451–460 of 507 posts
What I don’t understand is how you can work at a company like Flock and look yourself in the mirror. Seriously. You must be aware of the inherent evil, of the privacy invasive nature of your product, of how it’s being actively abused. How do you rationalize this for yourself?
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>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.
Honestly, not really. If you actually want to have decent coverage to observe crimes and track criminals, that's a ballpark reasonable figure. And it's not really that expensive, and the idea is that it ultimately saves money in terms of the crime it prevents and fewer police and detectives needed. I'm not defending it, but in terms of economic sense it's quite well justified. Opposition to it is moral/ideological ar…
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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'm sure the 40 percent of cops who are domestic abusers and the white supremacists militias recruited wholesale into ICE will use this power responsibly.
These aren't people who should hold any kind of intel. It's an actual danger to the population to give these people this much power.
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You never have, anyways.
What kind of silly comment is this? In fact I have, and they found the person responsible.
Don't complain when it eventually happens.
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These things are hard to weigh objectively. For instance, in America the police don't take bribes, you can't bribe your way out of a traffic ticket. The cops will laugh at your attempt and pile on more charges. But if you're a local business owner, the bribes to local politicians are far from unheard of and all manner of corrupt dealings between business and local government is prevalent. So how you rank America's co…
> For instance, in America the police don't take bribes, you can't bribe your way out of a traffic ticket. The cops will laugh at your attempt and pile on more charges. Sure, they might not take as many bribes as South American police tends to take (as someone who traveled that continent in car without a driving license, I'd say 90% are accepting of bribes for minor crimes), but American police also accept bribes fro…
In Mexico, cops will pull people over just to collect chump change cash bribes. In America, you have people like Epstein bribing state attorney generals, but nobody even thinks to slip a cop a $100 bill with their drivers license. This sort of casual everyday roadside bribery does not exist in America.
For more context here Flock Safety is a YC-backed company [1][2] [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety [2] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1856016868580151615
And let me share this reply by Garry Tan, CEO of YC, after someone made a comment that Flock might be _pretty dystopian_ [1][2]: > You're thinking Chinese surveillance > US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims [1] https://x.com/neurajordan/status/1963303084609966288 [2] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
In one part of the book, she goes to speak to a police chief on the topic of surveillance. She discusses with the officer the challenges of tracking migrant workers, and how in China there isn't a single ID number similar to an SSN in the states.
Towards the end of the interview, the officer, Xiaoli comments that much of the modernizing of the policing work is moving to be more "United States-Like".
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I always thought that show "person of interest" was a bit far fetched. how could one system have access to that much data? privacy concerns would surely stop it.
Along with all the cop shows I'm thinking it's almost intentional at this point to normalize things.
The name "Law & Order" is a blatant example of this, as it's a phrase used by Richard Nixon during his campaign in 1968, and was widely repeated when he created justifications for starting the War On Drugs in 1970. This same phrase was later used by Reagan and H.W. Bush when they planted their positions of wanting to wield state violence against countercultures that arose. The '90s was full of change as Gen-X started to become adults and formed their own powerful countercultures, and the title of the show was an emotional appeal to conservative older people who hated that change and wanted the state to shape society instead of the other way around.
What I don’t understand is how you can work at a company like Flock and look yourself in the mirror. Seriously. You must be aware of the inherent evil, of the privacy invasive nature of your product, of how it’s being actively abused. How do you rationalize this for yourself?
The thing is, a lot of ordinary people in tech are naive, gullible, more intelligent than wise, easily flattered, limited to first-order thinking socially-speaking, and obsessed with rules and systems. Then there’s another stratum of actors on top who are all of the above, and sociopathic to boot.
I don’t know, I think it’s just the way it is. I’ve become very disillusioned with the ability of ‘tech people’ as a class to work for good.
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Along with all the cop shows I'm thinking it's almost intentional at this point to normalize things.
The very first cop show, Dragnet, was explicitly a PR move to rehab the image of the police in the public's imagination. Every cop show since has been propaganda. Even shows where the police are not necessarily the "good guys", like The Shield or even Chicago PD, normalizes police brutality and the flaunting of basic constitutional laws because those dastardly bad guys have to be stopped at all costs. I enjoy some of…
So even the ones that try to buck the trend end up following it.