I don't want to stop Flock the company. I want to stop Flock the business model, along with all the other mass surveillance, and the data brokers. If the business models can't be made illegal, it should at least come with liabilities so high that no sane business would want to hold data that is essentially toxic waste.
Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong person gets access to the data, entire populations are threatened.
You want to stop the source, which is that the government and other agencies can purchase surveillance data that would otherwise be disallowed by the 4th amendment. We need to end this 'laundering' of information through third parties, and enforce the constitution by its intent.
They're also one and the same generally-- at least if the stalker has money or the right friends most kinds of law enforcement access means stalker access. It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker, and there are so many people that work in law enforcement that bribing, impersonating, or persuading your way to access is not that big a deal. Not to mention that enabled stalkers can just file a federal lawsuit and issue subpoena for records.
The only safe thing is for the records to never exist in the first place.
> It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker
This was one of the motivations for passage of the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994. Nowadays, officers need a legitimate reason to run a plate - unless the patrol car is fitted with automatic cameras[1] that look up every plate of every car they drive past.
> The Virginia state police used license plate readers to track people’s attendance at political events;
> The New York Police Department used license plate readers to keep track of who visited certain places of worship, and how often;
> Despite all this surveillance, ALPR technology has been repeatedly shown to be unreliable; like other police technologies, ALPRs can and do make mistakes.[2]
Generally, court decisions have held that you have zero expectation of privacy when you are in public spaces. Current license plate standards[3] aim for plates that are not cluttered and are easily read by the human eyeball, despite being wrapped with license plate frames (which usually make the state hard/impossible to read which is the most common failure mode for ANLR[4]). If the reflectivity material (traditionally called "ScotchLite"[5]) is worn out (or defaced), most states require the plate to be replaced.
How is that achievable? PIs can legally do it. Random people can keep tabs on you and exchange gossip. It's the sudden scale and low cost that doesn't sit well with freedom to not be tracked in public 24/7 we took for granted.
The core ill is aggregated data, because that's what allows the mass in surveillance, data mining, etc.
The collection actions are almost immaterial. Without persistence they must be re-performed for each request, which naturally provides a throughput bottleneck and makes "for everyone" untenable.
If we agree the aggregated data at rest is the problem, then addressing it would look like this:
1. Classify all data holders at scale into a regulated group
2. Apply initial regulations
- To respond to queries for copies of personal data held
- To update data or be liable in court for failing to do so
- To validate counterparties apply basic security due diligence before transferring data (or the transferer also faces liability)
- To maintain a *full* chain of custody of data (from originator through every intermediate party to holder) so that leaks / misuse can be traced
- To file yearly update on the types, amount of data, and counterparties it was transferred to with the federal government that are made public
The initial impediment to regulatory action is Google, Meta, Equifax, etc. saying "This problem is too complex and you don't understand it."
It's not. But the first step is classifying and documenting the problem.
The only way is through - everybody should get into the practice of stalking and gossiping about each other in a Molochian environment, where the people who do not do so suffer from the losing side of an information asymmetry.
Expect AI, especially post-Mythos, to just enable this at even further scale. Consumer grade wireless networking gear as a whole is a very wide attack surface and is basically never updated.
If PIs can "legally" do it then it sounds like there is a law which allows them to do it. That law can be revoked (unless the power comes from Constitution which would make it effectively impossible to revoke).
Note that PIs are effectively illegal under GDPR by default. They would generally need to provide Article 13 notice, i.e. you would become aware of them unless they were just asking around without actually following you. Member states can make them legal though (via Article 23) and likely in many cases they have done so.
In the US, PI licensing is only about PIing for hire. The actual act of going through public records, following cars and whatnot do not require a license, you can spy on anyone without a license as long as you don't get paid for it.
EU is more complicated, but Article 14.5.b allows withholding notice if it would impair/defeat the purpose of processing. The PI must however apply "safeguards", whatever it could mean.
Article 14(5)(b) does, but that only applies for Article 14 notice (personal data not directly obtained from data subject). Article 13 (personal data obtained directly from data subject) does not have such exception in GDPR itself.
This becomes extremely relevant when you read it in the light of the C-422/24 decision. In that personal data collected via body worn cameras was determined to be "directly obtained". Paragraph 41 from the judgement:
> If it were accepted that Article 14 of the GDPR applies where personal data are collected by means of a body camera, the data subject would not receive any information at the time of collection, even though he or she is the source of those data, which would allow the controller not to provide information to that data subject immediately. Therefore, such an interpretation would carry the risk of the collection of personal data escaping the knowledge of the data subject and giving rise to hidden surveillance practices. Such a consequence would be incompatible with the objective, referred to in the preceding paragraph, of ensuring a high level of protection of the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons.
Given this it's very unlikely that PI observing (especially if they record) could be considered to be Article 14 instead of Article 13 type of collection as it's exactly "hidden surveillance practice" that the Court warned about.
Member states do have a right to restrict the Article 13 disclosure obligations via Article 23 restriction, but that requires specific law in the member state & the law itself must fulfill the obligations that Article 23 requires. Article 23(2) essentially forbids leaving everything up to the controller.
And as far as PI in the US goes, actions between stalking and PI "for self" tend to be so similar that I wouldn't necessarily recommend anyone to try it.
