https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...
Strong disagree. Life in public areas is often still part of private life. And we should treat it with the respect and privacy that it deserves. You going to the doctor? That's part of your private life. You meeting with an old friend to catch up? Also private, even though you do it in a public cafe.
It seems like (to my very uneducated mind) the founders were worried about the tyranny of government. We have the bill of rights and a constitution designed to limit government powers.
But then there are people who weaponize rights against the people in favor of the government.
A private company creating a mass-surveillance network of tracking everyone in public is absolutely a weaponization of rights. Rights designed to keep our government accountable. Our rights that give us tools to prevent government from weaponizing privacy against us (secret juries, secret trials, secret government employees, records etc citing 'privacy' as a reason for secrecy).
Independent cameras, often not networked let alone internet connected are not the same thing as a single entity controlling a huge, internet capable, always on, cloud recording panopticon.
Logistically the first limits things like police access by units of both access and time (is it recording? Does the memory card overwrite? Did it expire before a warrant was issued?)
Putting that all in a convenient console and handing direct god eye view to police with a "oh you need a warrant first, wink wink", massively reduces friction for abuse of power.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...
> In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn
Maybe we need even more AI, because I think Claude would probably flag this as goofy. No human involved thought that it was wild they would stop something like 100 or 1,296 vehicles?
Because each city or county is doing its whole thing.
Which comes back a bit to, it's one thing for my county to be tracking its residents, but should officers in Texas have carte blanche? If anything, the local county should have to "release" before search results are opened up to someone foreign. My officers should be protecting me from invasions abroad.
(1) https://futurism.com/future-society/flock-surveillance-atlan... (2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2024/02/29/flock-a... (3) https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/tulsas-surveillance-gam...
If you drive through any commercial area, you're captured by dozens of cameras. There are over a dozen doorbell cameras on my residential block alone. Cameras are absolutely ubiquitous, for good reason. In the United States, at least, it would be foolish to assume that driving on a public street is anything resembling privacy.
Binge alcohol consumption is incredibly dangerous and contributes to a large number of national fatalities.
Governments should purchase a contract for a citizen tracking platform operated by a private company that monitors alcohol usage to ensure you're drinking responsibly and quickly detain those that aren't, given the threat they pose to themselves or the public. Governments should make tracking a requirement for legal alcohol consumption.
The private company expands to a nationwide network that allows the federal government, private contractors, and other people that gain access to monitor your environment (or your young kids) whenever they feel motivated, where ever you are.
For the name of safety, let's write legislation that gives the government's private contractors unfettered access to your microphones and cameras to help law enforcement be more efficient.
Instead of indulging in hyperbole, why not talk about the great evidence an ALPR outside a bar could provide with current technology? It’s absolutely a great idea. I hope that AI gets good enough to tell whether someone is plastered; that would save a lot of lives lost to selfish assholes.
Let’s put them outside Gay bars and Planned Parenthoods, just in the name of safety.
Think of all the college age women some guy halfway across the country can stalk.
We recently got permission to expand red-light cameras and I'm hoping that this kind of neutral machine-based enforcement of laws helps move us to a more law-abiding society. Civil liberties require civilization. Abdicating public space to the anti-social only allows for a de-facto rule by the uncivilized.
The problem is that these systems, always and without fail, come with government and police overreach and then the "guilty unless proven innocent" paradigm creeps in, which we have already seen happen with flock. You have police using the technology to spy on their lovers and friends of their wives and husbands, and you have political campaigns finding ways to spy on their opponents, and activists getting special attention from prosecutors, etc. Which always happs, but with totalitarianism is an absolute train wreck for an open, fair, and power-balanced government.
But not only do you have to trust the government now (and you likely should not), you also need to trust the government far into the future (which you absolutely cannot do) because the tools will still exist.
Don't accept tools that are also strong weapons for oppression.
It's the widespread remote camera installs that are the main problem there. If they kept data locally and had to be collected by hand, it might be fine - that's difficult enough to grow to monitor everyone all the time. Aside from using film though, I'm not sure how that would be achieved.
(To be clear, I really do think we should be prosecuting speeding (and tailgating) MUCH more than we do. Far more death and damage occurs from it than we should allow. But ubiquitous networked cameras are not the way we should do that.)
How else should it be done? I think they're going to pick the cheapest option most of the time.