[bko]

I think its entirely reasonable that license plates are recorded on public roads and accessible to police in lawful requests, like tracking stolen vehicles or dangerous suspects.

Your hysterics about photographing children in a park is silly and no one but the most online ideologue would find it at all comparable. Find a better argument if you want to convince other reasonable people who just want to live in safe neighborhoods and don't care much about your verbal word games and stretched analogies

[browningstreet]

> I think its entirely reasonable that license plates are recorded on public roads and accessible to police in lawful requests, like tracking stolen vehicles or dangerous suspects.

And I don’t. I think my right to privacy shouldn’t arc to nil.

Cops don’t care about stolen cars. Or stolen things from cars. I’ve given them footage of such a crime and.. nada.

And they have armies of police and armament to do the other police work. They have access to individually produced recordings that they do nothing with.

Instead of just dismantling all civic rights for _some_ property rights, maybe we should have a national convention about what police are obligated to do and their best practices to do so. Courts have already established that it is not public safety, so I personally wont support any action that simply gives them more.

[bko]

> Cops don’t care about stolen cars. Or stolen things from cars

So you're just anti police. You take the most uncharitable view about the police you're impossible to argue with.

> I’ve given them footage of such a crime and.. nada.

Why would they accept "trust be bro" when you give them a license plate and ask them to shake down someone. That's why they need the technology themselves so there is clear chain of custody and impartial witness.

> Instead of just dismantling all civic rights for _some_ property rights, maybe we should have a national convention about what police are obligated to do and their best practices to do so.

Police don't do these things because there's no follow through. They arrest people and they don't get put away because of activist district attorneys and judges. Almost all cops sign up because they want to do good, which means removing bad people from society. If arresting people and chasing down crime results in just paper work, risk from false accusations and mildly inconveniencing criminals, they won't bother.

So let's have that conversation. But restricting technology is pointless and just makes their jobs harder.

[Rooster61]

> no one but the most online ideologue

> Find a better argument

That is just a reversed no-true-scottsman fallacy. If the poster's "hysterics" are a poor argument, please break down why rather than just calling it silly.

It is obvious that many in this community are against wholesale collection of information, public or private, as evidenced by the thousands of posts that state such reservations.

[bko]

> as evidenced by the thousands of posts that state such reservations.

Posts on forums are not real life. Look at revealed preferences. Many people have cameras on their property. People prefer to live in neighborhoods with well funded police with tech resources.

Again, it's entirely reasonable to collect license plates and use it to apprehend criminals. Crime is a thing, almost everyone is affected by it at some point in their lives. I don't need a proof or study, it's common sense. You know it's true but you're just pretending you don't understand.

[bluefirebrand]

> Look at revealed preferences. Many people have cameras on their property

Go ask them if they realize their videos are being stored on a company's server somewhere and those companies employees can watch their camera feeds whenever they want

Most people have no clue, they think the camera handles all of it

[JumpCrisscross]

> Go ask them if they realize their videos are being stored on a company's server somewhere and those companies employees can watch their camera feeds whenever they want

I'm doubtful more than a single-digit percentage of those people would then take down those cameras.

[bko]

They don't care bro. Same way you likely use Gmail and a million other services that are centralized.

How about we have something good w technology, like using it to catch criminals

[TripolitianFish]

You’re braindead, hand waving an argument with common sense isn’t actually interacting with anyone in a meaningful manner, you would be more use saying this to a wall.

The point the original poster is making is that this is a private system which has a high potential for abuse and often is abused, à la the posters “hysterics”, as you driveled, of people taking pictures of children and sharing it amongst themselves. Nitwit

[nkrisc]

We need to prevent the implementation of surveillance technologies that can be abused now, because later when they are weaponized against us we won’t be able to.

Some things are too dangerous to allow to exist, however reasonable and useful they might seem.

[jvanderbot]

"Online" has become such a trite dismissal.

I'm calling out, specifically, that "A camera capturing an image of a license plate that is openly displayed on a vehicle is not searching for someone's private life. It is recording what anyone standing on the same street could already observe."

... implies that a very absurd and objectionable thing like folks standing around each playground recording children and comparing notes is actually also supported by that defense and that we should consider if that defense is objectionable or not based on what it enables as much as what it is defending.

On this very forum, you can find backlash against geofencing, and here, support for flock cameras? The contradiction is bananas. Automated logging of people in public places is dystopian. You can object with that claim, fine.

[AnimalMuppet]

> On this very forum, you can find backlash against geofencing, and here, support for flock cameras? The contradiction is bananas.

There's more than one person on this forum. Why do you expect consistency? Different people have different opinions. Different people comment on different articles. HN is not a hivemind; don't expect consistency.

[jvanderbot]

Ah yes, this is a fair point.

