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

Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 566 posts

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#241

Post by kbos87 »

I hate that this has to be an all or nothing conversation. There is a path where technology can deliver benefits without significant harm to individual privacy.

San Francisco has turned the tide on smash and grab crime through license plate readers and drone response. New Hampshire requires law enforcement agencies to delete unflagged license plate data within three minutes of collection. These two conditions can exist at the same time, in the same place, if we don’t allow the narrative to be pulled toward either extreme. Unfortunately that’s very tough to accomplish in today’s political climate in the US.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#242

Post by titzer »

furyg3 wrote: post #46

It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution. Thankfully the supreme court seems to agree here in two ways: 1) Just because a third party (Google in Chatrie case but Flock here) collects the data and the government requests it from them, doesn't mean that that isn't a 'search' which requires a warrant ("obtaining someone's…

> In the Google case, users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information... but when the Police ask for that information it's a 'search' and requires a specific warrant.

Bigcorp has a tendency to treat "anonymized" data as if it were up for grabs. The moment they strip the obvious PII from a data stream, they consider it anonymized, and they can do whatever they want with it. They "value" your privacy--that anonymized data is gold. Of course, such data is such high value and they don't "sell it to third parties", so they technically uphold their pages-long EULA, should they ever be charged in court.

But the nature of a lot of high value information, like fine-grained location and telemetry data, just cannot be effectively anonymized. I mean, how do you think they get real-time traffic information? It's "anonymized" GPS location / speed data from Android phones. And it is from the location services layer, not from Google maps.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#244

Post by freeopinion »

It's interesting to me that most of the people who are motivated to vandalize Flock cameras seem to balk at vandalizing Ring cameras. Indeed, they may own and operate their own Ring cameras.

Most everyone can understand the utility of monitoring their own doorstep. They might even think it useful to start tracking the patterns of traffic on their doorstep. I expect that most people could not articulate the line between acceptable and unacceptable surveillance.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#245

Post by michael0church »

YCisVeryBad wrote: post #223
furyg3 wrote: post #46

It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution. Thankfully the supreme court seems to agree here in two ways: 1) Just because a third party (Google in Chatrie case but Flock here) collects the data and the government requests it from them, doesn't mean that that isn't a 'search' which requires a warrant ("obtaining someone's…

Flock is YC. This is being done by investors for ads. Somr govts are cutting deals, those that aren’t are banning them. Never trust HN articles or high karma accts

Checks. I didn’t believe it at first, because I’ve always considered YC, in spite of its flaws, to be politically astute.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#246

Post by ethbr1 »

ryandvm wrote: post #220
furyg3 wrote: post #46

It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution. Thankfully the supreme court seems to agree here in two ways: 1) Just because a third party (Google in Chatrie case but Flock here) collects the data and the government requests it from them, doesn't mean that that isn't a 'search' which requires a warrant ("obtaining someone's…

I could probably be convinced that some sort of panopticon license plate reader network could be a net positive for society IF it had the necessary and demonstrably infallible audit and oversight systems - especially with respect to the 4th amendment in the United States (i.e. search warrants). But honestly, law enforcement is the least of my concerns because the industrial surveillance complex has shown time and aga…

> To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth?

To me, this was always the armored gauntlet underneath the velvet glove of any private entity with strong technical locks, Apple included.

The best you can reliably say about any private entity is that they're treating their users well at the moment.

Ultimately, profit always trumps user alignment.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#248

Post by s_dev »

HNIsEvil2 wrote: post #196

Flock is YC. HN mods are complicit and are shaping the narrative here. PG, Garry Tan, Dan Gackle, Tom Howard, Aaron Epstein, Jared Friedman, and all YC staff are enemies of the people.

I agree YC funding Flock is bad but I don't think you're helping. You're making it seem like there is an orchestrated effort to discredit YC rather than articulating this is poor form on their part.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#249

Post by gyanchawdhary »

elil17 wrote: post #158
gyanchawdhary wrote: post #109

As a non american, can someone explain the Flock story from a US perspective (ideally a reasonably centrist one)? .. i keep seeing them in the news here on HN .. apparently ~178 results in the past month . and it seems to get a disproportionate amount of front page coverage

Here's my understanding (please someone correct me if I'm wrong). Flock sells license plate reading cameras. Lots of cities and states bought these and no one noticed. Then there were some expose pieces about how the data is routinely used by police to do things like track people's everyday whereabouts (which should require a warrant). There were also a variety of other issues: - They misidentified someone's license…

thanks a lot for taking the time to explain this man .. really appreciate it.
Post reply on HN