Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

A "dragnet" is when you set up police checkpoints everywhere and essentially put entire cities under watch to find a fugitive. This happened in Boston after the bombings.

"Dragnets" are illegal except in extreme circumstances (like a bombing).

Flock is a "dragnet on demand." You have a digital dragnet in place not just in one city but potentially in every city, and with a single search can pull the results of the dragnet on anyone for any reason.

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

Bigcorp has a tendency to treat "anonymized" data as if it were up for grabs. The moment they strip the obvious PII from a data stream, they consider it anonymized, and they can do whatever they want with it. They "value" your privacy--that anonymized data is gold. Of course, such data is such high value and they don't "sell it to third parties", so they technically uphold their pages-long EULA, should they ever be charged in court.

But the nature of a lot of high value information, like fine-grained location and telemetry data, just cannot be effectively anonymized. I mean, how do you think they get real-time traffic information? It's "anonymized" GPS location / speed data from Android phones. And it is from the location services layer, not from Google maps.

This is being done by investors for ads.

Somr govts are cutting deals, those that aren’t are banning them.

Never trust HN articles or high karma accts

But honestly, law enforcement is the least of my concerns because the industrial surveillance complex has shown time and again that the commercial entities are the ones with the never ending thirst for squeezing ever more profit from every person they can. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth? What's to stop them Flock from selling data to any and all comers?

The possibilities are literally endless:

  * Perfect price discrimination. Parking garages, stores, car washes, fast food places perfectly adjusting price based on what you can afford (based on where you've been).
  * Car insurance shadow telematics. You don't want a GPS-tracker installed on your ODB? Fine. They'll still know where you drive and how fast.
  * Clinic-visit based healthcare inference. "Looks like this guy has been going to a cancer clinic. NO HIRE."
  * "Where has your spouse been?"

Edit: Note that this is not an endorsement, rather stating that recent supreme court cases may not be applicable.

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

I wish people could see that the very reason and way in which flock popped up almost immediately simultaneously all across the country is because it ids actually a domestic spying matrix, not a policing tool. It is a hostile, domestic and foreign enemy capability; not just some misguided mistake.

As long as the capability exists, it is “vulnerable” to back door access by foreign “intelligence services” that are just pass throughs to the CIA/FBI in this case through the “five eyes”+.

It may be illegal and unconstitutional to do domestic surveillance, which is still done under various “fingers-crossed and therefore the Constitution does not apply” enemy fabrications like national security laws/letters that are not even public, even if they are of course checked and approved by Judge Trust me Bro; but nothing stops, e.g., the various illegitimate American departments and agencies from asking the Australians, British, Canadians, Israelis, etc. if they happen to have any information about who you have met with over the last 5 years, or your country asking if you, foreign civil rights advocate, have met with anyone in America that might be helping spread civil rights in their country in exchange for some other NS deal with tweet another devil.

I wish we had a legitimate government that could actually be trusted with something like a verified, bullet proof Flock camera system that can only be accessed in a verifiable and auditable manner to actually prevent and solve things like abductions and drug/human trafficking and identify lost elderly; but wet love in a society dominated by devils that make deals with murderers, violate the Constitution constantly and consistently, carve out exceptions where none exist or are permitted, and are pedophiles devious criminals of every order and magnitude. I know all these things for a fact in addition to the fact that flock is not the first or the only method/network of mass surveillance that is already fully deployed around the country and world, and gaslighting, narcissistic lies are used to placate people and bribe them with shiny things and “convenience” to be ok with it.

People thought the future would look like some draconian and dystopian 1984, but in reality it is actually the Matrix or even the Minority Report, only far more hidden and with far more Soma.

The point being is that there cannot be any compromise at all, because as I will adapt what was said about the topic, “he who trades basic freedom for false security is guaranteed to receive neither.”

There will be numerous unevidenced accusations about fraud this midterms. It will blanket the internet and air waves.

Despite republicans being incredibly nervous about trumps chances these midterms, republicans will win the house and the senate. Trump will reaffirm a supermajority, and policies he decreed will only be expanded.

