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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why a regular patrol officer would / should even have access to something like this without some level of extra authorization. They're not detectives running an open investigation ...

In this case this officer was searching numerous networks over and over again, that alone should trigger some metrics that raise the question "uh ... why?"

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Pacheco has been one of the top users of the Flock system this year, according to data The Light previously obtained from the city. The most common reason inputted since April for her searches has been “traffic infraction.”

Just thinking of that reason, I don't even know what Flock would tell you at that point. It would tell you where else they were? Not going to do any good. Makes that reason pretty suspicious.

You never worked for a startup where the CEO demanded administrator rights to everything just because he's CEO?

Patrol officer isn’t the equivalent of a CEO.

I've built such software for bigger police departments. I listen to what the stakeholders want and balance them against users.

If the stakeholder wants a way to bypass this or that, then that's what's going to happen. Neither users nor stakeholders will want to be handcuffed in the name of public accountability. Nobody wants to be handcuffed, really.

Police do not want any accountability, that much has been exemplified by the way the police leadership and police organizations object to any attempt to regulate them.

> Nobody wants to be handcuffed

I’m sure that’s the case for everyone, but we have permissions and security and auditing for reasons none the less.

Yes, because a stakeholder wanted it.

I really wasn't asking you about what you do. It's a larger question than that.

The world would have been better without you.

patrol officer is more like a junior QA in your analogy

yeah but not in a US cops version of their place in the analogy

Because no one important cares and no one will do anything about it.

Celebrities get special treatment in hospitals built into pretty much all EHR software. Names are obfuscated, while searches and views get instantly flagged. I highly suspect the same thing exists here.

The funny thing is if you have the Karen HOA edition of the Flock cameras (eg the “private” ones for gated communities etc):

https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/how-the-safe-list-solves-pr...

The HOA ones come with “safe list” whitelisting to somehow cause it to dump local reads for some plates? This slightly also seems like a bad idea at least because then you just need to steal a car inside the gated community to defeat its "safe list" and wander around it without its Flocks reading you.

(I mean, once you leave the gated community, you're fair game again, but still: the 'safe list' feature provides bullshit privacy relief to even more ignorant people who are probably more relieved that they think they're suddenly not the ones that will be tracked but only the evil minorities will be.)

That's to protect the hospital. Inappropriate access to any medical record covered by HIPAA carries the same weight, it's just less of a legal shit show and less tempting for employees when they aren't rich powerful or famous.

It's not on the same level at all as medical records, but I remember years ago when I got my first "real job" working as a credit adjuster at a major credit card bank that you've definitely heard of.

Any employee could just search the name of a celebrity who was a card holder and view all their transactions. Not sure if that's still the case, but the only point I want to make here is that when this was brought up internally as a security issue, the top management clearly didn't care and did nothing about it.

I think they justify it as an ease of use vs security trade off

How else could they have arrested that wisconsin guy for driving to michigan to purchase cannabis? You know, apparently a totally valid use for such technology..

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