I should have stated something weaker: There are legitimate arguements, even on this forum, against geofencing, so entertaining arguments against camera-based always-on tracking shouldn't be automatically out of scope.

[AnimalMuppet]

Fair enough. But there are also plenty of people here who yell at those who are against geofencing, so you can also expect plenty of yelling if you advocate camera-based always-on tracking.

[bko]

> Automated logging of people in public places is dystopian

You went from recording license plates on public roads to logging people in public places.

If someone steals my car, I would want to be able to give police my license plate and have them track down the person very easily by all the cameras on public roads. This is not dystopian. This is what an orderly society should look like.

You're talking about children and random stuff that's completely irrelevant. If you can't or refuse to see that, I can't convince you.

[jvanderbot]

> You went from recording license plates on public roads to logging people in public places.

No, man, the argument is in the linked article, the one from TFA, the one I quoted. It is about public spaces and recording "what anyone standing on the same street could already observe".

That is insufficiently restrictive of a criterion because it's overly broad, and therefore can lead to absurd situations we'd never expect. Like kid tracking mafias. Any device that records "what anyone on the street observe" becomes awful creepy real quick, and we shouldn't accept that kind of argument ever.

TFA goes on to say that it breaks down at scale, and I'm trying to call out that, no, it is creepy at local scales too, because recording public activity is a bad precedent to set. I don't know how to make it more clear.

> stolen car

Having a use for an overbroad surveillance tech is only a defense for you, not for me and probably not for the courts either. It's not like they only activate it when there's a car stolen. It records all the time.

We've stated our opinions clearly now, I think the back and forth can end.

[redwall_hp]

If someone steals my car, I can open an app and find its precise geolocation better than some cameras, and deliver that information to the police of my own choice. (Ideally, the car company would be legally prohibited from sharing that information with any other party.)

"Monitor the movements of everyone in case of the minute chance of car theft and astronomical chance of the police caring" is patently absurd. We probably need cameras in bathrooms too, in case someone passes out and needs medical attention.

[bko]

> deliver that information to the police of my own choice

Good luck with that.

I've heard plenty of stories of victims of theft and crime literally leading police to the door of their assailant and they can't get any action because this "privacy" movement has made their efforts pretty meaningless.

You're naive and you obviously have no real experience in this regard. It's just sad that you promote policies that help no one but criminals and you're completely unaware.

[redwall_hp]

> I've heard plenty of stories of victims of theft and crime literally leading police to the door of their assailant and they can't get any action because this "privacy" movement has made their efforts pretty meaningless.

So the police are useless when given a precise location, and you want to give them more invasive tools to continue to be useless? That's not the argument you think it is.

[bko]

Police should do their jobs and do so once empowered. They can't accept "trust me bro" when catching a criminal. Hope that helps

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> You went from recording license plates on public roads to logging people in public places.

This is kind of a misconception about the technology; there is not really much distinction between these things. Firstly, they are cameras which have no means of differentiating between a license plate or a dog or a tree. In addition to that, they are (presumably linux) computers that have software to find license plates in the images the cameras take, both of which (license plates and images) are stored on Flock's servers. That's how the "recording license plates on public roads" bit works.

The point is that the images can still be ran through creepy software written by creepy people to find children to get to "logging people in public places". And let's say, to put it mildly, it does not fill one with confidence to research the security in practice of Flock's image data.

[vitally3643]

Yeah except flock is literally photographing children on playgrounds and inside gyms and showing those photos to random people in exactly the way being described.

But sure, "word games". Sure.

[bko]

> showing those photos to random people in exactly the way being described.

Do you actually believe this?

[Computer0]

bko, perhaps it would be helpful to research this topic a bit more before commenting, just to keep our discussions useful (https://www.404media.co/city-learns-flock-accessed-cameras-i...)

[bko]

> A blog post by Jason Hunyar, a Dunwoody, Georgia resident who learned about Flock accessing the city’s cameras by obtaining Flock access logs via a public records request is called “Why Are Flock Employees Watching Our Children?”

Wow, a surveillance system that's auditable through public records. Sounds pretty good system to me. Of course there are cases of abuse but seems like the worst system besides all the rest.

This is an insane ideological battle. Another technology people talk about is recorders that are trained to identify and triangulate gun shots. The most common sense stuff doesn't pass muster with these groups so theres really no point in debating. Just know that you are in the minority, unfortunately your groups have captured some politicians.

But hopefully we'll have some choice. I would welcome this an most tech to prevent crime in my neighborhood. And you can live in a completely "free" neighborhood where criminals are free from reasonable technology measures to prevent crime.

[jazzyjackson]

Bro when I’m seeing cameras everywhere the last thing I think is “gee what a safe neighborhood I’m in”

[apercu]

So I totally disagree with your arguments on nearly all points, but the fact that no companies prioritize security of data means that this footage WILL get released at some point, which in my opinion overrides ever single argument you made.