Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flock CEO's Address Spread Online as Surveillance Backlash Explodes

gadgetreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 96 posts

Re: Flock CEO's Address Spread Online as Surveillance Backlash Explodes

#11

Post by cucumber3732842 »

mullingitover wrote: post #6

I worry that Flock is going to take the fall, and some other bad actor with political connections (my money would be on Palantir) will just quietly pick up where they left off while everyone's patting themselves on the back for defeating Flock. The stuff Flock is doing is going to be standard AI-driven surveillance in the future, and unless the actual practices are made into political third rails and made into crimin…

>they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.

Or they'll be legalized piecemeal and you'll get sneered at by the useful idiots for opposing each incremental step based on principal.

Re: Flock CEO's Address Spread Online as Surveillance Backlash Explodes

#12

Post by spl757 »

elmer2 wrote: post #2

[flagged]

The CEO of a company that spies on people, and now detects signals from your phone to connect the car to a driver, got scared and had Google blur his house. That is the height of hypocrisy. His home address is also public information, available from the City Clerks office for free. People won't need to find the exact address, just look for the only blurred house on his street. It's all utterly ridiculous. Clearly the citizens of the USA do not want flock in their communities so the CEO of the company isn't going to be popular, but he could fix that by removing flock from the communities that ban it.

Re: Flock CEO's Address Spread Online as Surveillance Backlash Explodes

#14

Post by nazgulsenpai »

Our local governments are enabling Flock. Get involved in your local politics. Find out who made the decisions to put these cameras in the neighborhoods and hold them accountable. Until that happens they will just find another vendor if Flock folds. Just like Flock will find a new CEO if theirs is forced to resignation.

Re: Flock CEO's Address Spread Online as Surveillance Backlash Explodes

#15

Post by superxpro12 »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #11
mullingitover wrote: post #6

I worry that Flock is going to take the fall, and some other bad actor with political connections (my money would be on Palantir) will just quietly pick up where they left off while everyone's patting themselves on the back for defeating Flock. The stuff Flock is doing is going to be standard AI-driven surveillance in the future, and unless the actual practices are made into political third rails and made into crimin…

>they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night. Or they'll be legalized piecemeal and you'll get sneered at by the useful idiots for opposing each incremental step based on principal.

they'll find a particularly violent crime and use that as the strawman... "Oh you dont want this? well i guess you support violent immigrant mass murderers then!"

and then before you know it the state has implemented its mass surveillance apparatus across the entire country. And we though china's social credits were bad? just IMAGINE what those predatory tech bros are cookin up.

Re: Flock CEO's Address Spread Online as Surveillance Backlash Explodes

#16

Post by chinathrow »

nancyminusone wrote: post #9
mullingitover wrote: post #6

I worry that Flock is going to take the fall, and some other bad actor with political connections (my money would be on Palantir) will just quietly pick up where they left off while everyone's patting themselves on the back for defeating Flock. The stuff Flock is doing is going to be standard AI-driven surveillance in the future, and unless the actual practices are made into political third rails and made into crimin…

My money would be on Axon. They at least have a claim to the "hold police accountable" angle with bodycams and less-lethal weapons. Compared with Flock's "we'll watch you and what're you gonna do about it"

Fuck them both.

Re: Flock CEO's Address Spread Online as Surveillance Backlash Explodes

#17

Post by legitster »

I know this is an extremely hot take, but it's not the license plate reading service that bothers me.

A license plate is specifically a tracking number to identify a registered vehicle on a public road. The 4th Amendment gives you privacy inside of your car, but your car is not itself guaranteed privacy. Before Flock, police departments already had informally aggregated data from speed cameras, red light cameras, and toll booths. The distinction being that any evidence collected in such a way is purely circumstantial and still requires a warrant to investigate.

The big irony though of Flock plate readers is that because they're just tracking license plates, they're not actually that useful at solving meaningful crime. Realistically there are a small number of hit-and-runs that could be solved, and they can make certain investigations a bit shorter. And most of what we read about is officer directed stalking or harassment activities.

It's all of Flock's other advertised services that should really freak people out. The facial recognition, the audio scanners, the individual-level tracking databases - right now they're a fancy VIN lookup service. It's all the other stuff they're trying to sell departments on that are getting into really egregious 4th Amendment violations.

Re: Flock CEO's Address Spread Online as Surveillance Backlash Explodes

#19

Post by Computer0 »

whateveracct wrote: post #13
elmer2 wrote: post #2

[flagged]

CEOs aren't just people. They can have fun dealing with it :)

CEO's aren't people. When you pretend they are, you allow them to live normal lives where they seem deserving of the same social protections we all enjoy.

Re: Flock CEO's Address Spread Online as Surveillance Backlash Explodes

#20

Post by mullingitover »

legitster wrote: post #17

I know this is an extremely hot take, but it's not the license plate reading service that bothers me. A license plate is specifically a tracking number to identify a registered vehicle on a public road. The 4th Amendment gives you privacy inside of your car , but your car is not itself guaranteed privacy. Before Flock, police departments already had informally aggregated data from speed cameras, red light cameras, an…

Recent WIRED[1] article goes in depth on this exact problem:

> Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for “any offense,” exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and “do a workup on the top three individuals.” The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software.

> A “workup,” in Flock’s terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department’s records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts.

This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi, and it's going to be a whack-a-mole game dealing with all the baby Flocks that spring up if Flock itself can be shut down.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/

Post reply on HN