Honestly it should probably just be illegal for anyone, private or public, to engage in mass surveillance (or "data gathering", whatever) of anybody who didn't expressly consent to it. As long as the data exist, they will be abused.
When I installed the SoundCloud app and it told me by continuing I agree to them sharing my data with their 954 partners.[1]
1. I’m not even joining. When I mostly recently installed the SoundCloud app - for the first time on a new device, that’s what’s it said: 954 partners. How can anyone reasonably understand what it is their agreeing to in that scenario.
This is the important point. You need the right to not be discriminated when you withhold your consent, otherwise your consent is effectively meaningless, as it is forced on you by your impossible bargaining position. This is one of the central pillars of the GDPR without which it wouldn't work at all. Be advised to make asking customers for consent that doesn't directly benefit them illegal as well, lest you risk creating another wave of malicious cookie banners.
> You need the right to not be discriminated when you withhold your consent, otherwise your consent is effectively meaningless, as it is forced on you by your impossible bargaining position.
Which is why "we don't serve patrons without shoes and pants" policy is unconstitutional, yeah.
If you don't want to agree to a business's demands — you're welcome to not deal with them and look for an alternative. All the alternatives have the same (or even worse) demands? Unless you can prove collusion, that's just how the invisible hand of the market worked its magic out. Go petition you congressman to violate laissez-faire even more than it already is, I guess.
Except the are companies with which you effectively must do business.
Microsoft (or Apple).
Any web host, payment processor, etc that's contracted to do work for your local government (I suppose you could try driving to the government office and pay by check, but then you need to give consent to Ford or Chevy).
Short of living like a hermit, there's no practical way to avoid all ridiculous T&C.
Yes please. Your shaming didn't work. Free markets centre of gravity is biased towards capital and land owners. We need people power to balamce it back. Something we poor people are all enjoying now (pssst me and you are poor.... kings and barons are the few and rich)
I really need to start putting /s at the ends of my comments where I merely restate the currently adopted legal theory/framework in non-sugar-coated terms, don't I? The whole liberal movement has its roots in the merchants' and industrialists' desire of having as little interference from the aristocracy-heavy governments of the yore, and it really shows even to this day.
The trouble with this is that I, at least, am trying to live in a society. And society has both rights and responsibilities. Sometimes you are forced to do things, or don’t do things, contrary to your desires. Every freedom has two sides, you can’t ignore the fact that increasing some freedoms for one decreases other freedoms for others.
The shirt and shoes example is a great example in fact that illustrates the point. You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes, just like a business does not have unlimited freedom to impose whatever terms it likes, just because it put it in its ToS.
> You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes
Okay, I am gonna be 100% serious here: you absolutely should have such a freedom. Just as loitering or jaywalking being a crime is inherently totalitarian, what the hell.
In this case, unlimited means literally everywhere.
You do have the right to go barefoot in your own home. And in true public spaces.
But, a property owner can require shoes. Do I care if somebody is barefoot in the local grocer? No, not really. But, the proprietor might because they want to limit their liability (should something fall on your foot, a cart run it over, or a loose tack/nail somehow land in an aisle, etc).
Not only that, but it should be illegal (eg: fines for the company and potential jail time for executives) for tying consent to use/purchase of services or products.
Means of Control by Byron Tau and Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine. Can’t recommend these books enough for anyone who is skeptical of the above claim.
Even if we somehow, perhaps via magic genie-wish, made the government totally disinterested... these systems would still enable dystopian levels of private surveillance and manipulation.
A significant chunk of the infrastructure that farms data is now from private organizations, who sell that information because it is a source of revenue.
Government is the bogeyman we are afraid of, but ad tech is doing the actual heavy lifting.
The Potus is literally a pedophile, criminals are here to stay and winning. Your camera company supports them as long as they have money and/or control of the system.
One simple remedy would be to make companies (that collect such private data) and their directors/executives jointly & severally liable[0] for any identity theft. It should come with "forever" liability equivalent to SuperFund sites[1]
Notes:
0 - Financial penalties would not be limited to "your share" of the penalty. If you have money, and the other parties don't, the plaintiffs can collect from whichever defendant has money.
1 - Everyone who ever owned the site with the toxic waste is liable for the cleanup. This is why when a gas station is sold (in the US), all of the fuel tanks are dug up and replaced - this way, none of the future leakage can be attributed to the previous owners.
This should ironically start at the VC level - and that includes YC et al. Some one comes and says "hey, we got this idea, we collect facial recognition data for training proprietary AI models", the response from the VC should "I'm gonna stop you right there. This is unethical."
Not "Did you say I can 5x my ROI? Here, shut up and take my money!"
Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly
said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain
10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will
produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it
ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at
which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its
owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely
encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is
here stated.
We today can also add crypto schemes and mass surveillance to the examples.
And mind you, VC are people who are both pretty good at earning money and also eager for even more money. That's how they got to where they are, after all, not necessarily by being virtuous (over a certain minimally required amount, or a social signaling of possessing such an amount).
Fair enough. But, to be fair to them, they did have a falling out. There was a story on here how it went all the way to PG and then they asked Sam to leave (Something like that). I think saw it in a comment here, really don't remember.
