Nice to see some pushback in the most egregious abuses of privacy. I wonder why we are getting this with Flock but not seeing the same with private security cameras such as Ring, pervasive tracking of mobile devices by carriers and apps, and internet browser tracking. Is it just that there's a direct personal benefit with those devices, and people view the trade-off as being worth it?
I don’t think people realize that these devices can even be used that way. I talk with people outside of the tech scene frequently, and they are routinely surprised when I tell them about this sort of capability. The ring doorbell Super Bowl commercial about finding lost dogs was a genuine shock to people! I think there’s a degree of visibility you need to get people’s attention on an issue, and it’s just difficult to see a doorbell as a threat for the average person.
> Is it just that there's a direct personal benefit with those devices, and people view the trade-off as being worth it?
I think that's mostly it. Basically since Flocks only use is for the systematic tracking of people for use by police and government agencies, it's a lot easier to get people to turn against it. There's just no upside to them that any individual would ever benefit from.
It's sad because if/when Flock dies the death of deserves, the software/infrastructure will likely just get sold off and reapplied to some other deployment scheme like Ring quietly forgoing the big Superbowl Ad.
I so want to push back that all this is too little too late, because the system ,though still distributed , is effectively in place already. But.. I also don't want to be the old guy telling kids not to rebel. After all, being young and thinking ( knowing! ) one can change the world, is what being young human is all about. FWIW, it may well be their version of decss, ows and so on.
On the other hand, come to think of it, despite OWS being broken up by fancy new approaches ( rumor has it, Walls Street got spooked enough to see what effective methods can be employed given that Pinkerton approach would have been frowned upon then ), I don't recall FBI marking the participants in any special way ( please correct me if I am missting anything ).
With a nationwide effort in swing to dismantle corporate surveillance, the follow up is to pass legislation state by state that prohibits its implementation in the future. Federal legislation on this matter is unlikely to occur until sometime after midterms, and so state legislation is the path to success in the interim.
We voted out the cameras locally, the feds just installed them at every nook and cranny they had available. Turned out, there was a lot of federal property, so it was back to square one.
There are a host of issues that the dems are better on (assuming one agrees on what better means), but I don't think they're particularly better on this issue. One can point to pro-privacy outliers on both sides, but we're not likely to get one of them as the final candidate in 2028.
Bugs me no end that my latest upstairs neighbor (I've been here for 15 years) has a ring on their door which means I have to be in front of it every time I go in & out my own door.
It doesn't matter how thoughtful you are, someone else will be thoughtless for you.
It's not just inputs/sensors but also outputs. It seems like every public space is abused with bright obnoxious digital billboards now the cost is cheaper and cheaper.
Ring did get some pushback when they advertised the "pet finding" feature that folks realized meant would allow anybody to be found.
But overall, being tracked by your _own_ device feels different than being tracked by somebody else's device. Especially when taxpayer dollars are being used for that other device.
do you really believe your biometrics being checked once when you enter a continent as a foreigner is the same as being videotaped at every moment in your own country as a citizen?
The problem is that you're not being videotaped at every moment. You're trying to make one sound worse than it is, and downplaying the other one. Two things can be bad at once.
I dunno if it is ironic. Most of us recognize that technology itself is a tool. It can be used in any number of ways including ones in which some portions of the population may disagree with.
I will give you a weird, but current, example. TSLA ( and virtually all companies that center on Musk as its director -- in the original sense of the word before HR title inflation took it down ) may say one thing about what the plan for the tech is, but, even occasional review of their positioning shows that the "what their technology is currently used for" is in near constant flux. Honestly, the fact that his investors keep rewarding it is beyond me.
How is this data storage even legal? I mean having cameras out that will sound an alarm if one of N specific wanted cars pass by is one thing. But do these cars just store stuff for later use and abuse? Who approved that?
The 100k figure is an overestimate by a few percent. The OpenStreetMap data for ALPRs is pretty good, but there is some duplication.
I (recently) programmatically identified ~2.5k such instances.
https://pickpj.github.io/Mapping/FIock/similar.html
It has openstreetmap links attached for those who want to help fix the data.
Nice work all. But am quite unhappy with their new map. Doesn’t work with my hardened machine with webgl off or my old phone. For some obscure reason, the button to try the “legacy” map (from last month) does not come up most of the time. So several times recently the site has been inaccessible to me.
this is great. I mean I'm all for the argument in the abstract. my commute is 2.5 miles one way, and I get tagged 20 times in each direction. that kind of brings it home.
You mean those trailers with the blue flahsy lights on them? Those are LiveView cameras. I don't think Flock is trying to advertise where all their cameras are, hence the reason for the map.
They also enable mass surveillance and they also unnecessarily reduce quality of life. No one talks about the time lost to artificially low speed limits. But they do matter.
Speed cameras enable efficient enforcement of existing speed limits. They don't require 'artificially low speed limits'.
Speed cameras don't have to enable mass surveillance. The oldest ones are detect a speeding object and take two photos at a fixed interval. Cars that aren't speeding aren't recorded.
Slowing drivers isn’t a good thing. It’s just making lives worse by adding travel time when people could move faster. But my point remains - speed cameras are a backdoor surveillance method. They can be subpoenaed.
It builds a map of your life without you knowing. Thousands of cameras snapping your plate over months means someone can piece together that you go to a certain church, a certain doctor, a certain bar, or a certain person's house. You never agreed to that, and you can't see it happening.
There's no warrant and often no real oversight. Normally police need a judge's permission (a warrant) to track someone. Flock can let them search where your car has been without that step, which is why people call it "warrantless surveillance." And it's been misused: several towns like Oshkosh and Appleton canceled their Flock contracts over privacy concerns and several incidents of misuse by law enforcement.
You don't control the data, and the rules can change. This is a big one. When Brookings agreed to install the cameras, the city was promised it would own the data, that retention would be temporary, and that Flock would not sell the information, with the contract stating Flock does not own and shall not sell customer data. Then in February 2026 Flock rewrote its terms, granting itself a perpetual, irrevocable license to use and disclose all customer data, and deleted the promise not to sell that data. So data collected about you can outlive the promises that were made when the camera went up.
And another thing to note is that it goes way beyond just reading license plates. It's building a profile and lets them search based on it. It captures things like bumper stickers and what the people in the car look like.