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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the whole is worth more than the individual parts. It's like if you're trying to catch someone who robbed a home, you may have a camera to catch the car and license. Great first step, but cars used in crimes are often stolen. So you follow the car, and then you enter a dead zone where anti-flock activists prevented cameras. You're now at a dead end.

So I guess that's a win as that first camera is not very useful. And this is a good thing? I don't see your point.

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On the flip side, you are Uber and you’re trying to decide if you should charge the “low price” or the “high price” to somebody who just opened your app.

Luckily the person you’re about to make an offer to lives within the flock network so you quickly get pings from the last week that they shopped at Whole Foods and dropped by a dispensary on the way home. Yeah this person probably has disposable income, let’s charge them the 30% increased rate.

Or maybe you’re a future employer - oh this guy stopped at a dispensary 12 years ago? The algorithm will give him +4 risk points before we make our hiring decision. Plus he regularly goes to this bad neighborhood (which the algorithm doesn’t know is where his sister lives that he visits), that’s another +9 risk points.

AND on the darker side — if you knew they did this, would you visit your sister less?

There's some proper shareholder-oriented thinking! Even I was falling into the trap of purely considering Flock in a governmental context, and thus the potential for law abuse. But of course, they're not government, they're a private (indeed YC backed, Summer 2017) company. Policing might be their tent-pole and install argument but once in place there's all sorts of potential profitable revenue streams they might turn their minds too.

Pretty sure flock network isn't available to Uber.

As an aside, some people have an uncanny ability to take two things that are different in every conceivable way except one, and use the one similarity as the basis for an analogy.

Police work is supposed to be difficult.

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After all, how do we know domestic abuse isn't happening there without cameras?

I have cameras around my home. If someone breaks in I have video recording that I can provide police. I also live in a safe expensive neighborhood and naturally we have police cameras and a well funded police force. They have what they need to make sure no one breaks into my house and get away with it.

Try coming up w a better analogy

Can the police log in to your cameras at any time and pull footage? Because they can with Flock cameras.

More importantly, can _I_ log into the cameras? Because allowing randos into the data is the real ask.

I understand that the unspoken assumption is that (unlike internet randos such as myself) LEOs and your local government and every other jerk to whom they decide to grant access are universally "good and well intentioned".

But I am always astonished that folks really believe that assumption when stated as such.

If you give up on that assumption, though, the actual reality is that there isn't a difference between only letting literally everyone who has or knows someone with a .gov address access who comes and goes from your house and letting every random dumbass such as myself access that information.

How does any random law enforcement officer pull up the footage from your cameras when ever they want check you aren't breaking the law?

This has always been how the dystopian sci-fi future works. If you can get just get to 'the <future/decayed sounding name> zone' you are outside the big brother tracking.

It's also why a big brother system will always become full on/more and more big brother, because it needs to suck up and remove all the dead ends.

It seems that you are deliberately misunderstanding or not addressing the GP.

Your pro-flock argument is fine on its own. Delete the second paragraph and make your argument independently of the GP.

You did not address the primary argument against Flock cameras - the erosion of civil liberties (privacy) is not worth the higher rate of prosecution / conviction.

So to put the overall point first: democracy and freedom can require putting some money and effort into protecting rights, preventing abuse, preventing dragnets, and honestly addressing second/third/nth order effects that people are worried about, etc, even if you're trying to improve something. In this particular case, it's REALLY not difficult to envision systems that would achieve a better balance for the "officially stated case" [0] you describe, and thus be more likely to win the public's approval. We could use the same basic from-the-founding historical check of requiring a warrant and specifics for a search for example, and update that for modern times. The US judiciary could establish a solid internal PKI system and every judge could have an HSM of their own, then we could have a system where all footage, search capabilities and so on were encrypted and it literally required a judge's cryptographic signature on a warrant that had enforceable technical boundaries in time and space, with everything immutably documented. That wouldn't prevent the occasional bad judge and bad warrant, but just as with traditional searches it'd be a strong low pass filter and change incentives and accountability significantly.

So you have presented (amongst other things) a very black & white false dichotomy. You're claiming a bad, prone to abuse system is the only possible way to respond to your stated threat scenario. But it's just not. And you do actually need to win the public's approval not just browbeat them.

