I think the issue with Flock isn't that they're a joke security wise the issue is that they exist. If you want to police somebody you don't have to police everyone. I'd argue watching my location at all times is unreasonable search.
I don't get why we treat this any differently. The only difference is they're not as obvious.
stalking requires some kind of menacing or whatnot. i seriously doubt a judge would grant a restraining order just because you think someone is following you without any interaction.
>Stalking is a crime of power and control. It is a course of action directed at an individual that causes the victim to fear for their safety, and generally involves repeated visual or physical proximity, nonconsensual communication, and verbal, written, or implied threats.
In most states that requires a license with actual professional standards being met to obtain and maintain one. It does not entitle you to harass someone.
> stalking requires some kind of menacing or whatnot.
Repetition, threats, and fear. The standard is "would most reasonable people perceive these actions in the same way?"
The better question is, in the cities that have installed flock, is the crime rate actually down? And can we make FOIA requests to see how often and for what the police have queried the system to receive data? I may not be able to challenge the existence of the system with a TRO but I can constrain police use of it; hopefully, to the point it is no longer economically viable for them to operate it.
It's how much of journalism works: they're labelled "paparazzi" when it's negative-sentiment, or conversely "investigative journalists" when it's positive-sentiment. If you outlaw private citizens observing happenings in public spaces, you outlaw much of journalism. The targets of journalism, practically by definition, do not consent to being observed, analyzed, and reported on ("Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations"–Orwell).
And certainly the first to be arrested—ironically, if it was entities like Flock you meant to target—would be journalists observing, in public, police and LEO actions. There are a lot of powerful people eager to outlaw that today.
Sure... you just can't charge people for the service. What does Flock do again?
If being pervasively spied on by an increasingly fascist government doesn't make you fear for your safety you might want to brush up on your history...
...this is completely up to interpretation. again, just being followed isn't a crime nor does it violate privacy as long as it occurs in public space.
i could say someone on the subway was stalking me because they have the same schedule as me and commute at the same time.
thought experiment: >> if they do not want their conversations in their living room recorded, parsed by automated language models running in our datacenters, and added to their permanent record, they shouldn't have a window to a public space that vibrates. All we are doing is being in a public space, spending billions of VC money to point laser microphones at all homes 24/7 collecting data that anyone in this public space could have collected. You can not outlaw that without outlawing 5 year old Timmy riding his tricycle down the sidewalk, because we are using his right to see the light from his lamp being reflected by the houses, to justify why our creepy business model isn't a violation of millions of peoples privacy. You can't have a reasonable expectation of privacy that allows little Timmy to see, but forbids our corporation to spy on everyone, not in america. We also send electromagnetic waves out on one side off your house and collect them on the other, so we can see you move inside your house. It is basically like ham radio, anyone could do it, little Timmy sends electromagnetic waves through your house when he talks to his friend on a walkie talkie. You think Timmy shouldn't be allowed to have a walkie-talkie? We just send them through all the homes, all the time, everywhere. No we are not on your property all our devices are in public spaces <<
The idea that, if a single piece of information could be collected by a human in a public space, then mass scale collection of that and similar information at all times and in all public spaces, for any purpose by a fully automated behemoth is fine, is insane.
The USA needs to amend its constitution to define the right to privacy in a way that declares mass surveillance and systematic profiling using non-consensual data gathering at scale illegal for being the nefarious violation of basic human rights that it is, before they completely loose what little privacy they have left when they hole up in their homes.
There is zero chance of any amount of government in these United States cooperating in any fashion large enough to change the actual Constitution. Zero.
Electoral/constitutional politics isn't going to protect us. "International law" isn't real and neither are other laws. It's time to update threat models to include this fact. The threat-actors are definitely aware of it and using it to their advantage while relying on us to keep thinking on terms of the contrived systems they maintain.
Being creeped out by corporate stalkers and an invasive government seems to be something that a lot of "regular people" of all political allegiances have in common.
Then 3/4 of the states have to ratify it.
I don't think you could get half of states to agree the sky is blue let alone 3/4.
[edit] The Equal Rights Amendment has been in progress since 1972 and while they somehow managed to get 3/4 of states to agree (Virginia agreed in 2020) the 7- and later 10-year deadline built into the bill had long elapsed. And 5 states later tried to rescind their ratifications which isn't really covered in the constitution in the first place.
That one says simply:
> Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is godspeed.
Us foreigners still have to deal with Americans spying on us. (And other countries spying on us.) And Americans still have to deal with non-American organisations spying on them.
It doesn’t limit what a private company can do. And Americans love private companies with full control over their daily lives.
For a historic example of limiting private actors, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...