Not "Did you say I can 5x my ROI? Here, shut up and take my money!"

we are essentially already in that dystopia.

it is now more of a question of how bad it gets, and if the population will ever stand against it in any meaningful fashion.

Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7.

I mean, cool, stop Flock, but don't stop there. Flock is very much not the final boss in this fight. The cynic in me says we will all get bored once Flock is off the radar though.

Then you want to stop the company.

Which is reasonable.

Something, something, forest, trees.

Unfortunately automated surveillance is considered the best detective tool we have but in reality it doesn't seem to be the case with public self surveillance and good ol' park a policeman box in every neighborhood seems to outperform automated surveillance. So there's much more to this than "surveillance is bad or good" discussions we have right now.

I've noted this in the age verification debate, and in the Android developer verification debate as well.

Just denying the tradeoffs isn't productive, if tradeoffs affect others, just pushing your position disregarding the tradeoffs as fake or not important is divisive. In actuality I think that both parties become incentivized to solve the problems of the other group of people too, but as a centrist that position often gets pushback from both sides who seem to collaborate only indirectly from a place of adversarial competition and good vs evil framing, which I think is less productive than just recognizing the conflict and negotiating, but perhaps it's more engaging...

We had one last year. Everyone around has cameras. The cops refused to do anything about it. They refused to get recordings. The neighbor went door to door and gathered it herself. Cops refused to do anything even though you can see the car and the plates from multiple videos, multiple angles.

Guess what the cops always have resources for? Hiding behind bushes and trees to ticket people going 5 over. Or at turns where they know they’ll get people before people see the cop car.

Our HOA came together and asked the police department about this. They gave us bullshit about how custody of evidence etc is hard and even if they put people in jail, the lenient judges will let them go anyway. It was fucked up.

Our HOA was going in hard about installing floc cameras everywhere. I had to fight hard not to get that done. One of the reasons I won wasn’t because privacy, it was because the cops literally were like unless we can directly pull video feeds from cameras, we won’t do much. And that access wasn’t available to those police department. At least at the time.

There have been many other such stories I’ve personally witnessed in the cities I’ve lived in.

Cops seem to have plenty of resources to bully people of color, seize assets and hide behind trees and bushes to ticket people, reduce the period of orange lights so people get more tickets etc. but never enough to actually do their jobs.

Nice idea, but at least in the U.S. (with the lone exception of LE obtaining cell phone location records), courts have consistently held that if you give your data to someone else, you are no longer entitled to an expectation of privacy in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

If you want your data to be considered an extension of your home, at least for now, keep it at home.

This would be excluding gag orders correct?

And regular orders currently notify the service provider, but they don't necessarily notify the target, they just don't have a prohibition on the service provider notifying the target.

Finally, recordings of public areas actually aren't be impacted by warrants at all, right? But what you are saying is not just that LEA would need warrants to look at public recordings from a willingly cooperating camera owner, and that the warrants can't be gag orders (unless specified), but that the targets must be notified, even if the subject under search were someone else, the fact that I'm included in a recording would compel the LEA to notify me?

And how exactly would I be notified? Wouldn't that necessitate even more privacy invading features like facial recognition and a facial to contact information technology? Not an uncommon paradox.

Again, just want to understand the position, my position might leak as the question being leading, but I can't help it.

This would avoid having to define what is and isn't a mass surveillance system. Any camera recording off your property would have a legal risk for the operator-- but if you're just recording locally and only using it to discourage or solve crime you're suffering the risk would be minimal and justified.

It sounds good but the implementation would be harder than achieving single payer healthcare that's better than what Medicare is now destroyed by for-profit prior authorizations and fake healthcare with lifetime limits.

Give me a database of everywhere you have ever driven, and I will find multiple ways to make you look like a criminal.

We don't need mass surveillance for traffic control. It can be done by the police if they really wanted to do it. Truth is, they don't care enough about road safety. This is about surveillance of citizens for control. First step is just infrastructure setup - next step is using it to prosecute those who dare to challenge the rise of fascism.

Be an advocate for your own rights to privacy. Don't simply accept it as normalcy.

You want this on our roads? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud8kFCmalgg&t=112s

I really wish we had a more robust information environment where we could discuss things with more nuance.

[1] https://youtu.be/zexJJb9Lbas

Putting a bag over the camera/solar panel or taking it down and returning the lost/abandoned property would leave it disabled just as well.

The added damage of outright destroying it would make no real difference to the company (might even just make them more money) but would make it easier to characterize the action as criminally motivated rather than an act of conscience in the public interest.

We need to find a way to make partnering with flock a liability.

In New Orleans, a private rogue network of surveillance camera has been erected in reaction to a too constraining live facial recognition ban.

I think it would be much harder to stop.

Then on the way home I'll park where I left off. If anyone asks me I'll them everything I know about you. It's "public" information after all.

2) > Isn't that a privacy risk?

Yes, it is!

> Should we ban cameras in smartphones?

No? How about making it difficult for the police to seize everyone's videos without a good reason? We already do that for phone videos, it's called warrants. But Flock doesn't. They just ask cops to enter any arbitrary "reason" text into a HTML textbox and instantly get access to everyone's videos. And if the people explicitly said they don't want those specific cops to have access, like many people decided about ICE? Well, just ask the next county over and use their system, it's not checked in any way.

If someone breaks into my car and a Flock camera sees it, is their right to privacy in a public space more important than my right to not have my property get stolen?

Further, I'm not sure why there is an expectation of privacy in public places. You don't have to consent to being filmed when you're walking down a public sidewalk.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...

So I was disappointed by what felt like very weak arguments in the article. Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused. The solution is to fix the abuse problem.

I’d like to hear stronger arguments against these devices, so that I’m better informed locally.