If you force surveillance on 10 people and even one of them doesn't consent, that's still a net bad. And this situation is probably closer to the inverse of those numbers, or at the very least 50/50.
And this isn't even to mention the criminal negligence of Flock, and the evils they have already enabled, as committed both by Flock employees and by government.
It's hard to gauge the sincerity of these beliefs, and even harder to tell if you've actually tested these beliefs against the reality of mass surveillance, especially when it's been used to arrest and stalk innocent people.
Well, we need laws and oversight to stop these actions. Do you realize that people use phones to stalk innocent people? And yet you probably have a phone. Why is that?
This is like the "why drive if it's so dangerous" fallacy. We trade cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward. Cars and phones are highly valuable to normal people. Virtually all people do not experience immediate, constant, concrete benefits from public camera surveillance. And this is not even to mention that Flock cameras are more abused than phones (although scale makes that subjective, it's kind of apples-to-oranges right now).
Analogies are distracting. They are rhetorical junk food. Make an argument directly supporting Flock cameras - don't just say "it's like phones".
This was my exact point. I don't actually believe in banning phones and was just using it to point out how poor the argument is. I'm curious why you're jumping on me, but not OP. Is it because you agree with their opinions but not mine?
Saying "surveillance is bad because it has been abused in these instances" is not a particularly compelling argument because it doesn't talk about the "cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward" aspects of flock.
That's because you haven't thought it through. "We only want info on the bad people" might not alarm you personally until any government entity changes the definition of bad and now you're a "bad guy".
There are all sorts of powers we afford law enforcement that could be abused; I hardly think cameras would be at the top of the list of concerns, honestly. NYC has had thousands upon thousands of cameras for quite a while without much fanfare, along with other major top cities worldwide.
OP knows only a very basic opinion of mine, and they tell me I'm wrong because I haven't thought about it, what else should I think? Do you think they know how much I thought about this?
Isn't the implication "if only you thought more and better about this topic, your opinion would match mine"?
While such a surveillance system appears to (kinda) work in China, do you really trust American companies and the American police system to implement it at anywhere close to that level of competency?
It's not the cameras I mind per-se. They have legitmately been used to solve some crimes that might have gone unsolved otherwise.
But the problem is the cameras are pervasive. It's not like a red light camera, or a speed zone camera, or a toll road camera, that has a specific purpose in a specific location. And it's the building of a database, and correlation of data from point to point, and the potential abuse. We have documented cases of cops abusing Flock data to stalk exes, And history proves that any time you collect data about a group of people, it will eventually if not immediately be abused.
You can propose all the warrants and anonymizing and other restrictions that you might like to control who looks at the data and when, but at the end of the day it's all about trusting those in power who have control of the data, and that's not a good thing to do. The government does not (or should not) have the right to track the public to this degree as they go about their daily personal business.
Would you care to elaborate on why you don't mind individuals being stalked by employees with zero oversight or accountability, and why you don't mind protestors being monitored by the government? Since those are both part of "this type of surveillance", and are a pretty fucking crazy thing to state you're okay with with no argument for them. Do you perhaps lack the imagination to consider how this would affect your life if a government that did not agree with your political views came into power sometime in the future and were to use "this type of surveillance" against you?
And this isn't even to mention the criminal negligence of Flock, and the evils they have already enabled, as committed both by Flock employees and by government.