Live data from Hacker News

Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

newyorker.com

301–310 of 566 posts

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#301
post #104

The political left has really decided to go nuclear over Flock, but I'm not understanding the fundamental principle from which this view arises. Libertarian sorts don't like it either -- but that's entirely consistent with their entire existence. Is this a broad-based phenomenon on the left, or are sections perfectly fine with it? Some of the other comments here seem to endorse full on 1984-style surveillance, so per…

My understanding is that broad state power to the benefit of the people, Scandinavia style, is not the same as broad state power to monitor and/or control the people. Arguably those two types of power are in conflict in terms of desired outcomes.

Scandinavian state power has been used to increase crime through immigration

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent. Filming a car on a street and giving that video to the government is not the same as me giving private information to a third party, and then them giving it to the government such as Carpenter v United states covers. Edit: Note that this is not an endorsement, rather stating that recent supreme court cases ma…

" The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties, such as banks and phone companies, generally have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. This precedent, established in Supreme Court cases in the 1970s, allows the U.S. government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherw…

It's like allowing police departments to hire a hitman to avoid the Fifth Amendment.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#305
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't UK arrest a few thousand people a year for social media posts? What are you basing this high degree of trust on?

No, it arrests several thousands of people every year for breaches of the communications act(s) - this could be for online harassment, stalking or trying to defraud people over Facebook messenger. It's the equivalent of 'wire fraud' in the US.

They are arresting them for social media posts. You are lying

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#306
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent. Filming a car on a street and giving that video to the government is not the same as me giving private information to a third party, and then them giving it to the government such as Carpenter v United states covers. Edit: Note that this is not an endorsement, rather stating that recent supreme court cases ma…

The language doesn't really cover things correctly. You don't expect privacy in public in the sense that you might bump into other people that know who you are. That doesn't automatically mean that you expect walking into a public area means a system will start investigating you and seeing if you match with crimes. Assuming everyone in public is a suspect and continually investigating them, is a big change in how soc…

>Assuming everyone in public is a suspect and continually investigating them, is a big change in how society works.

Well that's not exactly how it would work.

Everyone is tracked, but only certain people are watched. That added to the fact that any nation with a sufficiently complex legal system has no law abiding residents. You've always broken some law, somewhere.

So it would be more like:

>[Pick any person from] everyone in public [and the system has the capacity to list the reasons why that person] is a [criminal]

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#307
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Smaller companies are far less likely to, as their owner is happy with their profit and actually likes running the company.

One a company goes public though, or has significant external input (VC etc), things start on the slippery slope.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#308
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…

The other thing that's going on is that Flock is essentially an always-on "dragnet." A "dragnet" is when you set up police checkpoints everywhere and essentially put entire cities under watch to find a fugitive. This happened in Boston after the bombings. "Dragnets" are illegal except in extreme circumstances (like a bombing). Flock is a "dragnet on demand." You have a digital dragnet in place not just in one city bu…

Recently was driving in the middle of nowhere in Texas.. And I saw a few flock cameras watching both ways in highways there too. So it is not just cities, states are implicated too.
Post reply on HN