Reading these actions, you can pick apart how to circumvent them, and the security audit is still pending — let's see how damning of a report they'll allow to be released.
Looks like they don't actually give a shit. These safeguards should be the required bare minimum.
P.S: Anyone know how London has solved this problem?
My police chief is okay with it and the case number "abc123" is FOIA-exempt out of operational security concerns.
Guns have safety triggers but cops still have no problems with discharging them too quickly and wrongly.
Let’s learn from guns, we should have limited them in the US decades ago and today the problem is hugely based on lack of will for action at every step in history.
Just another example of tech bros enriching themselves and destroying as much as they can along the way.
Even this isn't true (unless you meant morally, which I can't agree with) in the USA. There are times and situations where you absolutely have a right to privacy in public. For example, the government still needs a warrant to listen to you on a phone call in a public phone booth. The government needs a warrant to attach a gps tracker to your car even if it's on the public streets.
Personally, I would love extending protections against private corporations (not just government), and prevent the storage and aggregation of surveillance sensor data.
Plainly, I think it makes sense to not be constantly in view of a single entity when in public.
I can't go walk my dog around the neighborhood without looking up and seeing police accessible cameras. They can track my movements with no probable cause and no warrants.
My understanding is that IF they are tracking your historical movements over time from multiple different cameras, that constitutes a "search" and the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant in that case.
There have been slightly different variations to this in the courts lately, such as google location history and geofence warrants, but unless you know of a legal precedent (besides "they're getting away with it right now") that says historical movements don't need a search, I'm inclined to believe that they do.
Whether or not that is currently being successfully tested in court is another story.
It doesn't deal with the lingering threat that remains of the people who would be willing to do this kind of stuff for money.
The problem is ultimately that there are people motivated to spy on their neighbours and bring about a totalitarian surveillance nightmare in exchange for money.
You're just playing whack-a-mole as long as these people can still operate in society. They'll be back, and more insidious and more determined to destroy society.
What's the solution to that?
The possibilities are endless:
- Is your employee visiting your competitors?
- Where has your husband/wife/lover been?
- What medical buildings has this person been to?
- Does this person go to churches / gun ranges?[Edit: I think Flocks "victims" have a decent argument for injunctions for the removal of the cameras on the basis that Flock is conducting an illegal search on behalf of the government.]
However, the government can generally do what the public is allowed to do. So, if there are companies serving a genuine market for monitoring your employees, etc. via video surveillance installed on private property... then the government would not be restricted from accessing what private businesses have access to buy.
We shouldn't have these cameras at all but even if we were forced to have them the people running Flock are the last people who should be in control of them.
The way they act on social media and in interviews they just come off (and surely are) fragile ego children.
Make a site specific to your area. I’ve created https://stopflock419.com for my part, and I’ve already had five people in my area reach out to me (after spreading it around via friends and family).
Local campaigning is easier than you think! Most of the councils who approved these were a) lied to about the cameras’ capabilities and b) generally just on autopilot, they aren’t Flock fanboys, they just kind of take the police chief at their word that these are good tools.
Now, flock investor should get more hate.
I'm one of the general public that is continually confused by their usage of the word "own". I can't imagine that their language update will make it any more clear.
If the data is on Flock's servers (it is) and accessible by Flock (it is) then it is Flock who owns the data, not the PDs. Sure, they can allow the PDs to have say over what is done with the data, but ultimately Flock has the ability to use the data however they'd like.
This is not hypothetical: Flock have used previously shared data with DHS [0] without the so-called owner's permission and use data for their AI training [1] without option to opt-out.
Their definition of ownership is further contradicted later in this post:
> we will now require case codes for all law enforcement searches by the end of the year.
To be clear, I think this is a good change, but if PDs "own" their data, then they should be able to decide whether or not they want to use this feature.
All in all, this is not ownership.
[0] - https://apnews.com/article/immigration-abortion-license-plat...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/...
Abuse is possible, but I don't see why we can't limit it with laws and regulations. And the potential gains in terms of preventing crime and catching criminals are huge.
On the contrary, you should absolutely have a right to not be pervasively tracked and surveilled.
Is there actually a legal precedent for this?
They lost me when the CEO lied to a city official in a public meeting. ( https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-c... )
> “FLOCK already has their license plate reader systems in several neighborhoods in North SA [San Antonio] now,” James Glass, the deputy director of the Southwest Texas Fusion Center, wrote in an October 2020 email to colleagues. “In order to be granted free access to search the FLOCK system for license plate reader hits, we are asked to agree to sign this MOU.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/talon-flock-safety-cameras-p...
LazyMans•2h ago