Flock Defense "No Expectation of Privacy in Public" Is Wrong
ipvm.com
ipvm.com
Your hysterics about photographing children in a park is silly and no one but the most online ideologue would find it at all comparable. Find a better argument if you want to convince other reasonable people who just want to live in safe neighborhoods and don't care much about your verbal word games and stretched analogies
I'm calling out, specifically, that "A camera capturing an image of a license plate that is openly displayed on a vehicle is not searching for someone's private life. It is recording what anyone standing on the same street could already observe."
... implies that a very absurd and objectionable thing like folks standing around each playground recording children and comparing notes is actually also supported by that defense and that we should consider if that defense is objectionable or not based on what it enables as much as what it is defending.
On this very forum, you can find backlash against geofencing, and here, support for flock cameras? The contradiction is bananas. Automated logging of people in public places is dystopian. You can object with that claim, fine.
You went from recording license plates on public roads to logging people in public places.
If someone steals my car, I would want to be able to give police my license plate and have them track down the person very easily by all the cameras on public roads. This is not dystopian. This is what an orderly society should look like.
You're talking about children and random stuff that's completely irrelevant. If you can't or refuse to see that, I can't convince you.
No, man, the argument is in the linked article, the one from TFA, the one I quoted. It is about public spaces and recording "what anyone standing on the same street could already observe".
That is insufficiently restrictive of a criterion because it's overly broad, and therefore can lead to absurd situations we'd never expect. Like kid tracking mafias. Any device that records "what anyone on the street observe" becomes awful creepy real quick, and we shouldn't accept that kind of argument ever.
TFA goes on to say that it breaks down at scale, and I'm trying to call out that, no, it is creepy at local scales too, because recording public activity is a bad precedent to set. I don't know how to make it more clear.
> stolen car
Having a use for an overbroad surveillance tech is only a defense for you, not for me and probably not for the courts either. It's not like they only activate it when there's a car stolen. It records all the time.
We've stated our opinions clearly now, I think the back and forth can end.
"Monitor the movements of everyone in case of the minute chance of car theft and astronomical chance of the police caring" is patently absurd. We probably need cameras in bathrooms too, in case someone passes out and needs medical attention.
Good luck with that.
I've heard plenty of stories of victims of theft and crime literally leading police to the door of their assailant and they can't get any action because this "privacy" movement has made their efforts pretty meaningless.
You're naive and you obviously have no real experience in this regard. It's just sad that you promote policies that help no one but criminals and you're completely unaware.
So the police are useless when given a precise location, and you want to give them more invasive tools to continue to be useless? That's not the argument you think it is.
This is kind of a misconception about the technology; there is not really much distinction between these things. Firstly, they are cameras which have no means of differentiating between a license plate or a dog or a tree. In addition to that, they are (presumably linux) computers that have software to find license plates in the images the cameras take, both of which (license plates and images) are stored on Flock's servers. That's how the "recording license plates on public roads" bit works.
The point is that the images can still be ran through creepy software written by creepy people to find children to get to "logging people in public places". And let's say, to put it mildly, it does not fill one with confidence to research the security in practice of Flock's image data.
There's more than one person on this forum. Why do you expect consistency? Different people have different opinions. Different people comment on different articles. HN is not a hivemind; don't expect consistency.
I should have stated something weaker: There are legitimate arguements, even on this forum, against geofencing, so entertaining arguments against camera-based always-on tracking shouldn't be automatically out of scope.
But sure, "word games". Sure.
Do you actually believe this?
Wow, a surveillance system that's auditable through public records. Sounds pretty good system to me. Of course there are cases of abuse but seems like the worst system besides all the rest.
This is an insane ideological battle. Another technology people talk about is recorders that are trained to identify and triangulate gun shots. The most common sense stuff doesn't pass muster with these groups so theres really no point in debating. Just know that you are in the minority, unfortunately your groups have captured some politicians.
But hopefully we'll have some choice. I would welcome this an most tech to prevent crime in my neighborhood. And you can live in a completely "free" neighborhood where criminals are free from reasonable technology measures to prevent crime.
> Find a better argument
That is just a reversed no-true-scottsman fallacy. If the poster's "hysterics" are a poor argument, please break down why rather than just calling it silly.
It is obvious that many in this community are against wholesale collection of information, public or private, as evidenced by the thousands of posts that state such reservations.
Posts on forums are not real life. Look at revealed preferences. Many people have cameras on their property. People prefer to live in neighborhoods with well funded police with tech resources.