Moving on:

>It's like if you're trying to catch someone who robbed a home

It's notable how you didn't say "trying to catch someone who had gay sex" (a felony in some states until 22 years ago), "trying to catch someone who had an abortion" (back as a felony all of a sudden), "trying to catch someone brought as a child to the US who is in the green card process", "trying to catch someone who had a state reported stolen because the car dealership reported the car missing 6 months ago but it was found 2 months ago but the databases were never designed to get real time updates so there's a lag" and so on and so forth. Or more straight forwardly "it's like if you're a cop trying to catch your ex-girlfriend who said mean things about you on social media". You're on HN, you've been part of plenty of this, I don't think it's good faith discussion on your part to reach for an emotional tug and a lot of people here recognize and resent the technique.

And again see the first thing: in this case, why could the police not get a proper narrowly tailored warrant? They have plenty of clear, straight forward probable cause do they not?

>So you follow the car, and then you enter a dead zone [...] You're now at a dead end.

Wait, you said you were following the car? Police can do that you know, without massively networked surveillance nets, they have cars too, and they can follow cars. They can also put out an alert to keep an eye out. You'll need to quantify the gain here vs the cost.

>So I guess that's a win as that first camera is not very useful. And this is a good thing? I don't see your point.

I truly don't think you're making a good faith effort to see anyone's point at all.

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0: I'm using scarequotes there and giving it a footnote because I also want to emphasize that part of our suspicion is that, precisely because of obvious improvements, the "stop the robber!!", like "think of the children1!!!!", is primarily a cover story for far... less popular things that elite powers want to do to us. Meaningful checks and balances are possible, implementation importance aside that they haven't even bothered to try from the start tells a story of absence all by itself.

Good Lord what a dystopian hellscape America must've been before Flock! How did police solve anything?

Almost nothing like what is seen in police procedural television series, that’s for sure.

Although there is (allegedly) a fun feedback loop that cops more and more expect their jobs to be like police procedurals and try to solve crime as if reality was shaped by Dick Wolf.

Imagine coding like it’s shown in the Matrix, or Grandma’s Boy.

Well, that's the thing. Many crimes weren't solved, for precisely the problem that Flock solves. I never thought I'd rally in support of mass surveillance, but when criminals can brazenly flee a scene and not be pulled over because pulling over a suspicious vehicle is now considered "profiling". I find myself supporting an idea I used to be against.

> when criminals can brazenly flee a scene and not be pulled over because pulling over a suspicious vehicle is now considered "profiling"

You know full well that stopping a know car fleeing the robber and profiling are two massively different actions. They are not the same thing at all.

Also, it would be nice if people stopped fantasying about crime and basing their arguments on cool movies scenes.

Have you ever been a victim of a non-violent crime?

Loads of those just fall through the cracks of the system.

"solving the case" is mostly keeping all documented until they stumble on to something obvious, like already known perp having your stuff hidden in his stashing place while they go grab him for something unrelated.

In my city's subreddit, last week there was both a post complaining about the police not doing anything about a car break in, and a post complaining about flock on the front page.

People hate all kinds of things police do until they need the police to do something.

If you don't have video evidence the vast majority of non violent crimes go unsolved. How many manhours is a car break in worth, or a break in? Especially when the end result more than likely is still not enough to convict someone on.

Rings surveillance network and the huge network of private CCTVs has shown even with video evidence cops refuse to do their job if nobody is dead. If you get a package stolen in apartment complex, the PMs won't let anyone but police see the footage and the police will not come out to view the footage. Cameras stopped being a deterrent when criminals realized there are no consequences when they are caught on camera.

The police will however stalk and harass their partners, people they personally dislike, etc because they can view the footage at their leisure.

The lack of cameras is absolutely not what's stopping police from doing their job, its the complete lack of accountability or responsibility.

Someone breaks into a car. There is no camera, no witnesses immediately came forward.

Please do tell me what you want the police department to do here.

Someone breaks into a car. There is a camera. The cops don't care and the owner doesn't know the guy.

Please tell me what you think the police would do here?

You sound like someone who never had the police tell you they won't bother looking into it after you present them with surveillance footage clearly showing the crime happening.

Have you lived in a truly, totalitarian system? Have we really all forgotten from 1984? I get no one reads but come on.

I don't see anyone moving to Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, etc from the United States of America.

Just like I don't see libertarians flocking to Somalia.

Of course, white Americans don't think the cameras will be used against them. It's just for all those other people.

State surveillance builds infrastructure easily abused by bad actors, is a valid privacy argument.

I see extreme comparisons, false binaries, and emotional framing, that is not really convincing me.

A few yes, though wage & PTO theft and wage fixing were the financially most impactful.

> Loads of those just fall through the cracks of the system.

Annoyances aside, I'm still not sure it's worth trading civil liberties when wage theft dwarfs the entire category of property crime.

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