Assume VCs are brainless profit maximizers who don't understand ethics. How do you get them to say "I'm gonna stop you right there"?
Answer: Make it unprofitable to collect this data. Change the incentives.
So really, the correct answer IS on the legal level. Make a set of laws which make it burdensome at best and completely unprofitable at worst, and then the incentives within the system aligns.
Agree with your point and the solution. Make it risky to operate - so that most VCs would wash their hands off due to legal risks. Kind of like what happened to the crypto space. But, it always gets worse before it gets better. Tons of rug pulls happened before SEC took action.
This is great sentiment. Companies can be stopped, and then the medusa grows another head. Kill the business model, make the brokering of data illegal, and if caught, fines would be paid directly to those effected. This would go a long ways to promoting privacy first.
Look at the silver lining - once the paperclip maximizers have crashed both modern civilization and the biosphere, it will be easy for any survivors to find privacy amid the metaphorical and actual ruins.
There is a weird fetish with Flock right now. Privacy advocates have been screaming at the public for 25 years now and suddenly the public cares and is obsessed with this one very specific company.
Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7.
I mean, cool, stop Flock, but don't stop there. Flock is very much not the final boss in this fight. The cynic in me says we will all get bored once Flock is off the radar though.
It’s easier to consider responses or solutions to specific problems, rather than to solve for a broad, general principle. You can see this in many areas of life. Solving for general principles requires group effort (usually); you can get buy-in from individuals if you csn focus them on specific cases or subsets. So the Floxk fetish is reasonable at this point, IMO.
There’s also nothing inherently wrong with carrying sensors in your pocket. The “wrong” is in the providers/manufacturers exploiting the position they put themselves in. Managing data is hard, and most people don’t want to do the necessary work most of the time, so the providers/manufacturers offer to do that for their users/customers. However, they also exploit their csretaker position by tresting the data like they own it too, and extracting profit.
If the solutions to the Flock problems could be framed such that other providers/manufacturers had to build systems that were “local first” or “private by default” (as in pre-internet home computing plus explicit, finegrained shsring consents), then it would also be fine to carry sensors. I want my fitness tracker and GPS. I just don’t want the data it generates used to build advertising profiles on me such that ads (and government mass surveillance dragnets) can follow my every other move.
This movement reminds me of the "protecting democracy" message that was run on the national stage that pailed against the backdrop of rising inflation.
Privacy is important just as democracy is important, but crime and lawlessness feel more immediate and will always take center stage.
Any message to try to address the spread of flock and flock-like business models have to address what replaces it. If the only choice people are given is either having flock, or car break-ins, then I think we can probably guess what people would choose.
SFPD at least, has credited flock and flock-like tech for why property crime has dropped so much in recent years.
Although I oppose the surveillance state, it's important to understand the motivations and incentives involved in the move toward Flock (and its eventual successors); until those are resolved, governments are going to be implementing Flock style programs with relatively tepid opposition.
Police departments are seriously understaffed in many major cities, and officers are much less efficient than they used to be. This has led to the decline of the beat cop, who provided a kind of ambient authority that helped create, both a sense and reality, of public order. People really want the sense (even more than the reality!) of public order; without that, they will jump to faddish solutions that promise it, regardless of the data for or against it.
The best counter to Flock is to provide alternatives to it, not just reject it while keeping the status quo going. We need a new, vitalized police culture, that shares mutual trust and engagement with the community.
Police departments aren’t understaffed. It’s a priority problem not a lack of resources problem. I live in a tech heavy, wealthy city. It’s small. No violent crime. Barely any crime at all. There’s occasional break ins and car break ins. When this happens it’s a big deal.
We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door to door and gathered it herself. Cops refused to do anything even though you can see the car and the plates from multiple videos, multiple angles.
Guess what the cops always have resources for? Hiding behind bushes and trees to ticket people going 5 over. Or at turns where they know they’ll get people before people see the cop car.
Our HOA came together and asked the police department about this. They gave us bullshit about how custody of evidence etc is hard and even if they put people in jail, the lenient judges will let them go anyway. It was fucked up.
Our HOA was going in hard about installing floc cameras everywhere. I had to fight hard not to get that done. One of the reasons I won wasn’t because privacy, it was because the cops literally were like unless we can directly pull video feeds from cameras, we won’t do much. And that access wasn’t available to those police department. At least at the time.
There have been many other such stories I’ve personally witnessed in the cities I’ve lived in.
Cops seem to have plenty of resources to bully people of color, seize assets and hide behind trees and bushes to ticket people, reduce the period of orange lights so people get more tickets etc. but never enough to actually do their jobs.
Baltimore has metric shittons of police cameras but it's still a dangerous shithole. Cameras don't stop idiot criminals from criming. Baltimore's police suck and the area sucks because there's massive unemployment, cameras aren't a panacea.
I agree that police department staffing is less of a real issue than people claim it is, and that many departments have target staffing levels that are artificially elevated. But I'm struck by your comment about cops "hiding behind bushes to ticket people going 5 over", because in the ultra-ultra-progressive inner-ring Chicago suburb in which I live, one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement.
On a daily basis, I see several cars that are going forty+ miles per hour over the speed limit, weaving between lanes. They go right past the cop and the cop doesn't care. Then someone going five over goes past the cop and the cop gives them a ticket. They go after the easy ones that fill their quotas, not the ones that actually make anyone safer.
