things that have changed. It has been a continuous gradual slide. The publicized flock examples make clear that the nature and scope of the queries that can be run against modern systems are far beyond what was possible in the 90s. The databases are also far larger. You are the person arguing that because you're allowed to pick up a pebble it follows that you are permitted to scoop up a handful in a bag thus by extension it's okay to grab a small bucket full thus it must logically follow that filling up the trunk of your car is acceptable therefore no one has any grounds to object to the dump truck and excavator that you've engaged to illegally mine gravel along the side of the road.
  - Manuel_D 3mo ago
    Where's the basis for the claim that Flock was the first nation-wide ALPR aggregator? The source mentions that Flock aggregated data on a national level, but doesn't say that it was the first to do so. In fact it doesn't really offer any tangible thing that differentiates this from the decades old systems that predate flock. It's more like trucks are have been mining gravel from this pit for decades, and the courts have repeatedly affirmed that it's legal to one gravel.

deaux 3mo ago

Can you find a dozen cases of cops using these to stalk people in the 90s? If not, that's a large change in the status quo, as that's what's been happening with Flock.