There isn’t, and has never been, a nation in human history where regular people have meaningful recourse against random targeting by the government. This is as true in Sweden as it is in China.

The best you can hope for is that a court eventually rules in your favor, after years or decades of spending all your money and energy on it, having your life utterly destroyed in the process, and at the end you get a half-hearted apology (very often not even that), plus a tiny fraction of your expenses back if you’re really lucky. The shame and desperation will be with you until your last day.

This happens all the time and absolutely everywhere in the world. I’m not even convinced it happens more frequently in China than elsewhere, though people in the West certainly like to pretend so.

Most Western countries have 2-3 times as many police officers per capita as China and Russia. Many people in China have had not a single encounter with authorities in their lifetime (other than basic administrative tasks).

Meanwhile, in some EU countries, you need government approval to add a roof window to your own house, and you better believe there are inspectors and fines enforcing that.

Nobody really cared until they realized that it could be used to more effectively round up our precious illegal immigrants.

Additionally the trust that the government uses these cameras as intended is apparently higher in the UK than the trust of Americans that Flock will not misuse their surveillance technology.

"Any current issues of public concern?

It is recognised the extent of the UK network is a privacy concern and the scale of that network is likely to remain so for...

The NPCC ANPR lead has established an Independent Advisory Group (IAG) chaired by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner (SCC), with a broad representation from civil society and other..."

It's one of the most dystopian western countries when it comes to that, not sure I'd use it as an example

A big reason is because there's virtually no oversight, and it's managed by a single private corporation nationwide. Neither of those things are true in the UK case.

You should really educate yourself on things like this. They matter, and by your apathy and ignorance you're helping sleepwalk your country into a dystopia.

I’m an American living in Japan, I’ve always felt a great sense of liberty because of how safe it is here; I can live a lifestyle that would get me robbed pretty much immediately in the USA. While crime rates have always been relatively low here; part of that is because Japan got tough on crime around the turn of the century, and one part of that was pervasive rollout of automated license scanners used for reconstructing vehicle movement, like Flock. I suspect that Japanese people didn’t accept this because they don’t care about privacy - they absolutely do - but instead because they have a healthy enough social context to be able to consider the tradeoffs, and a government responsive enough to design around those tradeoffs; rather than immediately flying into a rage and vandalizing their cities like some angry Americans are doing now.

The same thing plays out for other things that would pretty clearly be a good thing, like having a real secure national ID instead of relying on social security numbers for identity verification (terrible). Can’t do it, people (as well as criminals) value the liberty of being difficult to trace far more than the liberty of not being defrauded regularly, or having a civil service that is able to do basic functions like authenticating you for benefits efficiently. Sigh…

https://www.wbrc.com/2026/09/04/moody-bessemer-police-credit...

https://www.fox13news.com/news/flock-cameras-help-find-kidna...

And who desides what that is? Because right now, in the US, Trump and ICE appear to have strong opinions on that.

There's been a lot of stalking enabled by Flock cameras.

2. see above

3. The downsides are enormous as well - Want to know who went to that protest last night? Query your local palantir console. Who met with your former wive within the last 2 weeks? Flock will give you answers.

4. The problem is scale (in the number of people who can observe me, the time frame I can be observed over and the length of time over which that information is available)

And the downsides are disastrous. If you live in a free, open, inclusive and tolerant state, the surveillance might matter little to you. When that starts slipping, you need the privacy, and the secrecy to fight what comes next.

We can't have this safely. It's been proven time and time again that they people with access to these systems are not all to be trusted. The systems will be abused and people will be hurt. I'm all for cameras and so on in isolated areas of high likelihood of crime, but not as a means to tracking everyone, just in case.

No, my neighbors do not know everything I’m doing. We have doors and windows and we quite like it that way. We choose what to share. Same in public, same in any reasonable situation.

Losing the ability to choose what we share with the world is a deeply frightening development and makes for a world that many of us, justifiably, do not want to live in.

You can choose to expose your private life if you want, but don’t pat my head and tell me it’s good for me.

2. But not permanently recorded and stored, searchable and logged for anyone to go back in time. Also, not potentially incorrectly stored and mislabeled as you instead of someone else doing something bad. This is happening.

3. I like the benefits of our current world. I guess those aren't real or considered?

4. I never thought "my life was secret". Cops are using this to stalk ex-partners, harass citizens that raise complaints, and arrest people on false information. No one has shown these cameras directly cause a decrease in crime, and the scant few anecdotal pieces of evidence where they do individual good versus "social good" (wild way to spin this given Flock wants this for the good of all society), do not outweigh the harms, costs, abuses, and loss of privacy.

I have no idea how imposing a permanent surveillance society on everyone-everywhere-all the time at all relates to the proverb raised.

The only way I could come up with a connection is what you wanted to say, but politely, is "shut up, worry about your own damn small little problems in life. The bigger problems? Us VCs have billions to make on".

Which, yea. That makes sense. It is why VCs don't want us talking about it. They stand to make billions, while the rest of us need to count our pennies, because they aren't giving us anything else.

Did I misread that?

(Flock isn't the only one doing this. So is Axon, of Taser fame. They are arguably worse. They come into towns where Flock was removed and just install Axon cameras. Their history is nasty).

The benefits of a mass surveilled world are absolutely not enormous. Like, what the actual fuck?

Primary example:

U.S. government officials pressuring social-media platforms through intermediaries to suppress constitutionally protected speech.

I'm sure we're a golden statue or private jet away from the supreme court having a change of heart there.

I don't think this is going to work out like you think it will...

Elect to is a bit strong here. Acquiesce to, maybe, or perhaps suffer to.