Flock haters cross political divides to remove error-prone cameras | Hacker News Reader

Flock haters cross political divides to remove error-prone cameras

arstechnica.com

47 pointsBender10 comments

But how do you fight back not against municipalities - but corporations deploying these?

Sure, you might get your small town to remove them throughout their own land, but Lowes and Home Depot will still set up their own Flock cameras on their own contracts nationwide.

Lowes is responsible for ~8 Flock cameras in and out of my local shopping center.

smashy smashy.

I think that the only way is to stop shopping at places that do this, and to tell those stores that you're doing so.

You might get, in a somewhat politically homogeneous community, enough people to boycott one store to make a difference, though frankly that shop might have to already strike residents as objectionable for some other reason, like its owner being a nasty person or something. But it isn’t realistic to expect people to boycott a whole shopping center. That’s why political organizing to enact regulation that can side-step consumer choice, is a (slightly) more realistic option.

Watching the inline video [0] made my blood boil. The officer acts all high and mighty "I'm not going to share the evidence with you because you are lying to me". This is but a small example of the overall incompetence and laziness of the police in this country to say nothing of the ego-tripping.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zTYO7ib-cM

Right. When presented with evidence of someone selling upwards of 50-100 stolen Macbooks and a similar number of phones, including my own, my police department's first reaction was:

"Well, he probably didn't steal them himself"

And when I, somewhat confused, asked, "isn't knowingly selling stolen goods also a crime?", "How do you know he is doing it knowingly?" "Hmmm, the fact that none of them have chargers or accessories and that the IMEI of every phone has the last two digits swapped so people can't search for them, but so they look legit?"

"We're not going to investigate this."

Great. Thanks for your concern.

Does anyone know of any playbook that has had success in getting these shut down? Any way of getting the city’s money back partway through a contract? Seems most cities use the excuse of “well, we already sunk the cost, so we can’t remove them now or it’s just a waste of money”. I see Sarah Hamid with EFF has commented. Maybe I’ll reach out and see if they have a “Project 2025 but for Deflocking Your Town”

Many cities have removed cameras before their contract was up (though that didn’t stop Flock from putting them back up in Evanston!). You can also target the next time the contract is up for renewal - gathering community support takes time anyway. You can focus on removing some or all cameras, or on the contract language (ACLU has a good resource on this that I can’t find right now). Municipalities should care about the liability they’re being exposed to - some states like Illinois have laws against sharing data with the federal government, and there’s a federal case going through the courts now.

Alternative, non negative title: "Privacy advocacy against Flock-cameras cross political divides"

I miss the days when American conservatives actually seemed to car a little about the idea of libertarian-ism ... even a little.

But no, now when they're in power its a complete abandonment of any libertarian ideals.

I'll take a few local occurrences / defectors from the proposed autocracy as a good-ish sign if only because there are are few.

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