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

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

#171

Post by tptacek »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #2

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 individua…

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.

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

#172

Post by assimpleaspossi »

sublinear wrote: post #116
deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #97

Can anybody find trustworthy stats that these actually reduce crime? All I see are occasional anecdotes about how they were used to find one person one time. Skeptical me seriously doubts this is an effective solution for crime. But maybe that's because this country has a history of being willing to do a million expensive and privacy violating things, and only if it's a punitive measure.

I don't have stats, but most police have made it pretty clear that they're used for investigations that would otherwise have very little to go on. I don't think anyone other than the manufacturers have made claims of cameras reducing crime. You can put all the AI bells and whistles on them, but they're still just cameras. They're a fallback option, not a dragnet. The police are generally reactive to reports of crime,…

You are absolutely correct but you won't get anywhere here.

I have relatives who are cops and lawyers and city councilmen. No cop is sitting in a back room somewhere tracking all the cars on every street trying to do, uh, whatever it is people here are claiming they are going to do to them.

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

#173

Post by assimpleaspossi »

afh1 wrote: post #117
crises-luff-6b wrote: post #72

There is no expectation of privacy in public. It's really that simple.

There may be no expectation of privacy in the sense someone may see you and take your picture. There is an expectation you are not constantly tracked everywhere you go by a nationwide surveillance apparatus, that your location is not constantly monitored, indexed and shared. Unless you expect to live in an Orwellian distopia.

And what happens to you? Has something happened to you? Or anyone you know who wasn't involved in something illegal?

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

#174

Post by kjkjadksj »

kodablah wrote: post #160
microgpt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flock doesn't automatically catch people who killed someone. Red light cameras do catch people who run red lights.

And people that don't run red lights and suffer selective enforcement and are used for arbitrary surveillance and so on and so on. Don't let your naive view of what you want these things and their handlers to do distract you from reality, regardless of the brand or intent of widely deployed cameras.

Traditional red light cameras take a still frame and are triggered only during a red light violation.

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

#175

Post by sublinear »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #172
sublinear wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have stats, but most police have made it pretty clear that they're used for investigations that would otherwise have very little to go on. I don't think anyone other than the manufacturers have made claims of cameras reducing crime. You can put all the AI bells and whistles on them, but they're still just cameras. They're a fallback option, not a dragnet. The police are generally reactive to reports of crime,…

You are absolutely correct but you won't get anywhere here. I have relatives who are cops and lawyers and city councilmen. No cop is sitting in a back room somewhere tracking all the cars on every street trying to do, uh, whatever it is people here are claiming they are going to do to them.

I also wonder what makes people think the cops are going to trust AI any more than anyone else. A mistake on bad information is even more dangerous for them and often makes national news.

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

#176

Post by Manuel_D »

jubilanti wrote: post #104
handoflixue wrote: post #102

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]

Automated License plate readers are a half century old at this point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...

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

#177

Post by arjie »

infecto wrote: post #169
arjie wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist. The original comment used this as the explanation for why there's low crime. Here's a reminder of the context we are conversing within. > > > > East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else. I think "extreme racism to outsiders" is detectable wi…

I think we’re talking past each other. I’m not claiming “Taiwan is extremely racist, therefore low crime.” I’m saying cohesive societies often have stronger in-group preferences and social expectations than Americans tend to recognize, and those coexist with being welcoming to many foreigners. Your experience and your relative’s experience are perfectly compatible with that. One or two positive anecdotes don’t tell u…

I understand what you're saying but it seems like a complete non-sequitur given the context of the conversation, which I'll reproduce here in threaded fashion in case it's not visible in your client.

> > > We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.

> > East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else. A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public. There's a whole category of videos on social media of Japanese furiously angry at Westerners acting like fools on their subways. They're not happy about it.

The claim is precisely what you're saying you're not claiming. So you must understand that I am having this conversation in that context. Though I suppose we can both interpose unrelated facts into the conversation and claim contextual irrelevance in the motte and bailey style. Here are a few I present for discussion:

2 + 2 = 4

The sky is blue

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

#178

Post by Manuel_D »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #76
llm_nerd wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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.

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.

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

#179

Post by malcolmgreaves »

jubilanti wrote: post #110
tough wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

Ok, so you don’t understand that ALPR is two commodity technologies: object detection and OCR.
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