> one of the chief complaints about policing over the last couple years has been the lack of traffic enforcement.
Which traffic enforcement though?
I really do not like the fact that lefts on red are not enforced. I have numerous times seen people run a red-red light infront of a cop car with no enforcement.
That said, people going 35 in a 30? Like I care. People weaving in between lanes? Yeah that seems much more dangerous.
I've noted this in the age verification debate, and in the Android developer verification debate as well.
Just denying the tradeoffs isn't productive, if tradeoffs affect others, just pushing your position disregarding the tradeoffs as fake or not important is divisive. In actuality I think that both parties become incentivized to solve the problems of the other group of people too, but as a centrist that position often gets pushback from both sides who seem to collaborate only indirectly from a place of adversarial competition and good vs evil framing, which I think is less productive than just recognizing the conflict and negotiating, but perhaps it's more engaging...
I followed the shooting at Brown University last year very closely. Brown's leadership was heavily criticized for having camera blind spots and not being able to track the shooter's exact movements through campus. I can understand why people with stewardship over the safety of their students/customers/constituents would make decisions to err on the side of tracking. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I understand it.
The criticism around that event, I believe, involved Brown University disablinf cameras trying to protect potential illegal immigrants being targeted by ice. It wasn't the lack of cameras. It was a purposeful disabling of said cameras that already existed.
Yes and so the real issue is that they outsourced to the wrong compan, gave up control of their camera feeds, and violated the privacy of their campusgoers. Had they just had their own CCTV system then this would have not happened.
Correct, whoever made the decision to create ICE, as it became a security risk that lead to deaths. Glad that's what you said, and no other valid interpretation.
While there were deaths, I didn't see any that were the result of a "security risk". I did see a whole lot of stupid people doing stupid things, and none of them were ICE agents, so I'm surprised there weren't more deaths.
It's a relatively new agency in name (2003), but it's not really all that new. It was formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and U.S. Customs.
A little know fact is that Biden deported more illegal immigrants then previous presidents with smaller budget and without killing them. He also deported higher amount if actual criminals in the set. So, you know, whatever before ICE is now was more effective.
Also, the abuses and violence are staggering. And they managed to deport or mistreat actual citizens, because they did not cared. Again, not effective.
Here is the problem - conservative and right wing people use "effective" as euphemism for "we want to see as much cruelty and abuse as possible".
This is a very common pattern; my university pushed through a ZeroEyes AI camera/open carry weapon detection contract within 2 weeks of a shooting at a nearby school, even though it’s trivial to bypass by hiding it; it’s most probably just (gruesome as it is to think about) a bad press insurance so if anything happened, they can say they had “state of the art AI detection” and they did all they could. No one wants to be the one caught not doing “all they could” against the media cacophony in the immediate aftermath.
Yep, here they admitted there were local revolutionary war re-enactors who were falsely flagged (although thankfully they didn't let it get past the first flag).
I recently did a dive into ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder i.e. sociopaths) and unsurprisingly most what's stopping them from outright killing people is the likelihood that they'd be caught. So one thing is clear is that as long as we have sociopaths and the like who treat crime purely as value/risk proposition some sort of powerful detective tooling will always be necessary.
Unfortunately automated surveillance is considered the best detective tool we have but in reality it doesn't seem to be the case with public self surveillance and good ol' park a policeman box in every neighborhood seems to outperform automated surveillance. So there's much more to this than "surveillance is bad or good" discussions we have right now.
With most of these things, people are for state power until they are victimized by it. It's a common pattern.
:D
I've had property stolen. Cameras generally won't help, and didn't help. Limiting ingredient is often not knowing who did it in any case-- in most places most common crime is committed by a tiny number of regular characters. Go look at the mountains of threads online where someone had a tracker enabled object stolen and knew exactly who had it only to have law enforcement do nothing.
that doesn't seem to be the case always, given the data on crime reporting:
"Patterns in police reporting for property crime during 2020–2023 were similar to those for violent crime. A quarter (25%) of all property victimizations in urban areas were reported to police, which was lower than the percentages in suburban (33%) and rural (36%) areas (figure 2).
Similar to overall property victimization, a lower percentage of other theft victimizations were reported to police in urban areas (20%) compared to suburban (28%) and rural (31%) areas."
"For violent crimes, in 1997, 7% of victims
stated that “Police wouldn’t help” as the reason they did not call the police. This more than
doubled to 16% by 2021. For property crimes, the corresponding rates were 12% in 1997 and 18% in
2021"
Police work for the State. The State orders them to work for the Public when it interests the State. Intervening in violent crime and property crime can be seen, cynically, as a PR move.
To be beholden to the State for justice and protection is fine when the State is beholden to the Public for their consent. Today, in the West, the Public has been so thoroughly disarmed, and /disrobed/, that consent is a formality, consent can no longer be withheld.
Look no further than Flock and FISA for the ongoing crisis of consent.
When cops are released from the State apparatus, they'll be given the respect and admiration they deserve. Until then, it's difficult to separate them from their incentive structure.
We need a law that says if you hold any data about a person, they must be notified when anyone accesses it, including law enforcement.
