Can someone explain why Flock is such a politically charged topic.
I’m only now becoming aware of it, and feel like I’m out of the loop on key aspects.
I’m only now becoming aware of it, and feel like I’m out of the loop on key aspects.
Tracking people by their smartphones? Voters get smartphones out of it, and the state supposedly needs a warrant to track them (except when they don't). And they can always just not get one.
Tracking people's every purchase? Voters get credit cards, cashback, purchase protection and online shopping out of it. And they can always just use cash.
Tracking people's media consumption? Voters get free/super cheap ad supported media, the widest selection the world has ever seen. And they can still buy in stores with cash if they want.
Access to people's photos, no warrants required? Voters get great quality cameras on their phones, and free basic cloud backup in case their phones are ever damaged or lost. And you can always disable it.
An always-on microphone in every home? Voters get huge, incredibly cheap TVs with 4K netflix/Disney/whatever, incredibly cheap smart speakers etc. And the microphone only turns on when it hears certain things.
Flock's problem is they've done the big power transfer without providing the corresponding payoff, and too quickly.
Their problem is they believed their own bullshit and thought they were offering people a good deal that basically amounted to "the government 1984s you more than they already do but your package thief gets arrested for it".
Ignoring the fact that that deal is not necessarily good, if they had been slightly scummier, not given two shits about actually reducing petty crimes against the people and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny for a very long time and gotten their systems deeply entrenched. The useful idiots would've eaten it right up with the flimsiest of pretexts so long as each segment of useful idiots was peddled to individually.
A massive network of surveillance cameras is not a consumer product. For most people, it's an abstract potential benefit of crime reduction weighed against an abstract definite harm to privacy. Definite usually wins against potential.
Flock has had a a number of security issues where people have demonstrated that the cameras could be accessed easily by anyone because of (IIRC) the use of default passwords.
Flock have said that they weren't doing this or that (I don't recall the exact details, I think initially they may have said it was just recording license plates), but then people found out they were doing a lot more than that.
Flock and police departments have been found to have been doing way more than using the cameras to investigate crime, including stalking friends and lovers and exes, and in one case one of the guys was found to have been regularly watching a young girls gymnastics gym a lot.
So it does mean quite a bit, then. Especially since the topic is flock, which is only relevant to the states.
People who get angry enough to tear down the Flock cameras in their area get rounded up and classified by the Feds as "leftist terrorists".
Axon gets a major boost to it's revenue by landing fat .gov contracts for it's own version of 24/7 surveillance.
Government employees who approve the contracts get rich on insider trading.
Flock isn't just a private mass surveillance corporation that leases cameras and infra to police departments. We've had that since digital cameras and the internet.
What Flock sells as its core product is "AI" surveillance and policing. What that actually means is that Flock trains their own statistical models on the data their cameras passively collect. Flock sells access to those models as a "one click" crime solver.
The result is not only the massive expansion of public surveillance, but the replacement of actual detective work with statistical modeling. By using a statistical model to "solve crime", police departments get to launder their responsibility away to the magic AI black box.