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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see some pushback in the most egregious abuses of privacy. I wonder why we are getting this with Flock but not seeing the same with private security cameras such as Ring, pervasive tracking of mobile devices by carriers and apps, and internet browser tracking. Is it just that there's a direct personal benefit with those devices, and people view the trade-off as being worth it?

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I don’t think people realize that these devices can even be used that way. I talk with people outside of the tech scene frequently, and they are routinely surprised when I tell them about this sort of capability. The ring doorbell Super Bowl commercial about finding lost dogs was a genuine shock to people! I think there’s a degree of visibility you need to get people’s attention on an issue, and it’s just difficult to see a doorbell as a threat for the average person.

Ring is dead near me. Everyone had Ring doorbells until someone went around with a hammer and fucked them all up.

Surely one of the cameras saw who it was...?

balaclava

It didn't happen

I'm picturing someone dressed up as MC hammer blasting hammer time on a speaker

Honey, did you order a ski mask and a hammer because someone is delivering them now according to the cam... nevermind.

Wish that same person would do something about obnoxious digital billboards

> Is it just that there's a direct personal benefit with those devices, and people view the trade-off as being worth it?

I think that's mostly it. Basically since Flocks only use is for the systematic tracking of people for use by police and government agencies, it's a lot easier to get people to turn against it. There's just no upside to them that any individual would ever benefit from.

It's sad because if/when Flock dies the death of deserves, the software/infrastructure will likely just get sold off and reapplied to some other deployment scheme like Ring quietly forgoing the big Superbowl Ad.

I so want to push back that all this is too little too late, because the system ,though still distributed , is effectively in place already. But.. I also don't want to be the old guy telling kids not to rebel. After all, being young and thinking ( knowing! ) one can change the world, is what being young human is all about. FWIW, it may well be their version of decss, ows and so on.

On the other hand, come to think of it, despite OWS being broken up by fancy new approaches ( rumor has it, Walls Street got spooked enough to see what effective methods can be employed given that Pinkerton approach would have been frowned upon then ), I don't recall FBI marking the participants in any special way ( please correct me if I am missting anything ).

With a nationwide effort in swing to dismantle corporate surveillance, the follow up is to pass legislation state by state that prohibits its implementation in the future. Federal legislation on this matter is unlikely to occur until sometime after midterms, and so state legislation is the path to success in the interim.

We voted out the cameras locally, the feds just installed them at every nook and cranny they had available. Turned out, there was a lot of federal property, so it was back to square one.

Regime change is coming, its harm reduction until then.

Are you sure about that? Seems pretty shameless and determined to bend all the rules to stay in power, I surely hope the change is coming though.

Dem advantage heading into midterms is highest in 20 years [1]. I am hopeful if democracy is directly attacked during the upcoming election cycle, the attempt will be contained, but agree it remains to be seen and you should have an exit plan if democracy fails.

Mental model: I am sure of nothing. All models are wrong, but some are useful. Better to have a plan and not need it than need it and not have it. Hope alone is not a strategy.

[1] https://emersoncollegepolling.com/april-2026-national-poll/

I was thinking regime change along the lines of you gonna get old and croak and be replaced in the voting both by some millenial/Z/alpha that will not repeat your mistake of trying to give the government arbitrary power because their whole lives all they have ever seen is that power come back around in various forms to screw the people.

As you like to quote, "demographics is destiny".

It will take 10-20 years of election cycles for the cohort replacement you mention to take place. By regime change, I mean the current administration is disempowered.

To note, we did not get here from arbitrary power; we got here due to partisan failure of checks and balances in Congress and SCOUTS. But, to your point, I believe changes will be made to prevent this failure scenario in the future.

There are a host of issues that the dems are better on (assuming one agrees on what better means), but I don't think they're particularly better on this issue. One can point to pro-privacy outliers on both sides, but we're not likely to get one of them as the final candidate in 2028.

A Democrat has won almost every election since the presidential election [1] [2]. It is a referendum on this administration imho, and based on all available data and evidence, I expect it to continue.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990619 (citations)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46864405 (citations)

I expect Dems to be better on privacy in this context ("We don't need ALPRs because privacy is more important than faux threats conjured up to sell corporate surveillance to the masses for institutional shareholder returns") because you're more likely to be fear driven as a Republican/conservative (and therefore, support invasion of privacy via ALPRs despite facts and statistics around the risk) due to a larger amygdala (where fear processing takes place) [3] and amygdala–BNST connectivity [4], but of course some Dems will disappoint on this policy topic. You might even be able to suss out confidence in policy implementation using photos of candidates [5], which can predict political orientation (and therefore, brain structure).

[3] Kanai R, Feilden T, Firth C ... Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults Current Biology, 2011; 21, 677-680 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.017

[4] Pedersen WS, Muftuler LT, Larson CL. Conservatism and the neural circuitry of threat: economic conservatism predicts greater amygdala-BNST connectivity during periods of threat vs safety. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2018 Jan 1;13(1):43-51. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx133. PMID: 29126127; PMCID: PMC5793824.

[5] Kosinski, M., Khambatta, P., & Wang, Y. (2024). Facial recognition technology and human raters can predict political orientation from images of expressionless faces even when controlling for demographics and self-presentation. American Psychologist, 79(7), 942–955. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001295

Bugs me no end that my latest upstairs neighbor (I've been here for 15 years) has a ring on their door which means I have to be in front of it every time I go in & out my own door.

It doesn't matter how thoughtful you are, someone else will be thoughtless for you.

It's not just inputs/sensors but also outputs. It seems like every public space is abused with bright obnoxious digital billboards now the cost is cheaper and cheaper.

wait until satellite constellations would start displaying ads ... as well as there is huge still unused space on the face of the Moon :)

There is some push on that too but Flock is sponsored by people's taxes, while ring is someone's personal choice.

Ring did get some pushback when they advertised the "pet finding" feature that folks realized meant would allow anybody to be found.

But overall, being tracked by your _own_ device feels different than being tracked by somebody else's device. Especially when taxpayer dollars are being used for that other device.

Dont forget about Waymo and similar. As much surveillance as flock.

Does Waymo track individuals for businesses and governments?

If so, I'll stop using them. If they just happen to need cameras, that's fundamentally different.

It's not much of a stretch to think they'd sell the data or be compelled to given the NSA and data brokers exist.

>the most egregious abuses of privacy

wait until you hear about EU's EES

do you really believe your biometrics being checked once when you enter a continent as a foreigner is the same as being videotaped at every moment in your own country as a citizen?

I think both are bad and there's no guarantee they are not keeping their eyes on me all the time

The problem is that you're not being videotaped at every moment. You're trying to make one sound worse than it is, and downplaying the other one. Two things can be bad at once.

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