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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

> He characterizes the behavior as rare. He simultaneously identifies it as the most common form of abuse. The tension between those two statements is the problem Flock has left unaddressed.

I don’t see how there’s any tension between these statements. The overall occurrence of abuse can be rare while the most common form of the abuse that does occur is of officers tracking people they know.

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The tension is that the abuse is far more likely than any value these cameras bring.

And what is commonly rare in a country of 342 million? Prairie Grove, Illinois has 1930 people and he did this to at least 3 people according to the report. .15% of the population. If you extrapolate that out to the national population, its roughly 520k people. Or, the entire population of Sacramento, Ca, being victimized by law enforcement with a surveillance power they should never have been allowed to have.

In a community of 20 people you have one person who commits robbery, that's 5% of the pop being a robbers. One _could_ extrapolate that but we'd fall victim to the law of small numbers.

Either way, I support a world where exactly 0/1 Flock corporations exist.

I agree but I don’t think that was the point, or I’ve misunderstood the statement about the tension between those other two statements.

Rare in comparison to what, the total number of searches across the platform?

But even that is the wrong focus. One could make the same case for rejecting police body cams because incidents of police abuse are rare, relatively speaking.

The real issue is that the platform isn't completely locked down by default with strict access control grants, monitoring, auditing, etc. Shoot I have way less access at my work to data and systems which do not have that level of sensitivity and have to go through multiple approval steps to be granted anything new.

But I guess those things don't help the sales pitches. To be fair policing the police isn't flock's job and doesn't make them money. Laws and regulations are the only real vehicles of change.

Yeah, in fact they're very nudge nudge wink wink.

Sell to a LE agency in a state that doesn't allow data sharing in certain ways? Flock certainly won't disable it. They'll even still train you in how to use it.

Garrett is very much a believer in Minority Report.

You're right both can be logically true. Now the tension doesn't reside in the logic, but in the intent of the statements.

First statement minimizes the problem's impact, second argues it's still worth tackling.

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