Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

The number of comments is way higher than the number of upvotes, which usually gets submissions heavily downranked.

> You're thinking Chinese surveillance

the big irony, of course, is that i'm much more comfortable with China surveilling me than the US, since the latter can throw me in jail, seize my assets, and ruin my family's life, while the former cannot.

Another sign of Chinese ideological dominance is that nobody can conceive of a future that does not mimic China's solutions to social problems. Trump says frequently that he's jealous of Xi's position as dictator, tech firms envy 996 culture, public safety advocates are pivoting to restricting internet speech and constant surveillance.. etc. etc.

jesus fuck the gloves really came off in the past few years. noone even cares to hide it anymore.

i could almost admire the transparency of these people, the way they're apparently okay accepting collateral damage of their schemes, up to the complete destruction of the fabric of society... as long as there's money to be made.

You don't understand, when software has support for Chinese characters it is automatically 150% more dystopian.

American venture capitalism ironically creates all of the same authoritarian issues as Chinese state capitalism, but without any of the lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty part.

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Flock does ai enabled mass surveillance.

Palantir uses such information, feds and local governments are already customers.

The CEO of ycombinator is part of the same weird church as Peter Thiel, acts 17.

Then look up the other SV tech billionaires that are on board with network states and other Curtis Yarvin nonsense.

When you give access to any system that collects the personal information including location data for people in the US to the police, a percentage of the police will always use those systems for stalking their exes.

Agree.

If you find yourself sympathetic to Flock, you should ask yourself: do we have a right to any kind of privacy in a public space or is public space by definition a denial of any sort of privacy? This is the inherent premise in this technology that's problematic.

In Japan, for instance, there are very strict laws about broadcasting people's faces in public because there is a cultural assumption that one deserves anonymity as a form of privacy, regardless of the public visibility of their person.

I think I'd prefer to live in a place where I have some sort of recourse over when and how I'm recorded. Something more than "avoid that public intersection if you don't like it."

You can both have a desire to defend your peace, while also being against mass surveillance.

I think you have it backwards. This is what happens when we rank human lives over human freedom.

The argument for these cameras is that they save lives. The argument against them is that they destroy freedom.

Surveillance technology doesn't stop property crime, so it isn't a tradeoff question.

The necessary and sufficient steps to stop property crime are:

1. Secure the stuff.

2. Take repeat criminals off the street.

Against random 'crime of opportunity' with new parties nothing but proactive security is particularly effective because even if you catch the person after the fact the damage is already done. The incentive to commit a crime comes from the combination of the opportunity and the deterrence-- and not everyone is responsive to deterrence so controlling the opportunity is critical.

Against repeated or organized criminals nothing but taking them out of society is very effective. Because they are repeated extensive surveillance is not required-- eventually they'll be caught even if not in the first instance. If you fail to take them off the streets no amount of surveillance will ever help, as they'll keep doing it again and again.

Many repeat criminals are driven by mental illness, stupidity, emotional regulation, or sometimes desperation. They're committing crimes at all because for whatever reason they're already not responding to all the incentives not to. Adding more incentives not to has a minor effect at most.

The conspiratorially minded might wonder if the failure to enforce and incarcerate for property crime in places like California isn't part of a plot to manufacture consent for totalitarian surveillance. But sadly, life isn't a movie plot-- it would be easier to fight against a plot rather than just collective failure and incompetence. In any case, many many people have had the experience of having video or know exactly who the criminal is only to have police, prosecutors, or the court do absolutely nothing about it. But even when they do-- it pretty much never undoes the harm of the crime.

No, we do not "deserve this". The universe has no concept of "deserve".

> We have sleep walked into it.

We didn't sleep walk into it, we ran into it because of poor basic civics education and a cynical media cycle that biases towards making everyone terrified of crime.

The latter is driven by two forces - a profit motive (sensational, gruesome stories sell), and a political motive (media carrying water for far-right-wing candidates loves to keep you scared on this issue).

The optimal level of crime or unsolved crime in a society is not zero, but a lot of people will look at you like you've got three eyes if you tell them that. Talk to them for another ten minutes, and most of them will see why what you say makes sense, but that's not a conversation their television will ever have with them.

>This is clear fascism, but people are too afraid to admit. We have sleep walked into it.

>With such surveillance, administration can [...]

Have you missed all the cries of "fascism" back in 2016/2017? The problem isn't "people are too afraid to admit". It's that "wolf!" was cried too many times and people tuned it out. Ironically this invocation "fascism" is arguably also crying wolf. From wikipedia:

>Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

Is an ANPR network terrible for privacy? Yes, obviously. Is it authoritarian? Maybe[1]. Is everything vaguely authoritarian "fascism"? No.

[1] Consider cell phones. They're terrible for privacy, but nobody would seriously consider them "authoritarian".

How are they conspiring to destroy it? Are you saying that coordinating attempts to change policy counts as destroying the previous policy, or are you drawing a line from identifying and locating the cameras to (possibly other) people actively vandalizing them?

> so any pedo can see when kids are there and not attended?

Sure. It also lets parents watch. Or others see when parents are repeatedly leaving their kids unattended. Or lets you see some person that keeps showing up unattended and watching the kids.

> Or how it has become increasingly trivial to identify by face or license plate such that combining tools reaches "movie Interpol" levels, without any warrant or security credentials?

That already exists and it is run by private companies and sold to government agencies. That’s a huge power grab.

> The best defense is actually the glut of data and the fact nobody is actively watching you picking your nose in the elevator. If everyone can utilize any camera and its history for any reason then expect fractal chaos and internet shaming.

This argument holds whether it is public or not. It is worse if Flock or the government can do this asymmetrically than if anyone can do it IMO, they already have enough coercive tools.

No, but the same argument could be made for things like open source software. We assume/hope that someone more aligned with our outcomes is actively looking.

Or, at the very least, that we can go back and look later.

At first I thought you were defending flock. Seems clear the cameras make it harder to commit crimes and easier to go after the offenders, despite all the side effects most people are upset about here.