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> People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?

It's not binary.

People are absolutely willing to sacrifice some of their freedoms to save lives. That's why we have speed limits, seat-belt and helmet laws, automobile safety regulations, DWI laws, etc.

have you seen how anyone online reacts when speeding or red light cameras are installed? or when parking becomes discouraged for sake of pedestrians or residents?

i am somewhat convinced that Americans views on cars is like that of guns, a absolute right that can and will not be infringed no matter how many must die

cars are more of a necessary “evil” than guns so the comparison is a little extreme so i don’t think the infringement of movement to cars is entirely irrational or unmetered, esp when in 99% of this country a car is absolutely required to live

> have you seen how anyone online reacts when speeding or red light cameras are installed? or when parking becomes discouraged for sake of pedestrians or residents?

That didn't address what the poster wrote, it's just a cheap reddit style of internet arguing that doesn't add anything. OP is right, society in general tolerates a bunch of regulations as to what and where and how they can drive.

Deaths from road accidents are (somewhat) more tolerated than say murder because of the enormous utility of cars. This is not bewildering to anybody who is not being disingenuous.

i am plainly disagreeing with the assertion that people are unwilling to give up more freedoms of driving to save lives based off my anecdotal experiences online seeing how ppl seem to on avg react to such regulations being passed

>People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom

Given that we (societally, rather than like, you, I or I imagine most of the people reading this here) seem perfectly willing to sacrifice personal freedoms elsewhere (that flock was ever deployed, the past few years rollout of age gates on websites, etc), how can you conclude that with cars its unwillingness to sacrifice personal freedom rather than entrenched economic interests driving (lol) the lack of change with cars?

> People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?

We are all different, and I think where we each land on the security <--> privacy continuum will depend on who we are.

This is also true of constitutional rights. The US constitution was written by a small group of wealthy white men. At the time of its drafting, some people were considered property and had no freedom. Women didn't have the same rights as men and were not allowed to vote. Where the framers landed on the security <--> privacy continuum may have been a very different place than many US residents would land today. Rape, murder, property crimes, etc... even today some groups are much more often victims than others. Safety is a much larger concern for some groups than others.

I just feel like you are painting with a very broad brush when it comes to "people."

>We are all different, and I think where we each land on the security <--> privacy continuum will depend on who we are.

I feel very comfortable saying that it has less to do with who you are and more to do with how much you've and/or the people around you have been on the business end of any sort of enforcement system or you've seen how the sausage is made.

There's demographic correlations to an extend of course but I feel very comfortable saying that Popeyes employees and fine gun collectors (i.e. two groups that are probably pretty far apart on just about everything) both land a heck of a lot closer to "the framers" than HN, Reddit and the "western white collar internet" generally does.

> that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains.

It might come as a shock, but there's nothing guaranteeing private movement in public in the US. It is totally legal for people to whip out their phone and start filming you in public. People can set up cameras on their property and film the road outside their house.

In fact, many of the municipalities that have "ditched" still have loads of flock cameras that they cant remove because they're on private property owned by the property owners.

There is this, which isn't enough but makes it clear the door is not shut on this argument.

https://law.stanford.edu/2018/06/22/supreme-court-defends-pr...

> The Court decided that a person has a “legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements.”

and

> "A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere."

In my view, the individual right to document anything one may observe in public is significantly different from tax dollars being spent to record everything that's visible in public, analyze it with AI, and then cross-reference it across an extended period to track the movements of law abiding Americans.

It's unreasonable to think you won't appear in someone's camera lens at any given moment while out in public. It's not at all unreasonable to assume your patterns of life won't be tagged and cataloged for weeks on end, for whatever reason, by a private or public entity.

You're right there's not enough precedent here yet, but we shouldn't let the current precedent of there being almost no regulation on this stuff remain.

Doubt that anyone is concerned with a random person catching a portion of your face while they're taking a picture in public. Instead, it's opposition to being tracked over time by a centralized entity like a private company or government agencies.

>At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents.

in 2025 in NYC 235 people died in auto accidents. in 1900 in NYC, 200 people died in horse related accidents. As the population has quadrupled in that time, the death rate has dropped substantially. Automobiles claim all those saved lives, "innocent" & criminal alike.

Medical advances have a lot to do with saving those lives. Many injuries that would have been fatal in 1900 are survivable now.

this is ice cream = shark bites levels of critical thinking

> If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent in homicides.

Im not advocating for these cameras at all, but I dont think this is a very good line of thinking. The drop started before Flock, but that doesnt mean that they arent beneficial and currently helping lower the rate even further.

To rich people, the privacy attack isn't an issue. We already track their private jets, how is this any different?

There are rich people who charter private jets instead of own them. Their personal whereabouts aren't being tracked in the air. (They get to skip the entirety of TSA screening for these charters, too.)

But Flock tracks them on the ground when they get in their big S Mercedes after arriving at their third vacation home in Aspen.

