Flock Defense "No Expectation of Privacy in Public" Is Wrong

https://ipvm.com/reports/flock-no-privacy-public

by jhonovich • 16 days ago

71 41 16 days ago

jvanderbot4• 16 days ago

It's commercialized stalking. A group of people who physically stood in each park every day photographing children playing and sharing those images between each other would be run out of town so quick. Laws would be invented in a heartbeat to stop this.

bko9• 16 days ago

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

jvanderbot4• 16 days ago

"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.

vitally3643• 16 days ago

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.

Rooster61• 16 days ago

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.

apercu• 16 days ago

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.

jazzyjackson• 16 days ago

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

nkrisc• 16 days ago

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.

browningstreet• 16 days ago

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.

cucumber37328423• 16 days ago

It's commercialized stalking. A group of people who physically stood in each park every day photographing children playing and sharing those images between each other would be run out of town so quick. Laws would be invented in a heartbeat to stop this.

This is a systemic problem.

There's a ton of things that are considered bad and questionably legal when small timers do them but if you spend millions producing fake bullshit paperwork to legitimize it it becomes a good thing.

I put a shed in my back yard, I'm an evil person for violating the Wetland Protection Act in my state, the city fines me and tries to turn it into leverage for stealing my house, the useful idiots cheer.

Blackrock pays some engineers to produce mumbo jumbo reports, they bulldoze the exact same f-ing "wetland" 100yd further back and put up solar panels, declare themselves to be saving the planet, and the same exact useful idiots once again cheer.

You can find a litany of examples like that in any industry, I just chose that one because I feel it's particularly on point for this audience.

jraph• 16 days ago

Have you tried to put a solar panel on your shed, though?

1718627440• 8 days ago

but if you spend millions producing fake bullshit paperwork to legitimize it it becomes a good thing.

As a German, that is precisely how Nazi Germany operated and why so few people complained: They had the proper process and paper for everything.

arjie2• 16 days ago

Yeah, but if there were people who ran around carrying other people occasionally football tackled each other killing all involved we’d probably ban that too, and yet cars are not only permitted but we give them large amounts of our common space in cities. The linebackers running around wouldn’t be treated so kindly.

This shows that in most societies mechanical devices can acceptably have certain behavior that humans cannot exhibit. People can see that a camera recording something to a video recording system is different from a person watching and photographing someone.

So these analogies by way of “what if a person were to do this other thing that implies an intent a mechanical system does not?” do not land with me.

everdrive• 16 days ago

If Flock feels this way the executive team should record the entrances and exits of their homes and stream them live online 24/7.

BizarroLand• 16 days ago

No person should be tracked by default.

There should not be any system that allows a person to be continuously tracked at all times short of as a consequence of criminal activity with a judge signing off on it.

It's so basic that a 3rd grader gets it.

cozzyd• 16 days ago

Imagine the uproar if flock were used for automatic speeding tickets.

(which... we should, if we have the data to do it, why not actually enforce traffic laws?)

arjie2• 16 days ago

In San Francisco we do have speed cameras. You’d need something like a calibrated distance measure to use Flock for speeding detection or it is (rightfully) contestable.

The cameras built for automatic speeding detection do fulfill their purpose, and I agree that it would be great to have more.

cucumber37328423• 16 days ago

Imagine the uproar if flock were used for automatic speeding tickets.

Imagine how much HN would be defending them if they started with speed cameras or something else that could be contrived as beneficial and kinda pandered to the whims of the demographics and then moved to 1984 rather than just going straight from zero to 1984.

The whole discussion would be framed as "these are critical safety infrastructure, besides they have strict controls around access and you have no privacy when driving a 2-ton death machine" and they could literally be doing facial recognition on pedestrians and tracking cyclists for years and years and years and it would take an insane mountain of beyond undeniable evidince to change the narrative of the discussion. Because once a bias prone vote base community picks a side, it's basically impossible to change. Welcome to modern discourse.

mmmlinux• 16 days ago

Never forget, There are people here who are very proud of the system they built.

kittikitti• 16 days ago

I'm infuriated with this narrative because I can then be in my own private backyard with a fence and still be susceptible to surveillance. What the people who own the surveillance narrative really mean is that if they can record you, whether in private or not, you have no expectation of privacy.

otterley• 16 days ago

Despite the references to recent cases like Carpenter, this isn’t a cogent legal analysis. These recent cases have been focused on the question as to whether law enforcement activity involving cameras, cell phone locations, etc. constitutes a “search” and therefore must satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. In the challenged cases, the Government didn’t obtain a warrant and the defense was trying to suppress the introduction of evidence.

But it says nothing as to what the Government can do when they do have a warrant. If they get a judge to sign one, provided the warrant meets the particularity requirement, they can go obtain what they need.

As far as Flock is concerned, it’s mainly a process thing. Right now they might be able to share their data with law enforcement without a warrant. If the law changes, the data will still be there, except henceforth, law enforcement will need to obtain a warrant before getting it. So there will be that safety mechanism, although security vulnerabilities could make it available to hackers.

The bigger question in my mind is “should such systems even exist in free states,” but as written, our Constitution doesn’t explicitly forbid them.

Flock Defense "No Expectation of Privacy in Public" Is Wrong

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