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Comment by mannanj | Hacker News Reader

So to fight abuse and overreach by your leaders, you can:

- give up your car/vehicle propery

- let an LLC take ownership

- reside in the privacy protections of LLC and corporation

I don't think any successful case has happened yet where flock et al have pierced the corporate veil to get address information, nor dug into insurance records to find who the LLC-license plates belong to.

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i don’t think that will help anything. surely flock and similar companies use facial recognition features? particularly at every stores parking lot that has these in it?

and i’d be more shocked if the same stores weren’t already sharing their own inside cameras facial recognition directly with companies like flock already.

and from what we’ve seen, these companies cameras are linked up with names from frequent shopper cards, cc data, what people buy, when they buy it, etc…

These camera also monitor the ambient Bluetooth output of phones in cars that pass by to identify who exactly was in the car at the time. Don’t think the LLC will hide that unless your phone is also owned under an LLC

I use my phone on airplane mode a lot, and also in a faraday cage bag. If you need directions, You can use use radio and pop in the directions then use just airplane mode and navigate and it will still place you via gps. If you want music use an AUX cable.

If you want privacy give up some of your convenience. If you're refusing to give up your convenience, than you have chosen to give up your privacy. I find it distasteful with people who have given up project their failures onto everyone else who haven't given up.

are you assuming that every time you're recorded by a flock it would be capturing your face as well? do you have evidence behind that? i.e. what about on highways or fast moving spaces or far spaces where your face isn't even visible.

sure maybe in store parking lots it sees your face. at least you add a step between it and the car's registered owner and make them do extra work. I don't think falsely equivocating "they track your face so just give up on all aspects of privacy" is true. imho that's you having given up and projecting your opinion and equivalencies on all opposing arguments since you have dissonance from having given up.

also it feels deceptive to then equate that everyone also has a shopper card, credit cards, and personal spending data too - not everyone is giving up their personal data and given up like you. there's plenty of people who would actually be protected from a private car scenario because they might not have shopper cards or personal transactions in some company databases - and either way, protecting your privacy in all these sub scenarios is how you create whole privacy. you don't get privacy by saying "well they already have my face so I might as well give them every thing"

oh, if it seems like i don’t think we should have privacy, i apologize. that’s not at all what i meant.

my point is, going after flock alone is not even close to enough. i’ve read articles that say flock logs dents/scratches/paint fades/etc… on cars as well.

we would be absolutely ridiculously naive to delude ourselves that they’re not pairing up and merging data with all of the other similar aggregators such as grocery stores, gas stations, etc.. who we know for absolute certain are absolutely actively collecting and using facial recognition, apps, bluetooth, wifi signals, frequent shopper cards, credit card data, etc… we know for sure they’re doing this. and we’d be crazy to think flock isnt merging this data, especially considering that every grocery store parking lot is crawling with the little video surveillance pods.

i think we’re being ridiculous framing this as simply a flock issue. there are countless surveillance companies doing this all over… not just flock. while it’s one of the more ubiquitous, we need to stop more than just flock. this has to be stopped at the root.

but yes, i do think it’s wise to use flock as the vehicle to raise awareness, but we’d be naive af to imply it’s “just flock” and that something like an llc would be anything other than trivial for their surveillance aggregation to overcome.

hmm, sorry as well if I came off a bit strong. I can see that there's a bigger issue at hand of a holistic set of entities and groups targeting us and surveilling us in as many changes as they can. where I struggle to understand you is when you talk about all the ways we could be watched but where I am hearing some resigning. OK so what if the stores have facial recognition? Wear a mask or protect your face. It isn't illegal to hide your face. Bluetooth and wifi, so what, do you know you don't need to have those on when you enter into a store.

I have been slowly over the years improving my phone use behavior, and now most of the time I don't feel like I'm in an emergency state where my phone needs to be used and not on airplane mode, I use cash more though I also use a credit card too. At least using a credit card and still doing the car-llc protection thing means a police officer won't be harassing you and easily fining you by license plate (I experienced cop harassment in Dallas last year being a Pakistani-muslim looking man, when they were hotly accusing muslims in the area of sharia law twice police pulled me over in white neighborhoods where I lived and cost my thousands in lawyer fees with 0 responsibility on their side - "qualified immunity"). I felt safe and protected not owning a car after that.

If I decided to not do anything at all, I would have epxposed my self to continual harassment. This is one part of the whole solution. Who cares if all those groups and entities are doing all those things, protect yourself against them all theres a way to do so in all scenarios. You lose when you feel powerless and pessimistic, not when you acknowledge all the risks and choose to do one thing at a time as you can.

What do you think we do to stop this at the root?

The fact that corporations have more privacy rights than people is dystopian.

It would be, you're right.

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