It's getting pretty crazy out there. What's your recourse for this? Avoid most populated areas?
I live in a town of 6,000 and we have 5 Flock cameras
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
#62flock is the most heinous reflection of the ills of our current socioeconomic structure. absolutely nobody should be okay with mass surveillance, much less mass surveillance enabled by a private company.
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> We have sleep walked into it.
We didn't sleep walk into it, we ran into it because of poor basic civics education and a cynical media cycle that biases towards making everyone terrified of crime.
The latter is driven by two forces - a profit motive (sensational, gruesome stories sell), and a political motive (media carrying water for far-right-wing candidates loves to keep you scared on this issue).
The optimal level of crime or unsolved crime in a society is not zero, but a lot of people will look at you like you've got three eyes if you tell them that. Talk to them for another ten minutes, and most of them will see why what you say makes sense, but that's not a conversation their television will ever have with them.
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#63Him reading the Flock statement on a Flock camera open on the internet was just so good. I love and support Benn Jordan.
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#64Earlier 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…
When you give access to any system that collects the personal information including location data for people in the US to the police, a percentage of the police will always use those systems for stalking their exes.
What is not only true for police but for every sufficiently big group of people.
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#65Children could go missing thanks to Flock default settings. HN would tell me to never attribute to malice ... but there may be criminal negligence. To cover their butts I strongly suggest Flock implement a default "grading system" that will show a city in a banner at the top of their management and monitoring system that based on their camera and network configuration they get an A+ to F-. If the grade is below a C t…
I always found Hanlon's Razor a bit too optimistic in tone. I prefer it restated in the form of Clarke's third law:
"Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#66It's getting pretty crazy out there. What's your recourse for this? Avoid most populated areas?
It's a quality of people problem not a quantity of people problem.
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#67Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#68For 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
I've never heard about this Tan guy before, I don't keep up with politics/corporatism anymore, but is that possibly sarcasm? It sure feels like it to me. But again, I don't know this person, but if I came across that by itself I feel like it's pretty clearly sarcastic, as Twitter tends to be. Maybe I'm just tone deaf myself to how tone deaf others could be?
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#69[flagged]
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but the same argument could be made for things like open source software. We assume/hope that someone more aligned with our outcomes is actively looking. Or, at the very least, that we can go back and look later.
I don't think they are similar. Public feeds would enable someone to document and sell people's whereabouts in real time. The fact that I could do the same or go back and look later is no defense.
This is a different argument than what I was responding to.
> I know in theory we all can continuously download and datamine these video feeds but can everyone really?
To which my response is "this is like OSS." What I mean by that is that, in theory, people audit and review code submitted to OSS software, in reality most people trust that there are other people who do it.
> Public feeds would enable someone to document and sell people's whereabouts in real time. The fact that I could do the same or go back and look later is no defense.
This is a different argument to me and one that I'm still torn about. I think that if the feeds exist and the government and private entities have access to them, the trade-offs may be better if everyone has access to them. In my mind this results in a few things:
1. Diffusion of power - You said public feeds would "enable someone to document and sell people's whereabouts in real time." Well, private feeds allow this too. I'd rather have everyone know about some misdeed than Flock or the local PD blackmail someone with it.
2. Second guessing deployment - I think if the people making the decisions know that the data will be publicly available, they're more likely to second guess deploying it in the first place.
3. Awareness - if you can just open an app on your phone and look at the feed from a camera then you become aware of the amount of surveillance you are subject to. I think being aware of it is better than not.
There's trade-offs to this. The cameras become less effective if everyone knows where they are. It doesn't help with the location selection bias - if they're only installed in areas of town where decision makers don't live and don't go, the power is asymmetric again. Plenty of other reasons it is bad. None of them worse than the original sin of installing them in the first place.