I used to work in criminal investigations. I understand how this might make investigation of real crime more difficult. But so does the fact that you need a warrant to enter someone's home, and yet we manage to investigate crime anyway.
Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company. It should require a warrant and notification. You could even make the notification be 24 hours after the fact. But it should be required.
The entities holding the information here are literally police departments. The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations. It's good to want things, though.
The information is not in any way restricted to use in active criminal investigations, and further, has been found to frequently be used for a variety of other purposes.
It's a bit like saying pornography is used in the study of human anatomy.
~jedberg is talking about a hypothetical law that would apply to ALPR data. In reply, you said "The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations." ("The information" here referring to ALPR data.) (You also said, "The entities holding the information here are literally police departments.", but I don't see that that's relevant unless we choose to believe that police departments are more deserving of public trust by default than any other organization.)
I was replying to the "used in active criminal investigations" part. Yes, the ALPR data managed by Flock is sometimes used in active criminal investigations. However, it's also used for many other things.
The many other things that it's used for supports ~jedberg's argument.
So we're clear, you believe there should be a law that, when a police department collects information about you during a criminal investigation, they should notify you directly that they've done so?
It does make sense. Police are absolutely not beyond reproach, and there's screwups all the time. They need to be held to a high standard.
It's also easy to imagine reasonable compromises, like a time delay where they only have to report after e.g. 48 hours, and allowing a system whereby a judge can issue a warrant to extend that delay.
Specifically, I believe that if information that is held by a private 3rd party I accessed by anyone, law enforcement or otherwise, that third party should be required to tell you that it was requested and by whom. Just like they can't put a gag order on a search warrant to your home, this hypothetical search would be exempt from gag orders.
> Your data should be an extension of your home, even if it's held by another company.
Nice idea, but at least in the U.S. (with the lone exception of LE obtaining cell phone location records), courts have consistently held that if you give your data to someone else, you are no longer entitled to an expectation of privacy in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
If you want your data to be considered an extension of your home, at least for now, keep it at home.
Nice idea (2), but many companies and govt agencies force one to give lots of data or you will not be receiving services, sometimes very important services.
I think the notion that data would be a home is beyond weak, but the explanation you gave for why isn't solid either, since the objects of data do not need to and in this case haven't consented.
That is, recordings of people in public settings (in some jurisdictions) are property of the recorder, but it still isn't a home (just imagine how that would work in some jurisdictions, someone takes a picture of you and it's trespassing? Would you be able to shoot them?)
Is there not some concept that utilizes cryptography in a way such that information about people is accessible, but if it's accessed, then the access request is added to a ledger (akin to blockchain) such that who made the access, when, and about whom becomes provably public knowledge?
And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.
Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right? But what you are saying is not just that LEA would need warrants to look at public recordings from a willingly cooperating camera owner, and that the warrants can't be gag orders (unless specified), but that the targets must be notified, even if the subject under search were someone else, the fact that I'm included in a recording would compel the LEA to notify me?
And how exactly would I be notified? Wouldn't that necessitate even more privacy invading features like facial recognition and a facial to contact information technology? Not an uncommon paradox.
Again, just want to understand the position, my position might leak as the question being leading, but I can't help it.
Much like you can't gag a search warrant on a home, you wouldn't be able to gag these orders either.
> And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.
True, but my proposal would require that they notify you.
> Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right?
No, but I'm saying this should apply to any time a 3rd party releases information to anyone, including law enforcement. In this case the Flock cameras feed into a private database. They should disclose when someone looks something up.
> And how exactly would I be notified?
Presumably if they can identify you then there would be a way to notify you. But those details could be left to the author of the bill.
My main point is that your data, when housed with a 3rd party, should be considered an extension of your home and offer the same guarentees and protections as the items actually in your home.
You can kind of circumvent that law by keeping the recordings in house.
What we have in argentina is an Habeas Data law, if someone has data about you, you can ask for it, (or ask it be amended or deleted. Pretty simple right?
The home bit is no go though. Maybe an extension of the self? Too flimsy though, there's enough strong of a case treating it as what it is, an image, a visual representation of a person. A home is a specific of a concept that means something else
Alternatively, one could create serious civil damages for those capturing surveillance imagery that causes various harms including false prosecution for any data they collected, even if it was unlawfully taken or used after it was collected. ... then let the liability work out the problem by making it too risky to run non-targeted mass surveillance apparatus.
This would avoid having to define what is and isn't a mass surveillance system. Any camera recording off your property would have a legal risk for the operator-- but if you're just recording locally and only using it to discourage or solve crime you're suffering the risk would be minimal and justified.
That will never happen in America without a focused political revolution because anarcho-libertarian techbro billionaires profit extensively from personal data trafficking and bought off the majority of politicians to keep it that way.
It sounds good but the implementation would be harder than achieving single payer healthcare that's better than what Medicare is now destroyed by for-profit prior authorizations and fake healthcare with lifetime limits.
What might be more productive is to suggest legal ways law enforcement can prevent and enforce the problems this was designed to stop. It will help you see where the laws are limited, what needs to be updated so you can balance the risk of privacy vs. the need to enforce laws (or the need for new laws all together). Right now we're osilcating between gaps criminals exploit and infringing on fundemental privacy rights.