Again, it's entirely reasonable to collect license plates and use it to apprehend criminals. Crime is a thing, almost everyone is affected by it at some point in their lives. I don't need a proof or study, it's common sense. You know it's true but you're just pretending you don't understand.
The point the original poster is making is that this is a private system which has a high potential for abuse and often is abused, à la the posters “hysterics”, as you driveled, of people taking pictures of children and sharing it amongst themselves. Nitwit
Go ask them if they realize their videos are being stored on a company's server somewhere and those companies employees can watch their camera feeds whenever they want
Most people have no clue, they think the camera handles all of it
I'm doubtful more than a single-digit percentage of those people would then take down those cameras.
How about we have something good w technology, like using it to catch criminals
Some things are too dangerous to allow to exist, however reasonable and useful they might seem.
And I don’t. I think my right to privacy shouldn’t arc to nil.
Cops don’t care about stolen cars. Or stolen things from cars. I’ve given them footage of such a crime and.. nada.
And they have armies of police and armament to do the other police work. They have access to individually produced recordings that they do nothing with.
Instead of just dismantling all civic rights for _some_ property rights, maybe we should have a national convention about what police are obligated to do and their best practices to do so. Courts have already established that it is not public safety, so I personally wont support any action that simply gives them more.
So you're just anti police. You take the most uncharitable view about the police you're impossible to argue with.
> I’ve given them footage of such a crime and.. nada.
Why would they accept "trust be bro" when you give them a license plate and ask them to shake down someone. That's why they need the technology themselves so there is clear chain of custody and impartial witness.
> Instead of just dismantling all civic rights for _some_ property rights, maybe we should have a national convention about what police are obligated to do and their best practices to do so.
Police don't do these things because there's no follow through. They arrest people and they don't get put away because of activist district attorneys and judges. Almost all cops sign up because they want to do good, which means removing bad people from society. If arresting people and chasing down crime results in just paper work, risk from false accusations and mildly inconveniencing criminals, they won't bother.
So let's have that conversation. But restricting technology is pointless and just makes their jobs harder.
This is a systemic problem.
There's a ton of things that are considered bad and questionably legal when small timers do them but if you spend millions producing fake bullshit paperwork to legitimize it it becomes a good thing.
I put a shed in my back yard, I'm an evil person for violating the Wetland Protection Act in my state, the city fines me and tries to turn it into leverage for stealing my house, the useful idiots cheer.
Blackrock pays some engineers to produce mumbo jumbo reports, they bulldoze the exact same f-ing "wetland" 100yd further back and put up solar panels, declare themselves to be saving the planet, and the same exact useful idiots once again cheer.
You can find a litany of examples like that in any industry, I just chose that one because I feel it's particularly on point for this audience.
As a German, that is precisely how Nazi Germany operated and why so few people complained: They had the proper process and paper for everything.
This shows that in most societies mechanical devices can acceptably have certain behavior that humans cannot exhibit. People can see that a camera recording something to a video recording system is different from a person watching and photographing someone.
So these analogies by way of “what if a person were to do this other thing that implies an intent a mechanical system does not?” do not land with me.
But it says nothing as to what the Government can do when they do have a warrant. If they get a judge to sign one, provided the warrant meets the particularity requirement, they can go obtain what they need.
As far as Flock is concerned, it’s mainly a process thing. Right now they might be able to share their data with law enforcement without a warrant. If the law changes, the data will still be there, except henceforth, law enforcement will need to obtain a warrant before getting it. So there will be that safety mechanism, although security vulnerabilities could make it available to hackers.
The bigger question in my mind is “should such systems even exist in free states,” but as written, our Constitution doesn’t explicitly forbid them.
There should not be any system that allows a person to be continuously tracked at all times short of as a consequence of criminal activity with a judge signing off on it.
It's so basic that a 3rd grader gets it.
(which... we should, if we have the data to do it, why not actually enforce traffic laws?)
The cameras built for automatic speeding detection do fulfill their purpose, and I agree that it would be great to have more.
Imagine how much HN would be defending them if they started with speed cameras or something else that could be contrived as beneficial and kinda pandered to the whims of the demographics and then moved to 1984 rather than just going straight from zero to 1984.
The whole discussion would be framed as "these are critical safety infrastructure, besides they have strict controls around access and you have no privacy when driving a 2-ton death machine" and they could literally be doing facial recognition on pedestrians and tracking cyclists for years and years and years and it would take an insane mountain of beyond undeniable evidince to change the narrative of the discussion. Because once a bias prone vote base community picks a side, it's basically impossible to change. Welcome to modern discourse.