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Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras

evanstonroundtable.com

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Re: Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras

#181

Post by delfinom »

burnte wrote: post #177
jbullock35 wrote: post #18

There is a larger issue that other commenters are missing: > The city has paid the first two years of that extension but would still owe $145,500 for the final three years if the contract is upheld. The city intends to terminate the contract on Sept. 26 under its notice to Flock, but the company is challenging that termination, and the dispute could escalate to litigation. The city is trying to terminate a contract w…

What you're missing is they can get that money without putting the cameras back up. That's what you do when a customer doesn't want your service/product but they still have an active contract.

Yep, paying out the remaining value of the contract is generally the default-court acceptable manner to terminate a contract. And it's probably in there as a clause.

However, if Flock was really being evil, they could argue in court they are losing on the value of spying on the American populace.

Re: Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras

#182

Post by delfinom »

nxobject wrote: post #146
sschueller wrote: post #44

https://deflock.me/

Thankfully, in my city, it seems to be all retail parking lots. But it’s disturbing to see other very, very adjacent cities go all-in on flock.

Same in mine very large suburb. Pretty obvious why they are putting them in Home Depot parking lots too given the amount of shoplifting we've gone through the last few years.

Re: Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras

#183

Post by delfinom »

bob1029 wrote: post #69
dawnerd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They installed some here at a Home Depot parking lot right when the ice raids started. It was weird that only the home deport owned portion of the parking lot got them which lead to some investigation into who put them up and sure enough flock has a contract with HD. Blue city in SoCal with lots of migrant laborers.

Home Depot has had an incredibly aggressive retail theft problem for about half a decade now across virtually every market. Their response of putting 10 ALPRs in each store's parking lot and locking up everything seems rational based upon what I've seen. There's something about stealing Milwaukee tools that gets certain groups of people very excited. They even have some tool manufacturers designing activation at chec…

Home Depot is still garbage at shoplifting preventation. Can never walk in and buy a p-trap kit without every one of them missing parts.

Re: Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras

#184

Post by kstrauser »

Animats wrote: post #47

There's a Flock camera at the end of my driveway. I'm next to a city line, so it's a reasonable location. I wonder if I can file a CCPA request and get a list of my comings and goings.

I think you can file a CCPA request to demand that they never store your data at all. Yes, that would be an utter pain in the ass for them, if so. And yet, that's their problem, not yours.

Re: Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras

#185

Post by xp84 »

potato3732842 wrote: post #95
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #72

I feel as if ALPRs are already a fact of life. Not thrilled about it, but that’s sort of what license plates are for (ALPRs are really just automated cop eyeballs). The most disturbing thing, is the behavior of the company. It’s pretty clear that they have a separate contract with the feds, and that contract is the one they care about more. It’s also an illustration of the faustian bargain that customers make, when e…

Licesne plates were never intended to be recorded all the time to create a data set of who went where when. They were so that in the non-standard case where something other than "business as usual" has happened an owner could be identified.

I don’t think that’s the current desired use either. (What they were intended for 120 years ago, doesn’t seem super important though). Setting aside the concerns that dominate all political discussion today on this topic amongst the 31% of voters who voted for Harris (that’s turnout * popular vote), these things are used every day to solve actual crimes. For instance, recently in my state, some dude murdered a woman and then hopped in his car and was caught because of an ALPR about an hour and a half away from the scene of the crime. When the police cornered him, he fired on them repeatedly. If it was not for ALPRs that guy would probably still be on the loose.

Having these keep data for a very short amount of time is a reasonable idea. I don’t think most reasonable people, including law-enforcement really thinks it would be ideal to build a permanent database of everywhere everybody goes. If anyone is convinced that is what they want, I encourage you to try speaking to someone outside your own political party instead of only operating in a social media echo chamber because I think you’ll be surprised how much real people don’t have cartoon villain ambitions.

Re: Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras

#186

Post by miltonlost »

donmcronald wrote: post #8

Even though it's become commonplace in the last 20 years, I'm still shocked to see how companies can pretty much ignore the law, do whatever they want, and have everyone involved shielded from any kind of significant consequences. In situations like this, I think the person at the top of the chain that told employees to perform the illegal installations should be arrested and charged. On top of that, the company shou…

That's Silicon Valley and tech's whole thing: move fast and break things (the law). Uber, Spotify, OpenAI: all began by flouting laws and were rewarded. And of course now we have a convicted felon of fraud as President doing his best to remove any chance of prosecuting fraud. This whole site is built on people wanting to break laws.

Re: Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras

#187

Post by toomuchtodo »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #32
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #2

Is there a good public list of Flock Safety cities? Would be particularly interesting to see where they are in blue states.

The best you can get is https://deflock.me/map , which is crowd-sourced, and therefore both incomplete and inaccurate. Cities tend to resist public records requests for camera locations. But Flock is currently in ~5,000 communities around the country. They have managed to spread very quickly, and very quietly, and the public has only become aware of it relatively recently. There is also a good site at https://eyesonf…

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=Flock

https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/

Re: Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras

#188

Post by apwheele »

Animats wrote: post #47

There's a Flock camera at the end of my driveway. I'm next to a city line, so it's a reasonable location. I wonder if I can file a CCPA request and get a list of my comings and goings.

You might reach out to the folks at the Institute for Justice, they have written letters to the cities to get the cameras taken down in these scenarios, https://ij.org/press-release/victory-arkansas-city-moves-sur...

Re: Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras

#189

Post by xp84 »

toephu2 wrote: post #169
daft_pink wrote: post #130

Wow. License plate readers are everywhere.

Is that a bad thing? I would imagine the only people who don't like this are criminals. But why are so many seemingly law-abiding citizens here up in arms about it?

A ton of people hold some of these core beliefs, which are subjective (meaning not exactly provable/disprovable) and aren’t subject to critical reevaluation:

• the federal government cannot be trusted when the president belongs to the other “team” regardless of whether the election was fair

• all decision makers in such a government are seeking a fascist and racist agenda that is a threat to all of us, and they are also seeking to harm anyone who even uses their First Amendment right to speak against them.

• therefore, they cannot be allowed to enforce immigration laws at all because we cannot trust them to not make any mistakes/break any rules

• the dangers of those rules being broken outweighs any dangers posed by criminals who happen to be undocumented immigrants.

• also as a result they cannot be trusted with any data that could aid in enforcement of laws or aid them in pursuing their political enemies.

Re: Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras

#190

Post by BobaFloutist »

renewiltord wrote: post #57
donmcronald wrote: post #8

Even though it's become commonplace in the last 20 years, I'm still shocked to see how companies can pretty much ignore the law, do whatever they want, and have everyone involved shielded from any kind of significant consequences. In situations like this, I think the person at the top of the chain that told employees to perform the illegal installations should be arrested and charged. On top of that, the company shou…

Well, if we consider it fine for people to commit crimes like shoplift, rob, or assault people it seems fairly normal to permit groups of people to violate the law too. Lots of fans of Luigi Mangione and this hasn't directly killed anyone yet. I'd say it's just a general tolerance to the idea that the rules we have are baroque and anything goes when trying to reach your aims. This seems fairly cross politically unify…

> Lots of fans of Luigi Mangione and this hasn't directly killed anyone yet.

There are also fans of Charles Manson, that doesn't mean we should automatically excuse any bad behavior that falls short of his.

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