Yes I think this site is not unique, I personally have at least 2 websites I have not shared anywhere with at least all of this information, that I am developing for my local community or just for myself. Its a subject worth discussing but I am also skeptical of the value of this link. I think maybe what is most worth considering is, "does this have value over deflock?" is it more accessible? Less overwhelming? I am not sure but I think that conversation would not be a great use of time in this particular space.
It's fundamentally a security camera, for many people. People buy them to see what's going on, record crimes for reporting, and to feel safer. I think there's significant overlap in people who want to feel safer and people being ok with the police being able to look through their cameras, since being able to record events, for the police, was part of the motivation for the purchase of a security camera. My frail elderly grandpa, who has seen his neighborhood go to shit with the reduced police funding, would definitely see this as a "nice feature".
IANAL, but if you are to take action it might be most prudent to do so non-destructively.
Putting a bag over the camera/solar panel or taking it down and returning the lost/abandoned property would leave it disabled just as well.
The added damage of outright destroying it would make no real difference to the company (might even just make them more money) but would make it easier to characterize the action as criminally motivated rather than an act of conscience in the public interest.
And you're conveniently unaware of the historical context of the origin of that phrase too, if we're to take you literally, since you seem to entirely misunderstand how the whole reason it was problematic was due to the inherent power dynamics
Indeed, one of the great wisdoms of history is that a mobs have no power. We are very wise men so we know that there are no peer reviewed controlled trials showing mobs having power. We call this thing Science.
People absorb the norms of their social class and start policing themselves and others without needing orders or hierarchical power dynamics.
Norm enforcement can spread faster and further than formal authority because lots of people can act on a signal whilst thinking they drew their own conclusions. Think of steve bannon's quote "politics is downstream of culture".
formal rank of the speaker is less important than that the signal comes from the socially legitimate tribe whose approval, language, and standard the subject is a member.
Lawmakers won't care until it is them and their kids that are being tracked by "hackers". Flock API's are poorly protected and the individual cameras are hackable as shown by Benn Jordan in multiple YouTube videos.
I’m all for mass surveillance of roadways, but I want to see results. Every day I see and hear people breaking laws with their vehicles in ways that make life worse for others around them.
Yep. Automate the whole thing and be done with traffic cops abusing their power to meet quotas or harass minorities. It would likely make car insurance cheaper too since people would drive more safely, and the cost of investigations and arbitration drops down with readily available video evidence.
You can at least question an officer in court. Automated stuff is incapable of testifying - which is why traffic camera "tickets" are not enforceable in every state.
Facial recognition performs so poorly on non-white people that you'd have to find the most racist officer saying "they all look the same to me" to get that degree of defectivity.
Just make quotas illegal. Make enforcing them a felony for command staff. Lock up body worn camera videos so they can't be used for "performance review." That footage belongs to the public, for legal purposes, it shouldn't be a "tool" outside of that.
More importantly, can I borrow you car? I have some, uh, stuff, to go do.
Mass surveillance is by definition oppressive. I think you mean to say you're in favor of targeted surveillance, targeted at criminals, who are on roadways. This is the distinction that's getting lost.
Give me a database of everywhere you have ever driven, and I will find multiple ways to make you look like a criminal.
We don't need mass surveillance for traffic control. It can be done by the police if they really wanted to do it. Truth is, they don't care enough about road safety. This is about surveillance of citizens for control. First step is just infrastructure setup - next step is using it to prosecute those who dare to challenge the rise of fascism.
Be an advocate for your own rights to privacy. Don't simply accept it as normalcy.
Why do people consistently and falsely believe that they have privacy in public settings? You are literally out in public. If you don't want your behavior in public to be observed, then either don't behave in such a way that you wouldn't want observed, or stay home.
UPDATE: don't conflate stalking with observation. These are not the same. You can observe, but you cannot intimidate.
Every entrance to my neighborhood has a Flock camera from my local police department. Tracking the exact time I enter and leave my home is at the very least right at this line you’re trying to draw.
What's the difference in outcome between passive stalking by having sufficient cameras to capture everyone's actions at all times and active stalking with a film crew?
It is intimidating and threatening to most normal people for their wearabouts to be tracked at all times, regardless of the mode.
Take this opportunity to learn that different people might have different thresholds to feel intimidated and that normal people don't feel comfortable being tracked at all times in real life, regardless of the mechanism by which it's being executed.
In the above example, maybe you feel uncomfortable because the film crew is following you around in broad daylight? Would you feel better if they stayed hidden like the flock cameras in this example?
They're not being tracked at all times in real life. They're potentially being tracked in public.
I get that some people have a desire for privacy in public. And I'm even sympathetic to it. However, with the exception of the EU, privacy in public not is a right, nor is it a thing most people believe they possess. (And even ECHR Article 8 has a carveout for recording public activities for legitimate purposes.)
If you think you should have such privacy rights, by all means, use the political process to achieve it. But note that it's not cost-free, and there will be tradeoffs.
In the film crew example, what is the difference if the crew is sufficiently far away from you such that you won't know? The paparazzi already do it to celebrities, seems reasonable for individuals to just track each other at a distance if we're all okay with your proposed path.
> seems reasonable for individuals to just track each other at a distance if we're all okay with your proposed path.
They often do. What am I gonna do, run up to anyone who's taking cell phone videos that might have me in it and try to force them to stop recording? That would make me look unhinged.
