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Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

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Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#111

Post by shunia_huang »

nikkwong wrote: post #57
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent 3 years in Korea, and that's probably where I will go back to retire after I exit. Crime there is extremely low - partially because of the cameras, but mainly because they're on top of it. They're able to spend time on every criminal, which deters anyone from breaking the law. Contrary to SF, where I've called the police and provided evidence for an open and shut case, and the cops shrugged their shoulders. F…

I used to live in china, which is by all means the dystopian surveillance state that we're all afraid that this could lead to. Don't misinterpret this as an advocation for that type of living; but it's simply interesting to note that when you ask any chinese if they would like to go back to the world of 30 years ago in terms of surveillance, essentially 100% of them will say no; they like it the way things are and no…

It's more complicated in China not just because of people want a more safer environment, but also because of the culture and the social formation built by history.

Chinese were taught to grow in honesty and integrity explicitly for thousand years and it's becoming common consensus when more and more people are educated. When the bar raises and the gov is not given more freedom to the people, it's just nature to let the surveillance cameras grow to each and every inch of the land.

Me personally would chose safety over privacy though.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#112

Post by pibaker »

urams wrote: post #59
pclowes wrote: post #45

People always want high trust societies. They are incredibly hard to create and incredibly easy to destroy. However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it. Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.

> However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. This is directly refuted by Singapore, Japan, arguably the UK, and others. Singapore is very interesting to visit. Externally there's somewhat of a narrative of a harsh police state but when I visited I almost never saw a single police officer and they don't have particularly many police officers on a per capita basis (170/100k vs 440/100k in NY…

Japan is not a surveillance society.

UK is not a high trust society. If anything the most trusting British people are likely found in places with the least surveillance.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#113

Post by [deleted] »

vuurmot wrote: post #83
urams wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Singapore, policing does not have the dystopian surveillance thing attached to it, because a large number of police are civilian conscripts. I would not have guessed in a million years that someone would argue that country's surveillance doesn't have a dystopian vibe because the country conscripts people into service.

fyi Finland has the same conscription rates, I don't see them being criticized for conscription? Maybe they are too white, or maybe people who injected too much rugged individualism into their veins have rotted views of society A system that has brought security and cohesion, and thus wealth, is accused of being dystopic

[deleted]

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#114

Post by paol »

janalsncm wrote: post #108
thaumaturgy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a glaring lie of omission when Singapore is cited as a "safe society" in a surveillance context without also mentioning that those same surveillance systems are used to aggressively suppress political dissent ( https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou... ). Super safe society, unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it. Then, not so safe for you. So I guess the question…

There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government. For most people in most places, police are ineffective and therefore the first is orders of magnitude more of a problem. For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unt…

How meaningful is that in a society where political dissidence is suppressed?

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#115

Post by pibaker »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #72
daymanstep wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society. Hell, even a single serial killer on the loose will make a lot of people too afraid to walk alone at night. One or two burglars can be responsible for 50% of the burglaries in a town. And so in and so forth. The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if…

The thing is I think if you give people the choice between a 0.001% chance of getting murdered on the street or a 100% chance of being surveilled 24/7 you will find that people will take their chances with the murderers

0.001% chance of being murdered is 1 in 100000 which is about the murder rate of the UK. That does not seem to stop the UK from wanting more surveillance.

The problem with murder rate is it doesn't matter what the actual numbers are. Just bombard people with bad news 24/7 and they will believe the sky is falling and murderous mobs are roaming the streets.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#116

Post by jjav »

janalsncm wrote: post #108
thaumaturgy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a glaring lie of omission when Singapore is cited as a "safe society" in a surveillance context without also mentioning that those same surveillance systems are used to aggressively suppress political dissent ( https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou... ). Super safe society, unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it. Then, not so safe for you. So I guess the question…

There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government. For most people in most places, police are ineffective and therefore the first is orders of magnitude more of a problem. For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unt…

> There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government.

#1 is annoying but has many solutions. You can call the cops, you can defend yourself, you can sue in the courts.

#2 is the most terrifying one since there is absolutely nothing you can do.

Thus any society needs to do the utmost to prevent abuse #2 above all else.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#117

Post by walrus01 »

infinite_spin wrote: post #106
walrus01 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that but I would also be very skeptical that whatever free standing poles they're erecting are fully compliant with TIA/EIA 222H (or engineer stamp approved drawing for each unique installation location, which will vary with local climate of snow/ice and wind loading), which is the engineering standard for self supporting tubular steel monopoles that have antenna, camera, solar panel appurtenances attached t…

They began strapping them to existing light poles here. I took a photo of one and it was gone a few days later. I didn't report it, it just vanished, which I noticed the next time I went for a walk. I want to know why they decided to put one up on my street, it feels like an intrusion.

Existing light poles are designed generally for very specific wind loading of only the lamp fixture on their ends, they're built to a very low cost spec to be cranked out in bulk. And to be a generally round or octagonal or whatever cross section that lets the wind flow around it in a worst-case 90 to 120 mph storm without any extra square or rectangular junk hanging off the side.

Adding appurtenances to one changes their wind loading and reliability. The engineers who signed off on some light pole designs might be unhappy to learn that multiple square feet of wind loading are being added after the fact.

The reason I know this is that in the telecom industry some (less experienced) people periodically try to use COTS light poles for some design that will hold just a few very small light duty sector antennas, or one or two 30cm size PTP microwave antennas in addition to the lamp fixture, as a "Hey I have this great idea to save some money" concept, and learn the hard way that the poles aren't rated or designed for it.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#118

Post by rcxdude »

nikkwong wrote: post #50

Even with all this said, surveillance like this is certainly going to be one of the best ways to catch criminals and reduce crime over the long term. I hope the misgivings that we have around Flock won't close the door to us ever using this type of technology, in some way, in the future.

Is it? In the UK we have a huge density of CCTV cameras and often you can barely get the police to write a crime report, let alone look at the CCTV. It doesn't really seem like the bottleneck.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#119

Post by blitzar »

wrs wrote: post #11
elictronic wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Company directly lies to governing body of city. Is found out the next day. Loses contract. Attacks city online afterwards. This isn’t about surveillance states, it’s about companies run by idiots.

This just sounds like the standard playbook for this crowd (by which wide brush I mean authoritarians and their enablers). They really hate being called on their lies, and their immediate response is to attack with whatever comes to hand (press release, xeet, the DoJ…depends on the person).

> this crowd

These companies are tech bros - they are selling to the authoritarians and they are increasingly their enablers, funders and biggest sycophants.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#120

Post by KaiserPro »

pibaker wrote: post #112
urams wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. This is directly refuted by Singapore, Japan, arguably the UK, and others. Singapore is very interesting to visit. Externally there's somewhat of a narrative of a harsh police state but when I visited I almost never saw a single police officer and they don't have particularly many police officers on a per capita basis (170/100k vs 440/100k in NY…

Japan is not a surveillance society. UK is not a high trust society. If anything the most trusting British people are likely found in places with the least surveillance.

> UK is not a high trust society.

sorry but data and experience does not bear that out. Denending on which source you look at, the Uk is a "high trust" society.

Now, your assertion about surveillance, sounds true but kinda rings a bit false.

The places where there are less CCTV cameras tend to be rural areas, and let me tell you, they do not trust anyone they don't know (I used to live in rural england) why? because there is no chance that the police will help you, unless you're being threatened.

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