Flock cameras, America's bipartisan issue?
Kudos to the guy, who single-handedly doing what almost all politicians miserably fail at.
Sweden also have traffic monitors that monitor highways around cities, border exists and tunnels, and also license plate readers for toll roads and bridges (also often used for parking). Those two generally have a much higher privacy cost than traffic cameras.
Cameras have been installed to fine cars running red lights. The city then reduces the length of the yellow to catch more people and offset the high cost of the cameras. The shortened yellows cause increased crashes and fatalities.
Net-net the track record in the states is not great.
One example https://www.koaa.com/news/news5-investigates/news-5-investig...
Its going to be unpopular but yes i think so. Traffic cameras, besides very few use cases, are completely useless (just like speed limits in general). Plus it's a huge temptation for local authorities to turn it into a cash cow and put it anywhere they please regardless of necessity. Italy is rife with those for example.
Now people can go faster while being safer.
The accident rate from before to after the installation of a camera has an average reduction of around 25% in reducing deaths in traffic. If someone don't believe it they can download the public data themselves and redo the math.
Sweden also do not have traffic cameras on highways, most likely because they are ineffective in reducing deadly outcomes at those speeds. The chance of surviving a frontal collision at 100km/h is highly unlikely, so the cost of installation a camera is better spent on roads with lower maximum speeds where the reduction in average speed actually have an effect on outcomes.
Try to forbid movement in the area and you can reach 100% reduce in deaths.
Statistics and data doesn't tell you the whole picture and often skewed.
Most crimes in Sweden are committed by "refugees" by huge margin, but good luck doing something about it or let alone talk about it publicly. But hey, lets install another camera to have everyone to slow down and exacerbate traffic conditions further down.
The obvious win in places like the US is that being pulled over is one of the most dangerous thing that ever happens to the common person, as they are exposed to a psychopath with a gun who is trained that the most important thing is to optimize every interaction to maximize his chance of 'making it home to his family' and if a policeman shoots everything that moves (up to and including, falling acorns) because he 'fears for his life' he will largely get away with it. So it is a nice alternative to that.
For those who downvote - lets just forbid movement to reach 100% reduce in movement related injuries, is that your strategy?
Don't agree with the company, but I don't find a suit here ridiculous. If my job put up cameras, and my form of protest was to deface and disable them, I'd get fired. This isn't a job, it's government, but it's similar in my head. The people with the authority to do something did it.
Part of putting shit in public is that it now has to interact with the public. If you want your stuff pristine, I would think you should not put it in public.
Maybe the law disagrees with me here, and it probably does because this country bends over backwards for companies, but that's how I see it.
If you interfere with the business model of a large company, they'll eventually figure out something to criminally charge you with.
Felony contempt of business model, and all that.
Isn't this a form of graffiti?
Removing paint takes a long time. Removing glue doesn't take a long time. Removing a sticky note takes almost no time.
If I leave a sticky note on your car, is that graffiti? Is glue graffiti?
I shouldn't have expected much more, though, to be fair. There's a reason I don't use nextdoor.
The funny thing is the people calling anti-Flock people "paranoid". Well, I don't believe in dash cams or ringing my house with surveillance cameras and peering at the footage all day and all night. I think _those_ are the paranoid ones. What happened to just living your life and not worrying about everything?
And at the very least - why can't you search the Transparency Portal? You have to try each and every agency name. Let's try https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ ...
<Error> <Code>NoSuchKey</Code> <Message>The specified key does not exist.</Message> <Key>index.html</Key> <RequestId>[redacted]</RequestId> <HostId>[redacted]</HostId> </Error>
Has been like that for a year plus, at least.
Was it different in the past? It seems like it'd be beneficial to Flock and their customers to make obtaining this information as obtuse as possible, while maintaining the vaguest appearance of "transparency". If they could charge you $10 per search, they probably would.
As an aside - can I ask why you left Flock? I assumed that the people who would've wanted to work there would be fully invested into the idea. What changed your mind?
The Flock of my recruitment process would be a lot less problematic. There was discussion of the obvious, the surveillance "state". But everything was a high ground of ethics and legality, ideas were supposedly run through groups to discuss "not just whether we could, but whether we should", protecting individuals whose data was collected by Flock but had no safety or LE purpose, retention, sharing controls ...