Flock also tracks the wealthy who can't afford charter a jet, but who can afford to buy seats on the fanciest side of the curtain.

Flock tracks the doing-alright folks in business class.

Flock tracks those aspires to reach these levels: It even tracks the temporarily-disadvantaged billionaires who work soulless factory jobs and stuggle to keep up on the lease for their Black Express RAM 1500 Quad Cab, who rail against taxing the people who actually do have money as if that would ruin their own lives.

Flock tracks Joey who manages the sandwich shop down the way.

Flock tracks everyone.

By the time we get down to the point of mentioning that "everyone" includes the subset of people who are criminals, that part almost seems like a bug instead of a feature.

>We already track their private jets

After the Elon Musk and Taylor Swift outcry rich people can now exempt themselves from being tracked

https://gizmodo.com/congress-just-made-it-way-harder-to-trac...

> 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents.

1/6 of those were pedestrians. 1/6 of those were motorcyclists. 1/2 of those were people driving drunk. 1/2 of those were single vehicle accidents. Young men with high horsepower cars are a significant factor in many of these.

You shouldn't use the statistic to infer "innocence." The picture of what type of accidents lead to fatalities of often more complicated than people would like to assume.

If you die of a heart attack while driving; then yep, you're in that statistic as well. It's _every_ fatality on the road.

A better statistic might be 222,000 people in 2023 died due to "unintentional accidents." We could save 20% of those people by simply outlawing ladders or being more than 6' off the ground without appropriate safety equipment.

Thank you for providing some logic in an otherwise disruptive and manipulating post. Not to mention the incredible utility that cars give.

Not to say we shouldn't be bringing these numbers down, however that doesn't seem like's OPs goal which sounds like propaganda.

FYI when cops arrive at a homicide scene, they don't go looking for the FLOCK camera's, they go looking for people who have RING cameras and businesses that have security cameras. Anything that is within sight of the crime scene is where they start.

If you think FLOCK is an issue, you're barking up the wrong tree. You can remove all the FLOCK camera's you want and it won't change the already overwhelming passive surveillance that's already in place.

We crossed the Rubicon decades ago when people gave up their ability to move without being tracked for speculative gains when they started using smartphones religiously.

Also, the passive surveillance has resulted in several high profile killers like LISK and Bryan Kohberger being caught. So as much bad as you think it does, there are clear cases where its helped crack decades old serial killings and put horrifically violent people in jail. I think we can both agree we don't want those people out walking freely in our society.

> So as much bad as you think it does, there are clear cases where its helped

You can "justify" so much with that sentence, that it becomes meaningless.

Also, it won't hide the fact that this surveillance infrastructure can cause much much more harm then it prevents. We've seen what it might do in repressive states and we see today that even those states which represented the idea of individual freedom on this planet, you are only one election away from madness.

>> "it won't hide the fact that this surveillance infrastructure can cause much much more harm then it prevents."

"can cause much much more harm."

Cars kill way more people than guns per year. Where do you draw the line on something as subjective as this? It has the capability to cause harm but has it to the degree you're talking about? Its debatable.

Also, taking a serial killer who murdered 8 women and dismembered several of them off the streets to me outweighs quite a bit of harm. But that's just me.

Serial killers are rare and limited in how many people they can realistically kill. We already have governments in the world who use increasing surveillance technology to crack down on public dissent and persecute minorities. Or pursue their war aims in other countries.

There is absolutely nothing subjective about a surveillance state.

There is historical and current evidence for the danger of those tools. Continuous danger for the whole population of an affected state. Some countries has learned from that, like Germany from the Stasi. They have some educative materials on that topic. You should google it up.

> Also, taking a serial killer who murdered 8 women and dismembered several of them off the streets to me outweighs quite a bit of harm. But that's just me.

Unfortunately it is not just you. Many people are willing to give up their privacy for something that has been suggested to them as "security", based upon fear mongering and abstract dangers to them. Fear is a very powerful tool.

I’m for looking for the existing cameras. I’m against a panopticon where any “trusted” LEO with an account can query and have ring + flock + OnStar + Tesla etc all aggregated to follow anyone. Ring has this now. I would guess some cities have it for traffic cameras. What I’m really against is having it privately owned as an end run around laws restricting government surveillance.

> Also, the passive surveillance has resulted in several high profile killers like LISK and Bryan Kohberger being caught. So as much bad as you think it does, there are clear cases where its helped crack decades old serial killings and put horrifically violent people in jail.

Isn't that true of almost every restraint on the state's power?

A lot of less intelligent people get very emotional about the state quartering soldiers in homes against the wishes of the homeowner. But if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. We may not know who the Zodiac Killer is but I can tell you one thing for sure - he didn't have four to ten infantrymen in his house, keeping track of his comings and goings. Given the obvious security benefits of having soldiers in your home, no rational person would object - unless they've got a meth lab in their basement. /s

they absolutely positively do both.