The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts
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It seems like a statement to the prosperity of the American ideals of freedom that they are being removed both by local activism and illegal means. Along with the general sentiment on social media. It's genuinely insane the power social media has on earth. It's attributed to the revolution in Nepal, major protests in India, and there were a bunch more in other countries[1].
We as humans have been brainwashed with the nothing to hide fallacy. It's good to see it dismantled once we see mass surveillance in practice.
[1] Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar, Peru, and Bulgaria from a Brave overview (can't say I researched any of these).
Prompt: other countries that had uprisings like the Nepal 2025 one
Some kind of Flock@home volunteer surveillance network that tracks politicians, records LEO interactions (including those involving masked unaccountable agents), and provides the only accountability that the public has left.
There are a lot of sheriffs.
Is this really better though? First-party community maintenance is more direct, cheaper, and doesn't rely on fragile central authorities (granted, it _does_ rely on a difficult pattern of community discussion and collaboration to satisfy tribal consensus, etc).
I'm broadly OK with cameras being in public, but I have much more trust in direct action than I do in elected "officials".
On medium time-scales, it seems to me that a great solution will be to have community-maintained cameras kinda all over the commons, but such that the camera eye can be accessed publicly (ie, removing the information asymmetry which gives the undesirable actors (police, etc) greater view than the actual community participants).
I'm genuinely asking since I'm a bit out of touch with this latest controversy, but how are they any different than a dash cam, doorbell camera, or my alley camera, for example such that they deserve special consideration?
Edit: To be more clear, the issue courts have considered is warrantless searches of ALPR databases (and whether that evidence should be excluded), not whether it’s constitutional to put up cameras.
See: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-applauds-important-...
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
With automated license plate readers, they can simply collect everything with a reasonably affordable network of cameras, then query the database when they want to find a particular pattern of activity. The police have already detained people for frequent border-crossing between marijuana-legal and illegal states. This gets exacerbated by granularity and extensiveness - imagine an anti-choice state pointing cameras at every maternity care parking lot in the state and tracking who visits them for cross-referencing with visits to pro-choice states.
And with the existence of parallel construction, there's no reasonable way short of dismantling the ALPR system to avoid abuse against the citizenry.
I'm not sure I'm on board with the efficiency argument but those are always interesting ones.
https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...
Like, all a warrant requirement does is make it so that the police have to talk to a judge before making the searched data part of the evidence against you. It would do nothing to stop the police from fabricating some other pretext to lawfully stop and investigate you - say, parking a police cruiser at the border into the state and whenever the ALPR in that car hits a list of vehicles, stop them for going 0.1 MPH over the limit and the officer says they smell weed.
Is that because the government has access to the database? Aside from that I'm not really sure what the difference is between Flock in this case and something like a doorbell camera.
Maybe I should've been more direct. In your view, what is the appropriate usage for camera devices in public spaces?
If my friend has a doorbell camera and I don't like being recorded by him every time I visit his house, I can just not visit his house. Similarly, if Target has in-store surveillance cameras, I can just not shop there. If driving anywhere has me logged multiple times in Flock's network, I can't just stop driving, and even if I did they track pedestrians and bluetooth signals too.
In short my opposition is to all of it, but some scenarios are clearly far worse for privacy than others. Doing something unusual that has your neighbors privately chuckling at their surveillance footage is less bad than doing something unusual that has Target's loss protection following you and making you feel uncomfortable, which is less bad than doing something unusual that has a police officer decide to "randomly" stop your car and attempt to search it, which is less bad than doing something unusual that has a SWAT team kicking down your door and arresting you.
Thanks though as a nitpick this isn’t quite accurate since it can also record people just passing by in the general case.
A flock camera is connected to every other flock camera, ever, period. It’d be bad enough if a whole town were tracking the movements of all of their citizens constantly and storing that data forever to be searchable without a warrant (because of the extremely obvious flashing abuse vector that has been shown to be taken advantage of multiple times- give the old google a search for police officers stalking exes and their partners via flock, or flock employee spying on children’s gymnastics gym)
BUT, it’s not even just that! You can track people everywhere that there are flock cameras if you are a part of the flock network! So you can stalk people everywhere in the country with 0 oversight. It is an insanely massive privacy issue.