It’s a false equivalence. Passive surveillance cameras aren’t the same as having a bunch of annoying people trailing me, which gives rise to the concern for the personal safety of me and my family. So I reject the comparison.
What about if/when those cameras are no longer really passive, and everything they see gets autonomously compiled into a dossier on your activities and movements?
Would you mind if I parked near your house, such that every morning, when you drove past, I could follow you. To work, to the store, to the gym, you know, wherever.
Then on the way home I'll park where I left off. If anyone asks me I'll them everything I know about you. It's "public" information after all.
Having this surveillance done by human beings rate limits the process to, in theory, focus it on actual criminals. Requiring warrants for the more invasive and persistent techniques adds another layer of accountability.
You're bootstrapping your argument with an assumption that there's something to account for. Public activities are public. You're shifting the accountability from the actor to the observer.
I’m curious if there were some consortium of all private businesses with their own surveillance cams deciding to aggregate their footage could it be stopped?
I worry about this. It's easy enough to go around putting bags over flock cameras, but it would be harder to justify targeting ones that just maybe are doing double duty.
We need to find a way to make partnering with flock a liability.
Here's a modest proposal: what if we made it a serious crime for anyone to retain automatically-recorded surveillance footage, or data derived from it, for longer than some limited period of time (say, 7 days) unless said footage is released to the public within that timeframe?
That is, you can put up cameras wherever you want, but you can't gain any kind of competitive advantage by doing so.
I think the public would be more alert to the dangers of mass surveillance if the magnitude of that surveillance was more obvious. And if everyone was watching everyone, at least it wouldn't as easily abused for purposes such as selective prosecution or blackmail.
For the Canadians sitting at home, tut tutting more American foolishness that could never happen up here... Flock started their expansion into Ontario this very month[1].
Live in a neighborhood that privately installed cameras. The city also installed cameras. Before the camera's cars used to come and raid houses and worker's trucks. It was quite common. The neighborhood has statistics and tracks how many stolen cars / plates drove through the neighborhood. All crime statistics dropped, police show up and arrest people. Saying its an illusion of safety is bullshit. It's all fake until you're a victim of a crime. We need our own way to fight back against gangs, etc. I'd rather have more cameras and less police. Also lets get some drones as well, they work fantastic in SF. The city owns the data its not getting sold. It gets erased unless a crime is reported.
> Flock advertises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a culture of mistrust and preemptive suspicion. As the EFF warns, communities are being sold a false promise of safety - at the expense of civil rights* (EFF).
...
> True safety comes from healthy, empowered communities; not automated suspicion. Community-led safety initiatives have demonstrated significant results: North Lawndale saw a 58% decrease in gun violence after READI Chicago began implementing their program there. In cities nationwide, the presence of local nonprofits has been statistically linked to reductions in homicide, violent crime, and property crime (Brennan Center, The DePaulia, American Sociological Association).
These are incredibly weak arguments. I haven't personally looked into how good Flock cameras are at actually preventing crime and catching criminals, but if this is the best counterargument their detractors can come up with, it makes me suspect they're actually pretty good.
Crime is extremely bad. Mass surveillance is bad too, especially if abused, but being glib or dismissive about the real trade-offs is counterproductive.
Also, recording in public spaces (or private spaces that you own) is an important and fundamental right just like the right to privacy; simply banning this kind of surveillance would also infringe on civil liberties in a different way. I agree that laws and norms need adjusting in light of new technology, but that discussion needs more nuance than this.
I also thought it was interesting that the author basically argues Flock cameras are too effective at figuring out where criminals are, but then also argues they aren’t effective enough at reducing crime.
An academic study about the use of surveillance technology at the Los Angeles Police Department, the book documents the LAPD's use of data brokerage firms (e.g., Palantir) that collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, as well as automatic license plate readers like Flock, and Suspicious Activity Reports generated by police and civilians, which include reports of mundane activities such as using binoculars, drawing diagrams, or taking pictures or "video footage with no apparent aesthetic value." All this data ultimately gets parked in Fusion Center facilities, built in the aftermath of 9/11, where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies collaborate to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information. As the author observes, "The use of data in law enforcement is not new. For almost a century, police have been gathering data, e.g., records of citations, collisions, warrants, incarcerations, sex offender and gang registries, etc. What is new and important about the current age of big data is the role in public policing of private capitalist firms who provide database systems with huge volumes of information about people, not just those in the criminal justice system."
It's taxpayer-funded dragnet-warrantless surveillance, data harvesting, and stalking. And it is local elected officials' deliberate voluntary or bribed choice to invite Big Mommy into the lives of their constituents and people passing through. The anti-privacy doomers don't get to force their invasive anti-values on everyone else who wants respect for and to preserve their right to not be autonomously surveilled and monitored every single second when not in a business or organization premises.
Boy would it just be terrible if someone hacked into the flock network and manipulated all the camera results ever so slightly. A letter here a number there, license plates or matches never quite lining up. It would take years for them to find the source of the “bugs”. Not saying I know anyone doing this or anything, just saying it would be oh soooooo terrible.
The best way to block Flock is probably to find a way to track billionaire celebs like Taylor Swift and Elon Musk.