... the reality was much more "mask off". "Eliminate all crime, using Flock". Very Airbnb'ish. "We know your jurisdiction doesn't allow you to share this data. It's not our job to enforce that on our platform; if you're sharing it, that's not our concern - you'll still have access to all the tools to do so." Sales worked with Agencies who weren't allowed to gather data themselves, weren't directly allowed to partner with Flock for cameras, were asked where they saw or believed they'd most want said cameras, and Flock would aggressively work with businesses, HOAs, other government entities in those areas, and get them onboard, and then go back to the Agency saying "Hey, guess what, we know you're not allowed to collect this, but these customers are, and you're able to share their data."
That didn't sit well with me - there was nothing actively illegal Flock were doing, but they were openly helping Agencies flout the spirit of laws constraining them while staying within the letter (in the above examples, HOAs and others would often get deeply subsidized, at least, installations, knowing that Flock would be able to get a bigger contract with an Agency that would otherwise have no over very limited means of working with them).
These things, coupled with Garrett's "vision" that, he emphasized repeatedly, was his literal vision, "Eliminate all crime with Flock", were too much (and I think lead to some of their even more troublesome initiatives now, like "Have AI look for potential suspicious vehicle movements, even without a reported incident, and have it alert officers to go investigate in realtime", with talk of that being extended to conversations and audio).
Evidence -> Crime -> Suspect
DoJ model:
Suspect -> Evidence -> Crime
Ideal model:
Crime -> Evidence -> Suspect
I live in a county where the county seat is <15k people (<40k in the entire county). There are two camera locations listed on deflock - four cameras total, since they face both directions. In the past month, I’ve discovered an additionally six locations (twelve cameras), all of which show signs of having been very recently installed.
I went to add them to Deflock, but their process requires an OSM account. I wasn’t able to do that on the side of the road, and haven’t gotten back to it yet.
If you find yourself with some time, there is now a DeFlock app that helps with mapping. It also includes locations where people suspect there might be a camera, though that is limited to about a third of the states so far.
Either way it doesn't make sense to me why hardware stores are the biggest private use case.
It's like having a Ring doorbell and sharing the feed with the police, which is also pretty popular in some areas. If you trust your local police to ethically fight crime, why not help them out?
The reality is these guys are scared of us. And that's behind inane airport security, militarization of police, the ICE raids.
Years and years ago read a heretic economist that comment that highly unequal societies spend huge amount of money on security. Enough it has negative effects on their economy. This is really not a good thing for the rest of us.
You’re right. It’s a start. There’s also https://www.deflock.me
But this is a good point, people get upset when government is perceived to screw them over and not upset enough when the private sector does it. In practice, the private sector screws over the public quite a bit.
Companies at least risk significant consequences if they start tear gassing children. For the most part the worst they can do is screw you out of some money, which is not great, but obviously better than imprisonment and the like.
Everyone with even a quarter of a brain can recognize that the extreme data collection is a ticking time bomb. This WILL be leaked. This WILL be used to deny people's rights. This WILL lead to financial loss for people.
It's only a matter of when.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-age-automobiles-and-truc...
How many vehicles are registered but never driven? According to what source?
The statistics said the average age of light vehicles was 12.8 years. The average age of passenger cars was 14.5 years. And Consumer Reports said 32 of 44 brands offered some form of wireless data connection in 2018.[1] This implied 12 brands or more offered vehicles without wireless data connections.
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/automotive-technology/who-ow...
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
I do think that's an important distinction though; if I have a camera and record a public space, that's not an issue. If the government sets up a bunch of cameras, that's an issue, whether or not it's ICE, the FBI, or someone else using the cameras. I can't imagine the government will set up cameras and do non-scary things with it.
They'll have to track me the old-fashioned way, by my phone.
Once there will be a few high-profile cases around telemetry data being used, there will be much more outcry there.
This seems like an unsupported assumption. Lots of people like them. Anyone who wants policing to be effective and cares about crime / public safety would like them to have the best tools.
This depends on what the “cost” is for this “safety,” no?
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
Ben Franklin's Famous 'Liberty, Safety' Quote Lost Its Context In 21st Century [0]
(it was about the legislature being able to legislate [taxes])
[0] https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
But surely, it's not the entire world that's suddenly experiencing these waves of perceived crises, right? The statistics to justify tough-on-crime enforcement are useful for the proponents, but it's not the statistics that prompted them to act. They have their own reasons, and some marketable justifications just happened to be lying around. If they weren't there, they would find some other numbers or some other category of criminals that must be urgently pursued, anything to justify the power grabs. Reducing crime won't stop them.
The reality, which might I remind everyone does not care about their opinion, is this: crime has been trending down for decades. Police budgets have been increasing for decades. Many police departments are over funded.
It doesn't. Simply giving the police more stuff doesn't garuantee they will be more effective. They might be LESS effective, if they, say, have a culture of abusing their tools.