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US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

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Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#41

Post by puppykito »

waNpyt-menrew wrote: post #36
gorgonical wrote: post #21

Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ I recommend them.

Someone complaining about local governments having data while directing them to YouTube, whose owner does surveillance at a scale far exceeding all local governments of all countries combined, is ironic. Why don’t these people use Peertube at least. Fact of the matter is they’d like to personally profit off the same nonsense they complain about. This person has a million subscribers, they aren’t some random whistlebl…

???

It is very clearly because YouTube has a higher reach than any other platform in that space.

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#42

Post by throwway120385 »

waNpyt-menrew wrote: post #20

[flagged]

There are ways of doing this that don't require you to abdicate all of your privacy to a third-party SaaS company who makes it easy to share information with the police everywhere.

My camera system is not connected to the cloud and it has a retention policy of 4 weeks. I took pains not to aim them anywhere where I'd be collecting data outside of my own property. There's full-disk encryption in use. The police could maintain their own surveillance network and place their own cameras in a legally compliant way and it would be fine.

Flock and Ring are awful because they enable easy surveillance and search after the fact, not a priori because they are surveillance systems. If they required proof of warrant before letting the police execute a search I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with them. A police officer stalking an ex is like the basic example you get if you ask an ALPR vendor why we need audit logging and proactive auditing of all searches. But that's not the only way these tools enable invasion of privacy.

If you want proof that that's the problem with them, you should know that people have been building wired camera systems and ALPR systems for decades before Flock and Ring came into existence. So it's solely the cloud Search-as-a-Service business model that's the problem there.

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#43

Post by baggachipz »

I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious framing and marketing in the name of "safety".

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#44

Post by RankingMember »

waNpyt-menrew wrote: post #31
RankingMember wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The answer to that is the only one that matters. Is it, though? Crime would be super low if we were all confined to prison cells by default, too.

[flagged]

You made a broad-brush statement that essentially justified anything in the name of safety. You might want to re-word your statement if you meant otherwise.

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#45

Post by ceejayoz »

waNpyt-menrew wrote: post #27
hrimfaxi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. Would crime go up, down, or stay the same if we had to get strip searched before entering airplanes?

The types of crime that would happen in an airplane would already be identifiable due to its constrained cabin, so I don’t understand the comparison. Let’s use your example for say a concert. Is checking bags worth it? Would crime go up if there was no bag check? Why or why not?

> Is checking bags worth it?

Probably not. It's mostly there to preserve the profits from alcohol sales.

> Would crime go up if there was no bag check?

Did it go down when they added them?

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#46

Post by alex43578 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #13

It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"), which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that tracks you everywhere.

A big part of the value is the network: track a stolen a car or a suspect in the next town over or across the country.

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#47

Post by bradleyankrom »

baggachipz wrote: post #43

I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police…

I saw the same thing in a Home Depot parking lot yesterday. I guess I'm glad there's some sort of notice about it, even if its intent is more, I dunno, branding? It took me a while to figure out what all the solar panel + camera on a post installations were as they popped up around my town. I even pulled over to inspect the hardware for signs of ownership and didn't find anything.

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#48

Post by AndrewKemendo »

gorgonical wrote: post #21

Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ I recommend them.

Wow thank you for sharing this I had no idea this guy existed!

There’s more of us techno anarchists out there apparently!

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#49

Post by zulux »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #32
therobots927 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is pretty polarized around privacy as demonstrated by reactions to the Snowden leaks. So I think that’s a fair point.

That was over a decade ago. I wonder if it has gotten better or worse since.

It's gotten worse: I'm so tired of rampant crime that I'm up for a little surveillance. And I used to donate to the ACLU before they went crazy.

Re: US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

#50

Post by peab »

waNpyt-menrew wrote: post #31
RankingMember wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The answer to that is the only one that matters. Is it, though? Crime would be super low if we were all confined to prison cells by default, too.

[flagged]

It's a stretch for sure.

I think the point is that it's a tradeoff of civil liberties in exchange for safety.

I think it's an interesting discussion and it's not clear to me what the right answer is.

Given the first amendment in the USA, i think once it's cheap enough everyone will be filming everyone all the time. Just look at how many people have ring doorbells.

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