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Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

newyorker.com

321–330 of 571 posts

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#321
post #125
post #57

At the very least they need to make public accessible all data collected about all employees and owners of Flock, and everyone in government agencies that contract with Flock. This means we can see all photos and videos of these people, every trip they make, etc. All searchable with AI, with no audit trail (just like it is for government agencies).

You seem to be missing a basic fact about how the world works: there are two classes of people, those who make the rules, and those who are expected to follow the rules. These classes are largely disjoint.

Yet still, every now and then, a king is executed.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#322

Flock is YC. HN mods are complicit and are shaping the narrative here. PG, Garry Tan, Dan Gackle, Tom Howard, Aaron Epstein, Jared Friedman, and all YC staff are enemies of the people.

Spamming a thread with new accounts isn't a good tactic to point that out.

It seems to have worked

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#323
post #259

Not an American, what made Flock special compared to other surveillance cameras? Informationized or intelligentized surveillances cameras arent a new thing.

Mass deployment on public property and the network effect that having them all connected and using things like license plate readers is all pretty new.

Largely the US hasn’t had widespread surveillance, it’s been private property ownership of CCTV type systems for security reasons which Americans are ok with. Reading my license plate, face, gait, etc every 100 meters as I move across a large distance loses the security reason and entered the world of mass surveillance. Which while many of us struggle with caring about, is seen as infringing on our right to privacy which itself has a complex legal interpretation of and where systems like this cross a line into what is acceptable. The fact that law enforcement can query flock to learn of an individual’s location without any warrant is often seen as directly opposing a constitutional protection from government search. It might also be important to know that the US Constitution is seen as a law of physics in some areas and that most laymen that read the Fourth Amendment would come to the conclusion that this is not allowed and thus unconstitutional at its core. There’s of course legal things that have happened since that clarify interpretation of the constitution so the wiggle room they have to operate, especially when it’s something the government wants to exists, is enough for now. The Supreme Court would be the ones to eliminate grey area. They recently issued a ruling taking a heavier privacy stance. Meanwhile, people on the street have grown deep distrust in tech and government which is visible as they are destroying these cameras.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#324
post #260
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…

The best deterrent to crime is to make people not want to commit crime in the first place. Education. Social cohesion. Prosperity. Safety nets.

Executed people cannot commit crimes. Educate that theft means repayment or death. The rest follows.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably selling data to CBP/DEA. I went through a combined military and police checkpoint a bit north of Rio Hondo last August and it was surreal.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#326
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…

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…

Isn't there a difference between getting picked up on someones Tik Tok "broadcast" and a private/public surveillance operation?

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#327
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…

But what if a private company does a fourth amendment violation? What if the private company is the governing body seeking control?

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#328
post #41
post #3

Already a reality in mainland China, which is a country with very little street crime, grafitti, vandalism etc.

Graffiti is amazing. It is protest.

It's counter-culture and I'm here for it. I had a fun convo with my daughter about why rail cars are so frequently tagged. More fascinating are the hidden pieces in tunnels and the like, where only few people will ever see it.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#329
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]…

These systems aren't perfect recognition oracles - there are lots of errors, especially as you scale up the technology. At the end of the day, it's a probabilistic identification correlated to a stream with a mix of of reported or suspected crimes. Your framing completely misses the reality. I'd argue that the OP's language is a much better fit.

Re: Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

#330
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is tracked, but only certain people are watched.

The "only certain people are watched" hinges on pinky swears, winks, and nods. IMO it's a distinction without a difference.

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