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Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

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Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#31

Post by miyoji »

asdff wrote: post #20
vel0city wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just reads to me like "won't someone please stop me from grinding up all these babies? If only someone would pass a law preventing me from doing these horrible things I keep doing..." Like, you know you can just stop doing bad things, right? You shouldn't need a government telling you that maybe you shouldn't do bad things. Its as if he's saying he has no free will or executive action being the CEO of Flock, he…

This is in fact what is being said. Executives really don’t have free will. They are slaves to capital all the same. Every move is in light of furthering the interests of capital and not actual people or humanity. Hence no meaningful efforts on things like global emissions or wealth inequality. Capital’s incentives are in opposition to that.

> Executives really don’t have free will.

This is pure bullshit, an accountability dodge. Executives don't have to accept the job. Executives don't have to stay in the job when they find out they have to compromise their ethics. These are not people who are forced to steal bread to eat, they're highly compensated elites who have been given everything by society and they choose to do evil in exchange for the high compensation.

Capital doesn't force management to do a single thing they don't wish in their hearts to do.

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#32

Post by overgard »

scrapcode wrote: post #21

I am absolutely biased, but there is a lot of attempt to shift or at least share the blame here and not a lot of accountability. Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters. We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes. The obvious here being that even if this was the exact p…

The way I see it their fundamental business model is not something we should tolerate. This is basically just stalking with a lot of money put behind it and barely any legal accountability. This is just not a thing we should tolerate in a free society.

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#33

Post by Cider9986 »

There's a map of ALPRs based on OpenStreetMap so you can see ones near you:

https://maps.deflock.org/

There's a lot more than just Flock, Flock is just one of thousands of terrible companies creating mass spying on innocent people. And there's also other ALPR companies like Axon and Motorola.

Flock may be worse than those because of the AI features and large databases, but other companies making surveillance tech are not avoiding the AI features because of moral reasons.

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#34

Post by c22 »

sterlind wrote: post #17

seems like: - cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database. - Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it. - cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him. thoughts: - as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil,…

You misunderstand Brazil--the system is the cause.

People can be relied upon to make mistakes. Any system that does not account for this fact and allows mistakes to "accelerate" is fundamentally flawed and requires redesign.

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#36

Post by dylan604 »

"Inevitably what happens is, let’s take the rental car example: A car is reported stolen by the rental car agency."

I've heard stories of rental car companies being very aggressive in reporting a car stolen. It sounds like Flock is having to do a lot of work to handle reports made by rental car companies specifically. This leaves me wondering how aggressive rental companies are in reporting back to the department they made the stolen report notifying the car had been found. I'm guessing not very.

These rental companies need to be held responsible for their lackadaisical use of stolen car reports. It is not the police's responsibility for what is essentially a contract dispute. If I allow someone to borrow my car, the police will not consider this a stolen car situation even if they said they would bring it back the next day. This is no different than a car not being returned to the rental company, so why are the police willing to be involved?

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#37

Post by vel0city »

f154hfds wrote: post #18
vel0city wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just reads to me like "won't someone please stop me from grinding up all these babies? If only someone would pass a law preventing me from doing these horrible things I keep doing..." Like, you know you can just stop doing bad things, right? You shouldn't need a government telling you that maybe you shouldn't do bad things. Its as if he's saying he has no free will or executive action being the CEO of Flock, he…

I agree with you of course, people should be ethical. But if every human exists on a spectrum of evil good, and we can't change this, then regulation/law serves a critical function. Proper legislation should at least create an effective floor for what's possible to profit off of. Otherwise we're pretty much at the mercy of the least scrupulous capitalist - and let me tell you, they will always exist. For AI the argum…

I agree, we do need regulations on this. We do need to also hold our elected representatives accountable. They're literally asleep (or in the alzheimer's ward) while on the job. And we also need to hold our police and other organizations who are actively abusing these tools that are already deployed. But we should also be holding the groups building these tools accountable for what their tools are doing, especially since its pretty obvious these kinds of abuses and failures would be extremely common.

The thing is, bank robbers and murders aren't the ones going on podcasts suggesting "gosh you know maybe I wouldn't be doing these things if there was some kind of regulation preventing me from robbing banks and stabbing people"

Its like a gun store owner acting all sad about how he sold a gun to an obviously deranged person who ended up murdering some people. You know you could have just not sold him the gun, right?

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#39

Post by jakeydus »

xoa wrote: post #29

There's a lot going on in this story and interview, but I'd like to narrow in on one aspect I consider pretty core, and that I'm pretty disappointed Joel didn't push back on: > Garrett:[...] To individuals that are promoting breaking the law, I just find that confusing. We’re a company that, by and large, by design from our founding, was that people shouldn’t break the law. I don’t know why that’s controversial, that…

"I don't fear surveillance because I don't break the law!" is the rallying cry of the current privileged class. Laws change.

This was such a weak interview, I recognize this is a car podcast and Joel's not an investigative journalist but the lack of pushback was so disappointing.

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#40

Post by general1465 »

scrapcode wrote: post #23
sterlind wrote: post #17

seems like: - cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database. - Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it. - cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him. thoughts: - as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil,…

> as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. 34DTM != 34DTM10

But 34DTM* == 34DTM10 which is exactly what Flock did.
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