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Stop Flock

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Re: Stop Flock

#181

Post by hmry »

self_awareness wrote: post #166

I understand the privacy argument. There are a few questions though: 1) Suppose there will be another shooting. Don't you want to know what exactly has happened before you go to the protest? Suppose your child will be hurt. Wouldn't you do anything to capture the culprit? How exactly would you feel if the police would tell you that they couldn't get the video with culprits face, because watching it would be a violati…

1) If someone killed my child, I would probably want to kill them back. And yet we don't consider that sufficient reason to make revenge killing legal. The wishes of the victims need to be weighed against the cost it imposes on everyone else, including those who are innocent. The cost of violating everyone's right to privacy, the social impacts of mass surveillance, and the risk of that data being abused.

2) > Isn't that a privacy risk?

Yes, it is!

> Should we ban cameras in smartphones?

No? How about making it difficult for the police to seize everyone's videos without a good reason? We already do that for phone videos, it's called warrants. But Flock doesn't. They just ask cops to enter any arbitrary "reason" text into a HTML textbox and instantly get access to everyone's videos. And if the people explicitly said they don't want those specific cops to have access, like many people decided about ICE? Well, just ask the next county over and use their system, it's not checked in any way.

Re: Stop Flock

#182

Post by Lio »

The best way to block Flock is probably to find a way to track billionaire celebs like Taylor Swift and Elon Musk.

If they were able to successfully change laws so they can fly anonymously they can probably change laws on cameras in public places, at least for them anyway.

Privacy for the special people.

https://gizmodo.com/taylor-swift-and-elon-can-finally-fly-pr...

Re: Stop Flock

#183

Post by self_awareness »

hmry wrote: post #181
self_awareness wrote: post #166

I understand the privacy argument. There are a few questions though: 1) Suppose there will be another shooting. Don't you want to know what exactly has happened before you go to the protest? Suppose your child will be hurt. Wouldn't you do anything to capture the culprit? How exactly would you feel if the police would tell you that they couldn't get the video with culprits face, because watching it would be a violati…

1) If someone killed my child, I would probably want to kill them back. And yet we don't consider that sufficient reason to make revenge killing legal. The wishes of the victims need to be weighed against the cost it imposes on everyone else, including those who are innocent. The cost of violating everyone's right to privacy, the social impacts of mass surveillance, and the risk of that data being abused. 2) > Isn't…

[flagged]

Re: Stop Flock

#184

Post by diordiderot »

saghm wrote: post #148
renewiltord wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t say anyone was a king. I was just talking about troublesome priests.

And you're conveniently unaware of the historical context of the origin of that phrase too, if we're to take you literally, since you seem to entirely misunderstand how the whole reason it was problematic was due to the inherent power dynamics

Read some Foucauld. power is internalised.

People absorb the norms of their social class and start policing themselves and others without needing orders or hierarchical power dynamics.

Norm enforcement can spread faster and further than formal authority because lots of people can act on a signal whilst thinking they drew their own conclusions. Think of steve bannon's quote "politics is downstream of culture".

formal rank of the speaker is less important than that the signal comes from the socially legitimate tribe whose approval, language, and standard the subject is a member.

Re: Stop Flock

#185

Post by hmry »

self_awareness wrote: post #183
hmry wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) If someone killed my child, I would probably want to kill them back. And yet we don't consider that sufficient reason to make revenge killing legal. The wishes of the victims need to be weighed against the cost it imposes on everyone else, including those who are innocent. The cost of violating everyone's right to privacy, the social impacts of mass surveillance, and the risk of that data being abused. 2) > Isn't…

[flagged]

Which points do you disagree with?

Re: Stop Flock

#186

Post by burnt-resistor »

It's taxpayer-funded dragnet-warrantless surveillance, data harvesting, and stalking. And it is local elected officials' deliberate voluntary or bribed choice to invite Big Mommy into the lives of their constituents and people passing through. The anti-privacy doomers don't get to force their invasive anti-values on everyone else who wants respect for and to preserve their right to not be autonomously surveilled and monitored every single second when not in a business or organization premises.

Re: Stop Flock

#187

Post by burnt-resistor »

scarmig wrote: post #93
aldebran wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police departments aren’t understaffed. It’s a priority problem not a lack of resources problem. I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all. There’s occasional break ins and car break ins. When this happens it’s a big deal. We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door…

> I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all. Compare to e.g. Oakland, which recently approved a Flock expansion: https://oaklandside.org/2025/12/17/oakland-flock-safety-coun... Why? https://sfstandard.com/2023/06/09/oakland-crime-police-respo... https://oaklandside.org/2025/10/08/oakland-watchdog-audit-po... https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-police-off…

Baltimore has metric shittons of police cameras but it's still a dangerous shithole. Cameras don't stop idiot criminals from criming. Baltimore's police suck and the area sucks because there's massive unemployment, cameras aren't a panacea.

Re: Stop Flock

#188

Post by burnt-resistor »

jedberg wrote: post #27

We need a law that says if you hold any data about a person, they must be notified when anyone accesses it, including law enforcement. I used to work in criminal investigations. I understand how this might make investigation of real crime more difficult. But so does the fact that you need a warrant to enter someone's home, and yet we manage to investigate crime anyway. Your data should be an extension of your home, e…

That will never happen in America without a focused political revolution because anarcho-libertarian techbro billionaires profit extensively from personal data trafficking and bought off the majority of politicians to keep it that way.

It sounds good but the implementation would be harder than achieving single payer healthcare that's better than what Medicare is now destroyed by for-profit prior authorizations and fake healthcare with lifetime limits.

Re: Stop Flock

#189

Post by jimnotgym »

Every time I see Flock mentioned, it makes me think it will be about the Linux lock file tool Flock, and I wonder why people want to stop it

Re: Stop Flock

#190

Post by wnc3141 »

neya wrote: post #164
bmitch3020 wrote: post #10

I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. If the business models can't be made illegal, it should at least come with liabilities so high that no sane business would want to hold data that is essentially toxic waste. Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong…

This should ironically start at the VC level - and that includes YC et al. Some one comes and says "hey, we got this idea, we collect facial recognition data for training proprietary AI models", the response from the VC should "I'm gonna stop you right there. This is unethical." Not "Did you say I can 5x my ROI? Here, shut up and take my money!"

It seems like in the last number of years, VC has been prioritizing becoming the beneficiary of the whims of the regime.

In short, I wonder if this has any implications about their confidence in startups' viability in private sectors

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