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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

#371

Post by Supermancho »

someguyiguess wrote: post #99
harporoeder wrote: post #83

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…

Private citizens filming in public and police forces setting up arrays of surveillance cameras in public somehow don’t seem equivalent. I’m not a lawyer so I can’t properly articulate what the legal difference is. And if there isn’t one then the law needs change. Clearly the majority of citizens agree with me. Is it legal for US citizens to all put cameras on their cars and set up a network where we can all see where…

> Private citizens filming in public and police forces setting up arrays of surveillance cameras in public somehow don’t seem equivalent.

The reason these strategies (for the same goal) don't seem equivalent is due to the nature of oversight. Flock as a centralized private company governed by a procedural system, can be corrupted and abused more easily than a distributed network. Flock's systems have already been abused and will continue to be.

Re Title: Flock doesn't "want" anything in particular, other than to sell more contracts and make more money.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#373

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

The solution to this is legislation. Legislation enshrining a right to not be studied, a right to be forgotten, penalties for even creating certain kinds of datasets.

I think the Americans should push for a constitutional amendment that protects one's right to privacy.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#374

Post by ModsMakeTrouble »

testfrequency wrote: post #279
s_dev wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Excessive moderation creates spam.

On strict sites like these, everyone runs sock puppet accounts and throwaways directly in response to the moderation.

A site with nothing like that would have far fewer accounts and engagement.

Ah ha!

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#375

Post by wat10000 »

slibhb wrote: post #358
wat10000 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even red light cameras have a substantial potential for abuse. The revenue stream incentivizes messing with the light timing to cause more violations.

Great -- so fix those problems with legislation.

Right, and while we're at it, we can stop theft by having the thieves choose not to steal.

If your approach is that we can fix abuses by having the abuser write down rules that say they're not allowed to abuse us, why limit it to public surveillance? Stick cameras in everybody's houses while we're at it. Think of all the horrible crimes that go on behind closed doors. Solve the privacy issues with legislation.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#376

Post by tavavex »

slibhb wrote: post #348
matheusmoreira wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> draft good legislation to curb potential abuses No such thing. Unless it is mathematically impossible for the government to abuse you, then you will be abused.

That sounds like an argument for anarchism. I am very unimpressed by political philosophies that take arguments to their logical conclusion. What seems to me to have worked is understanding that a government is necessary, that it has the potential to misbehave, and therefore we should carefully design laws and processes to constrain it. I would like to see opponents of mass surveillance do this, which seems more prod…

No, it is an argument that the best way not to abuse something is to not have access to it. If you enshrine a ban of total surveillance on a deep and universal level in a country, it'll be a lot more difficult for a future bad actor state to reinstate it. We need the most extreme legal hurdles that can exist. More importantly, if the technology isn't actually physically installed, it becomes even more of an uphill battle for a future corrupt government. Your proposal is for surveilling everyone but making a pinky promise that no one in the chain will ever be corrupt at any point in the future, because all it would take at that point is changing some words on a page, refusing to prosecute an abuse of power, using some loopholes or pushing a software update.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#377

Post by vsviridov »

cm2012 wrote: post #372

Fundamentally this is silly because Flock only tracks cars and not individual people. It doesn't do facial recognition surveillance. Society decided a long time ago that driving is a privilege that can be regulated in a variety of ways.

It can track devices via their Bluetooth radiation. A lot of devices use randomized MAC addresses though, but probably not all.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#380

Post by slibhb »

californical wrote: post #364
slibhb wrote: post #335

I'm generally in favor of mass surveillance, as long as it's in public . I think it can prevent a lot of crime and I don't believe we have a right to "privacy in public". Red light cameras, for example, strike me as unalloyed good. However, I'd be interested to see if opponents of mass surveillance could draft good legislation to curb potential abuses. For example, the laws around who owns/controls data from cameras…

Just wait til we have an administration in the White House (I’m guessing not this one?) which directly threatens your freedoms in such a way that they can easily use cameras to prosecute those who they disagree with. Current governments have used the mass surveillance to go after people for abortions and for being too foreign-seeming (even if here legally). If those don’t affect you, surely you can think of something…

This post is a good example of why I find the anti-surveillance people so tiresome

> Just wait til we have an administration in the White House (I’m guessing not this one?) which directly threatens your freedoms in such a way that they can easily use cameras to prosecute those who they disagree with.

"You must not be gay/trans/black/hispanic/female or you'd agree with me" is not a good argument.

We're living in a brave new world where cameras and storage are cheap, networks are fast, etc. People have cameras at their front doors, stores have cameras, appartment buildings have cameras, etc. We need to deal with these facts productively, i.e. with legislation and serious thinking, rather than inane comments like "women seeking abortions have been tracked therefore we need to ban cameras".

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