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Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

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Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#341

Post by fleshmonad »

tejtm wrote: post #299
SamInTheShell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing will be done until one of the investors of the tech end up embarrassed from weaponization of the tech against themselves. These people have no clue how creepy some of their technologic betters can be. I once witnessed a coworker surveilling his own network to ensure his girlfriend wasn't cheating on him (this was a time before massive SSL adoption). The guy just got a role doing networking at my company and t…

flock is a YC startup We have met the enemy and he is us -Pogo

I am the "Y-combinator". Do you have any questions?

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#342

Post by StanislavPetrov »

SamInTheShell wrote: post #12
edot wrote: post #6

Flock or their defenders will lock in on the excuse that “oh these are misconfigured” or “yeah hacking is illegal, only cops should have this data”. The issue is neither of the above. The issue is the collection and collation of this footage in the first place! I don’t want hackers watching me all the time, sure, but I DEFINITELY don’t trust the state or megacorps to watch me all the time. Hackers concern me less, ac…

Nothing will be done until one of the investors of the tech end up embarrassed from weaponization of the tech against themselves. These people have no clue how creepy some of their technologic betters can be. I once witnessed a coworker surveilling his own network to ensure his girlfriend wasn't cheating on him (this was a time before massive SSL adoption). The guy just got a role doing networking at my company and t…

As O’Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.

Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.

‘You can turn it off!’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘we can turn it off. We have that privilege.’

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#343

Post by Phemist »

quitit wrote: post #317
dvtkrlbs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and the biggest problem with this kind of ALPRs are they bypass the due process. Most of the time police can just pull up data without any warrant and there has been instances where this was abused (I think some cops used this for stalking their exes [1]) and also the most worrying Flock seems to really okay with giving ICE unlimited access to this data [2] [3] (which I speculate for loose regulations). [1]: http…

I keep an unofficial record of instances where police and similar authorities have abused their access to these types of systems. The list is long. It's almost exclusively men stalking ex-partners or attractive women they don't know, but have seen in public. What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a high level of internal logging/user-trackin…

> What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a high level of internal logging/user-tracking.

Would not be surprised if these types of abuse serve to obfuscate other abusive uses as well and are thus part of the system operating as it should. Flood the internal logging with all kinds of this "low-level" stuff, hiding the high-level warrantless tracking.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#344

Post by tehlike »

dogman144 wrote: post #311

Was fortunate to talk to a security lead who built the data-driven policing network for a major American city that was an early adopter. ALPR vendors like Flock either heavily augment and/or anchor the tech setups. What was notable to me is the following, and it’s why I think a career spent on either security researching, or going to law school and suing, these vendors into the ground over 20 years would be the ultim…

Now you have scale with ai hardware becoming cheaper and software incentives aligning.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#345

Post by coffeebeqn »

edot wrote: post #6

Flock or their defenders will lock in on the excuse that “oh these are misconfigured” or “yeah hacking is illegal, only cops should have this data”. The issue is neither of the above. The issue is the collection and collation of this footage in the first place! I don’t want hackers watching me all the time, sure, but I DEFINITELY don’t trust the state or megacorps to watch me all the time. Hackers concern me less, ac…

How is this different from the CCP surveillance? I guess this is easier for third parties to access?

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#346

Post by kjkjadksj »

embedding-shape wrote: post #127
gruez wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He probably being sincere. If you're logged in (or use something like xcancel), you can see the full thread, where he starts off with > Flock Safety currently solves 700,000 reported cases of crime per year, which is about 10% of reported crime nationwide > And they're just getting started His profile also says: >President & CEO @ycombinator —Founder @Initialized—designer/engineer who helps founders—SF Dem accelerati…

It's really interesting the different cultures "YCombinator the startup incubator" and "Ycombinator/HN the internet forum has". A comment being so oblivious about surveillance would probably be flagged here, at least heavily downvoted, while this guy is actively the president and CEO of Ycombinator today? pg, what happened? Ycombinator used to be a beacon of sense in a sea of uselessness, but now uselessness is runni…

Another case in point is most commenters are incredulous about AI, often coming from people who try and use it and see its shortcomings. Then you scroll over YC startups and I believe every single one at this point is some dumb AI startup.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#347

Post by autoexec »

embedding-shape wrote: post #240
tchalla wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn’t Trump already said he won’t do another term?

He has said that he cannot do more than two terms, but also there are ways to do more terms. Then he said it's too early to think about, then that he is joking, then that he wasn't joking, then that he isn't looking into it, but that they're "probably entitled to another four after that" ( https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-trump-has-said-about-pursu... ), whatever the fuck that means. Ultimately, I don't think it mat…

> Ultimately, I don't think it matters much what he says or has said, he won't clearly say what he/they are planning, obviously.

Honestly they're pretty open about their plans. They laid most of them out in Project 2025. They just sometimes carry out those plans while also denying that they are following the playbook. Trump in particular will be surprisingly candid about what he's doing in between bouts of lies and denials.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#348

Post by MPSimmons »

torben-friis wrote: post #337
superultra wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in an Atlanta neighborhood where one of the founders lived. A prototype for Flock Camera was designed by three Georgia Tech grads because someone kept breaking into their car (not uncommon in our neighborhood tbh). The trick is that the camera was pointed towards a middle school. Which means they were constantly recording kids without adult consent. Now, years later, Atlanta is the most surveilled city in Nort…

>There are 124 cameras for every 1,000 people How does that make any kind of economic sense? Morals aside, that’s a ridiculous amount of devices, data collected and transmitted, and so on.

Gonna have to write more speeding tickets to pay for these, I guess

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#349

Post by mothballed »

autoexec wrote: post #340
fusslo wrote: post #131

I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock. From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public. Therefore any time you go in public you cannot expect NOT to be tracked, photographed, and entered into a database (which may now outlive us). I think the argument comes from the 1st amendment. Weaponizing the Bill of Rights (BoR) for the government agains…

> I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock. I suspect they'd make a distinction between private individuals engaging in first amendment protected activity like public photography and corporations or the state doing the same in order to violate people's 4th amendment rights. We certainly don't have to allow for both cases.

They'd have not forced license plates to be displayed at all times to begin with, as they are a search of your papers without probable cause your vehicle is unregistered. Private ships in those days (probably the closest equivalent of something big and dangerous that could do tons of damage quickly on the public right of way) did not have required hull numbers or anything like that. Of course that doesn't totally solve the flock problem, but makes it a lot harder.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#350

Post by mvkel »

the main summary of 1984: "neighbors are encouraged, via telesecreens, to spy on one another to enforce conformity."

There thing to fear isn't some higher state; it's each other. We happily will surveil each other under the auspices of safety.

Hell, these days, our kids grow up with cameras pointing at them in their own rooms. What did we expect?

Until we are willing to accept more "risk" in exchange for more privacy, this will only get worse. (It's why I believe most tech/services that tout privacy are DoA, because nobody actually cares)

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