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Comment by louwrentius | Hacker News Reader

The idea that a for-profit company is allowed to scan licence plates and make this data available and searchable without restrictions seems ludicrous to me.

In The Netherlands, we do have ANPR camera's but they are run by the police and there are strict rules about data retention (no hit on a licence plate means drop the data). ANPR cameras aren't used as dragnet surveillance. The NL situation is not perfect, but it's on a different playing field.

With the absolute unregulated situation in the USA, the outcome has been predictable: cops stalking people and innocent people jailed for weeks due to mistakes.

I love Benn Jordan's work, including the video where they went to a Flock office building, filming employees. They didn't like being filmed, but it did not teach them a lesson unfortunately.

If you (still) work for Flock, don't think of yourself as a moral, decent person.

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How do you ensure privacy laws are being followed by police?

Also do you have any guarantees that national security apparatuses aren't able to access this data if they have the right excuse (e.g. counter-terrorism, narcotics enforcement, etc)

Right now, we are pretty much guaranteed that they can access the data. As opposed to no guarantees that they can't.

I'm not clear the point of your post. Is it to say that what we had before is not guaranteed safe, so let's do this worse centralized thing because reasons?

The Netherlands situation is not a legal (nor political) possibility in the US. US police is extremely decentralized compared to other nations

Settling for some minor reforms is not the answer to the US's exploding surveillance state problem

Nothing is foolproof. But I have far more trust that the police in the Netherlands will make reasonable choices with private data than a US for-profit surveillance company. In a functioning democracy, the police are kept honest via voters. Flock is only beholden to their investors, and their bottom line.

Sure, but I don't think we can make the Netherlands police in charge of our largest surveillance network.

Flock is despicable but after all the documented abuses of the system (assuming you don't accept that the entire system is an abuse) were enacted by cops (read: public officials).

I don't think a law making only ICE/FBI/etc able to access the data will do much to slow the rapid expansion of the surveillance state

Believe me, I’m as opposed to this all as you, but playing steelman for a possible solution if it really is helpful to law enforcement and civil society to have these cameras…

What if you made the data only recorded for flagged license plates, for example? Where all information is discarded at the camera-level (not even sent to remote servers) unless it matches a specific target given by police with an expiration date, with an audit trail for every entry, and manual blind-solution human review to confirm any matches before an event is even recorded

>In The Netherlands, we do have ANPR camera's but they are run by the police and there are strict rules about data retention (no hit on a licence plate means drop the data). ANPR cameras aren't used as dragnet surveillance.

In my city/state (Southern USA) you often see plain unmarked cars with multiple ALPR cameras mounted to the rear of the car. These are usually private companies patrolling streets & parking lots to build databases for REPO/Towing operations. Wouldn't surprise me if they are selling plate location databases to databrokers & law enforcement.

Plus Axon is already replacing Flock in some areas. Unfortunately there are multiple players in this game and Flock going down is only slowing their spread slightly.

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