It’s universal persisted tracking of literally everyone’s movements 24/7 everywhere there is a flock camera, persisted presumably forever, and currently accessible to an extremely large amount of people without any authorization or judicial check required. (Many would go to comment on the police demographic being unstable and/or uniquely situated to abuse this, but arguments about that may or may not be moot to you depending on your opinion of the police)
I feel like it’s plainly clear that any doorbell camera does not do that. Even if most doorbell cams are cloud enabled, I’d imagine it’s significantly harder to subpoena a doorbell company for “every camera you have on exactly this street that could’ve done this thing”, and infinitely more so to force them to give you all of their data history and continue to do so forever. Flock just does that as their business.
Doorbell cameras are also not particularly capable of tracking you on every major travel route you take, as they’re primarily on, well, residential doors. Maybe some businesses have them? But they certainly aren’t able to resolve every license plate that travels through a segment of highway. Not to mention that they just don’t do that at present at all anyways, even in the places they’re installed- they just record motion, and sometimes use AI to point out “a car drove by” or “a person walked up to the door.” Not “license plate XYZ1234 drove through highway 12 at 8:34 pm”.
I feel like your statement just kinda ignores all of this and is saying “well yeah, but besides all the mass movement tracking and data storage and correlation, it’s basically like a doorbell camera because they both record people/cars and store them somehow, right?”
Which, I mean yeah I guess? But the “besides” part is kind of entirely the massive problem.
[1] well, not yet.
That doesn't seem clear to me at all. It may not be one interconnected network but if a crime occurs say, at 100 Main Street the police can see doorbell cameras, identify the model, and ask the home owner for the tape and if necessary get a warrant. It's certainly not as easy to obtain the data but it's certainly possible to achieve the same goal.
Look, I'm not trying to defend Flock here or anything, just trying to understand what the specific concern is whether that is hyper-efficient tracking, a privacy violation, a constitutional violation, or maybe even something different altogether.
The barrier to entry is infinitely lower with flock than through that process though, and the scope of data collection is infinitely wider. If a police chief wants to stalk their ex or their boyfriend, they login to their floxk and search <my ex girlfriends license plate>, and acquire their entire travel history for the entirety of the time flock has existed, through highways, through non residential thoroughfares, etc.
If they want to do that via ring doorbells, they have to go ask every single person in a neighborhood to hand that over under the pretense of a law enforcement operation. And, again, those doorbells are not covering highways or large residential thoroughfares, and they’re not connected enough, nor equipped with the technology to automatically read and store license plate data forever. The LEO would have to go through every single doorbell, manually document every single car/plate that passes through, and cross reference their own markings of location-to-timestamp documentation to determine whatever path the person they wanted to track. I think it’s obvious that this is an arduous task- one that could absolutely be undertaken to pursue serious crime! But one that would be pretty damned hard to abuse due to the work involved. And also, again, is only residential!! Because ring doorbells are not posted on the side of every major interstate highway and city main road!!!
Flock automates every ounce of that completely, and with an insanely larger scope! It’s not hard to imagine that a police officer going around asking every owner of a doorbell cam for their footage would generate some hubub amongst the community about “what is this for?”, and if the what-for was invalid, generate some backlash!
Instead, a person with access to flock faces absolutely 0 friction tracking anyone, (basically) anywhere at any time in the last X years since flock has existed, **and not just residentially**! I want to point out that your own point, “police can ask the home owner”, is restricted to a very specific locale, places with doorbell cameras! These things are being installed with such frequency on so many major thoroughfares that is possible to track far, far beyond “someone left home / someone came home”, or “someone was infront of these houses or in this neighborhood.” That is an extremely significant difference.
I do want to say, I respect your inquisivity, and your willingness to ask and explore the issue. My genuine apologies for the dismissiveness present in some of my remarks. That’s not really the spirit of HN discussion, and I apologize for that.
"What is so wrong with having your house burn down? It's just a chemical process that happens all the time."
https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/victory-federal-...
There is a big difference in a cop seeing you go by, checking a list, and coming after you than scanning every license plate, bumper sticker, etc. and putting in a database for every cop in the country.
My rule of thumb is that if it's technically possible, someone, somewhere is doing it.
What?