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Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

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131–140 of 354 posts

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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.

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.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

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> Assuming they have access to terabytes of regional video surveillance but don't have their own compute besides what the LLM will buy for them

Amazing how you can move the goalposts to make things impossible, isn't it? Where in the world did "without compute" come from? Are they not even allowed a decent desktop computer?

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#133
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally legal. The operating theory of all of these cameras is that anything happening in public sight is by its nature not private. The federal government is dumping millions and millions of dollars into grant programs for municipalities to buy it… It’s a giant federal surveillance program disguised as decisions made by individual police departments. It’s hilarious and depressing to contrast the HN community reactio…

You're mistaken if you think the community is still the same percentage of humans.

That’s a fair point that I didn’t consider, thank you.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#134
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why wouldn't codex or claude just reach for whatever FOSS https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr

[flagged]

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.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you willing to potentially be prosecuted to make a point that will ultimately come down to, "The cameras you destroyed are replaced with newly purchased units"? The way to beat this isn't vandalism, it's getting them banned from every municipality and county in the country, while fighting at state levels for more bans. It's also silly talk from kids online, just like "Don't vote, burn your local Wal-Mart" is only…

You get to sacrifice your life one or zero times in your life. Surely there are some terminally ill people who would do it?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect most terminally ill people want to spend time with the people they love, not breaking cameras and working their way through the legal system.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#136
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally legal. The operating theory of all of these cameras is that anything happening in public sight is by its nature not private. The federal government is dumping millions and millions of dollars into grant programs for municipalities to buy it… It’s a giant federal surveillance program disguised as decisions made by individual police departments. It’s hilarious and depressing to contrast the HN community reactio…

What meh response? There has been a continued and very vocal response against flock here.

If you pointed out any of the many problematic aspects of Snowden in those days, you’d be shouted down and voted into oblivion immediately.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

[flagged]

[dead]

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine representatives who did what voters actually wanted. There's probably a name for that. Representative democracy or something. As opposed to corporate representation.

This is why gerrymandering should be unconstitutional, and why corporations should have their rights explicitly curtailed: they're not citizens or the people.

I'm really unconvinced gerrymandering is the issue here.

It's not like Red cities have flock cameras and Blue cities don't.

It's really just that the Fairness Doctrine [1] needed to apply to more than radio. If you can constantly just repeat your point and then deny an opposition time then of course you'll get your point through.

Although maybe if super-pacs got outlawed then the Equal-time rule [2] would suffice.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#139
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last 20 years has burned privacy into the ground for a large part of the population.

[flagged]

There's this insidious tendency among HNers to make this argument and ones like it.

Yeah, if you live in a tiny medieval village or a small town in the middle of nowhere in 1980 there was little "privacy" but Jeffrey Dahmer was fucking dudes (back when that wasn't ok) and eating people in his apartment for years before anyone caught on. In more suburban settings there truly was privacy to a large practical extent.

Furthermore, these argument lie through their teeth to portray privacy from those who you mostly voluntarily associate, vs privacy from government systems that can seek you out, have power over you and can fairly unilaterally screw you with little recourse and you cannot choose not to associate with.

Having people not associate with you in 1980, or 1280, because you did something sly or immoral is fundamentally different from being combed over by the government because you hit some unknowable proprietary criteria that triggered them to go over you with a fine tooth comb.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#140
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must live in a different New York City than the one I visited. I had the safety calibration of Tallinn, Estonia and Dubai, UAE. The subway was extremely hostile. People were regularly drugged out of their mind. I saw one guy try to drink a Coca Cola upside down and spilled it all in the bus. Another crazy chased my limited mobility Estonian friend who wanted to visit nyc alongside me when she went alone for groce…

You saw someone try to drink a soda upside down and spill it? We are going to need more than a Flock cam to stop that heinous act, perhaps a Flock robot arm that could grab the criminals arm and turn it right side up, or just restrain them while the authorities are on the way.

I saw a tall man on L train stomping aggressively through the car and yelling bloody murder that he is gonna "stab the next mf I see", while attempting to swing punches at random people. The whole train ended up getting evacuated, and the train line got delayed. That was last winter. Between then and now, I saw people threatening others on the subway multiple times.

The most recent incident was a few weeks ago on Q train, where a seated man was screaming at the woman across from him (who was trying to do her best to ignore him), how he was gonna kill her and "the rest of her people" (whatever that means).

But please tell me how stuff like this never happens.

And I am not even a subway hater overall, I take it daily, and it is my preferred method of transportation. And no, I am not taking subway into deep and shady parts of bronx or brooklyn, as heavy majority of my rides are contained between Dekalb/Jay St Metrotech (aka dt brooklyn) and midtown.

It just sounds like crazy talk to me, when someone claims that the safety cams in subway cars are not, at least, somewhat helpful. At least newer A/C train cars have those cams now, and, I hope, it will lead to prosecution of serial subway harassers.

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