If they were able to successfully change laws so they can fly anonymously they can probably change laws on cameras in public places, at least for them anyway.
I understand the privacy argument. There are a few questions though:
1) Suppose there will be another shooting. Don't you want to know what exactly has happened before you go to the protest? Suppose your child will be hurt. Wouldn't you do anything to capture the culprit? How exactly would you feel if the police would tell you that they couldn't get the video with culprits face, because watching it would be a violation of someone's privacy?
2) Everyone has a camera in their pocket. Someone is filming all the time. Police can seize this video. Isn't that a privacy risk? Should we ban cameras in smartphones?
3) Should we even be private in the public? Doesn't privacy in public spaces encourage crime? I will die on a battle to keep the privacy in my home, but in public? I personally prefer to be safe, than private, in public.
4) What about private cameras near homes filming 24/7? Are those risks for privacy?
5) People in power will always be corrupt, have bad intentions, will use public goods for personal gain. Should we disregard broader benefits because there will be isolated cases where those benefits will be exploited?
1) If someone killed my child, I would probably want to kill them back. And yet we don't consider that sufficient reason to make revenge killing legal. The wishes of the victims need to be weighed against the cost it imposes on everyone else, including those who are innocent. The cost of violating everyone's right to privacy, the social impacts of mass surveillance, and the risk of that data being abused.
2) > Isn't that a privacy risk?
Yes, it is!
> Should we ban cameras in smartphones?
No? How about making it difficult for the police to seize everyone's videos without a good reason? We already do that for phone videos, it's called warrants. But Flock doesn't. They just ask cops to enter any arbitrary "reason" text into a HTML textbox and instantly get access to everyone's videos. And if the people explicitly said they don't want those specific cops to have access, like many people decided about ICE? Well, just ask the next county over and use their system, it's not checked in any way.
Privacy is not "convenience", I'm not sure how you arrive at that. And it's also not mine, it's everyone's.
I don't want children to die (obviously). I also don't want governments to track the movement of protestors and dissidents, police to stalk their ex-girlfriends, etc.
I don't think the effectiveness of mass AI surveillance in preventing crime is high enough to justify the drawbacks.
I am somewhat skeptical that either the ACLU or EFF are effective organizations for this cause. The ACLU in particular have drifted significantly from a civil liberties focus, and EFF's privacy track-record for corporate run surveillance has never been the best and of late they seem to be following the ACLU away from civil liberties.
There is an increasingly popular idea that all libertarianism, including civil libertianism, is inherently partisan and specifically right-wing. I think it has done a lot of damage to these organizations' ability to effectively fight this and other issues. I've shifted a lot of my support for ACLU/EFF towards IJ in recent years.
I could be convinced to support public cameras if access to the footage was tightly controlled and only used for solving serious crimes, but government officials and flock themselves have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted to use them in a responsible manner. It’s too powerful of a tool to put in the hands of untrustworthy individuals
If someone breaks into my car and a Flock camera sees it, is their right to privacy in a public space more important than my right to not have my property get stolen?
Edit: not a low effort comment. This is something you should all read and demand the same of. I consternated on how not to call your regime moronic. It _is_ moronic that you don’t have these basic protections and we keep having to listen to you all whine about that.
The "Take Action" section is missing the most obvious solution. Everyone just goes and takes down a camera. We as a society do not consent to this use of public space and simply have a national "Take out the trash day."
There is no way Flock could practically ramp up production or manpower to replace the entire fleet before failing to meet contractual requirements with their customers that keep money flowing in.
Who are you to speak on behalf of society? Wouldn't society also be better off if those who stole your car got caught?
Further, I'm not sure why there is an expectation of privacy in public places. You don't have to consent to being filmed when you're walking down a public sidewalk.
Agreed. Flock has been a key contributor in solving numerous crimes. I'm happy for Flock to be in my county and would like the police to have more access to technology like this, not less.
Does your country also have a recurring problem of police shooting unarmed citizens? If not, it probably helps to understand the dynamics of why the police are not widely trusted here
I am not American, but in my extremely dangerous country we have many privately-operated cameras and I don’t know a single person who is against them. We also have strict privacy laws.
So I was disappointed by what felt like very weak arguments in the article. Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused. The solution is to fix the abuse problem.
I’d like to hear stronger arguments against these devices, so that I’m better informed locally.
> Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused.
This isn't your life pro tip to get you some additional 20% discount on the next McDonald's order, or some ethical kind of abuse that gets you your needed treatment, because the healthcare system is just too nonexistent to care, though.
Any criticism against the use of surveillance technology needs to resort to the rhetoric of COULD, because any other choice of words would put the final nail in any surveillance companies' coffin, with evidence from either whistleblowers or circumvented security issues.
It's certainly hard to look behind the curtains - fair, but in a world where the top companies are selling advertisements by accumulating and correlating large-scale tracking information from every person on earth, regardless whether they're users of the products or not, it should be much harder to shrug off such a possibility as dystopian nonsense than to see it as the fucked up reality (circumvention of fundamental rights included) that it is.
No, the solution is to fix the societal issues leading people to resort to crime. Surveillance cameras are not a solution, they are a band-aid placed several steps away from the wound.
Without that, we are quickly spiraling into the dystopia where privacy is gone, and when the wrong person gets access to the data, entire populations are threatened.
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