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Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

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Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#271

Post by conductr »

naz wrote: post #139

Tangential but why do articles about Flock never have (YC S17) in the title like articles about other YC companies?

To be less cynical, I think it would require editing to original submission. I also see why editing the “bad press” company submissions could have undesirable optics. So, maybe the mods just choose to be a bit more laissez faire than normal and lets the community self moderate the related posts. Probably within some reason in the comment section, but they allow us all to be quite critical in ways that could easily be considered against the HN guidelines and they’re not squashing it either. I think that is perhaps the best stance for them to take honestly.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#272

Post by Ajedi32 »

kbos87 wrote: post #241

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 exi…

Depends on how much you trust the government's ability to restrain itself once the capability for mass surveillance is out there and widely deployed.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#274

Post by YCHNPopcorn »

ghm2199 wrote: post #263

Perhaps its time that YC mentioned explicitly that if they are going to fund a company which holds specific PII data(i would include precise location history to start with) they would have to guarantee: 1. An erase-me feature if they gained over say some X unique/active users. 2. Disclose to their best legal abilities on warrants served in the countries that allow such disclosure. Allow for strong whistle blower prot…

[dead]

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#275

Post by skinfaxi »

jimmar wrote: post #253

The sad truth is that many citizens want a closely surveilled world. Flock delivers the product they want. Imagine a shooting took place in the downtown area of a major city next week that lacked cameras. Do you think people would praise that city's respect for their citizens' privacy? Or would people blame the city leaders for not keeping the citizens safe?

The former. Look at cities winding back shotspotter.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#276

Post by alexk307 »

freeopinion wrote: post #244

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 betwe…

Ring cameras don't record and index every single license plate that it sees and hand that data over directly to law enforcement. There's a huge difference between surveilling your own private property, and a massive network of ALPRs feeding data directly into government systems.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#277

Post by pintxo »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #257
pintxo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. There is a huge difference between my neighbors accidentally seeing me leaving my place, vs an anonymous person 7 months later, being able to statistically analyze when I leave my place in the morning, and when I return in the evening, even getting a list of the places I stayed over night on the days where I did not return in the evening. 2. see above 3. The downsides are enormous as well - Want to know who went t…

I cannot reply to everyone but still want to defend the above post (apart from a patronising tone so apologises for that) The most common response here is “but in the future some other government could do X”. And yes. This was also a major reason for opposition to the orignal “Peelers” in 1800s - a civilian police force. The police today are able to commit many egregious violations but they are mostly held back by la…

Why create an instrument that has a limited upside, but a downside that can lead into totalitarianism, in the first place? If it does not exist, I don't need to trust anyone, hence there won't be a problem.

Institutions can go evil, as seen in any friendly dictatorship all over the world in the last 100+ year.

Keeping the police on the legal side of things seems to be challenging (ICE killings? Asset forfeiture? Police brutality?), better to make it harder for them to do something illegal in the first place.

I am still waiting on a working answer to the question of "who watches the watchmen", so far, this has never really worked (NSA/Snowden?). What has worked quite well was limiting the institutions up-front.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#278

Post by leansensei »

apexalpha wrote: post #138
alehlopeh wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just need to reasonably predict the future 20 years ago.

The EU heavily regulates this specifically in the, here infamous, "AI regulations" . Though GDPR would also ban this probably.

What's the point, when we have Chat Control 2.0?

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#279

Post by testfrequency »

s_dev wrote: post #221
naz wrote: post #139

Tangential but why do articles about Flock never have (YC S17) in the title like articles about other YC companies?

They are a YCombinator company! TIL. I'm genuinely taken aback by that. I can clearly see a bunch of brand new accounts brigading the thread, YCisComplict, YCisBad etc. Presumably bots or something but this is still bad even discounting those accounts. We need more Aaron Schwartz’s in the world. Shame he's gone. Lads like that seemed kind of dorky and a bit pretentious in their pursuit of righteousness back in the da…

Welcome to the thunder dome. YC is not our friends, they just host what (was) a niche forum where early tech peeps could have mostly civil conversations. It’s become increasingly hostile in moderation and sharp political opinions, that a lot of the joy here has fumbled out. (sorry mod team..I know you deal with a lot and traffic/spam keeps growing).

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#280

Post by creaturemachine »

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

All that karma farmed with paywall bypass posts. Kinda greasy.
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