Emboldened, tariffs will continue and expand. The Iran war will continue and expand. Flock cameras will continue and expand.

The supreme court will acquisence slowly piece by piece to ever more draconian constitutional violations.

This is only the beginning.

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

Primary example:

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

I'm genuinely taken aback by that.

I can clearly see a bunch of brand new accounts brigading the thread, YCisComplict, YCisBad etc. Presumably bots or something but this is still bad even discounting those accounts.

We need more Aaron Schwartz’s in the world. Shame he's gone. Lads like that seemed kind of dorky and a bit pretentious in their pursuit of righteousness back in the day but my god their absence is noted in this day and age.

Besides, money keeps businesses in the economy afloat, it's an artificial good with (more or less) constant value. Money's a systematic means to an end and rarely an end goal, its purpose is the transportation of value, and not the communication of value.

I'd personally agree to put Flock-levels of civil vigilance in the same bag.

I've been involved in civil liberties for over three decades. I was a member of the EFF and ACLU when I could afford it, and follower of the early cypherpunks. Like a lot of EFF members, I was advocating against the Patriot Act a d the methods used to pass it after 9/11.

But this feels different. The fact that there is large support feom the left behind this makes me very cautious.

The examples of police stalking is another thing that adds up to something fishy.

I'm very glad that dangerous stalking by those with authority and power is being addressed and dealt with. But I have to wonder if the true people with power aren't using this to create laws tailored to them around future citizen surveillance methods.

I had a possible opportunity to work in a really interesting space with wildlife management and sensor networks, including cameras. It would have been a dream, because it was an awesome space to bring educational material to families about the world around them. Interactive embedded sensors and media integration thst let them learn about nature.

I didn't take that position because of healthcare and medical issues. Bit as a kid who grew up exploring science museums, I would have loved to have given back to the community. I am heartbroken for the result.

But with Flock and the crackdown on cameras, the company is also directly in the path of the legislative and public consciousness shift.

I know whatever they build will keep up with their focus on customer safety, humane wildlife management and public safety. But there's now going to be extra focus on protecting the public from employees of the firm. It shifts the narrative.

It takes focus away from just educating the public. But I guess there are other large companies who can do a better job just focusing on education and inspiration.

It makes me sad. I don't expect those new people against Flock to understand. I'm personally happy about the focus on privacy. But it's not just privacy and education now. The early cypherpunk view has been subtly co-opted.

Look at the recent Meta settlement. Society in general has known that Facebook and social media as imagined by the tech industry as an algorithmic targeting platform is largely harmful, but instead of holding them to account the US allowed them to settle with some small fines (18B is a lot, but only 10% of the gains they made from settling the case).

Now, Meta will make changes again, and then violate the rules and expectations while claiming cover from following the rules and it will take another decade of investigations, complaints and negotiation before there is an improvement.

Where were those activists when it was already clear what these companies are doing, but before the famous ad? I am not trying to be nasty, if one wants to be outraged about something bad happening, its 24/7 job and then some more.

Whack-a-mole with problems is fine, but better to unplug the machine or something similarly drastic if you want to see some sort of permanent improvement and general direction change.

Behavior you describe is some sort of well meant extremism (isn't all of it well meant from certain perspective?). Not something you easily win masses with, just add polarization into society. Clear win would be flock simply going bankrupt since their revenue becomes close to 0 consistently.

and a lot of human rights violations

It would be nice if there were less, but that change shouldn't come at a significant cost.

As an example, the FBI has data on $10-20 billion in property crimes per year in the US. Wow, that's a lot. Of course, there's probably $5-$10 trillion dollars of personal property.

If the benefits can be had at too high a price, that doesn't make the price worth paying.

And very little ability for anyone or any group of people from any walk of life to resist getting screwed by the government if the government chooses to screw them.

The long term cost of putting locks on doors and bars on windows and all the other things that need to be done to deter small scale crime is peanuts compared to the cost of giving up the ability to disobey the government and work counter to the government with a low likelihood of being caught so long as one's profile is low.

I know that by putting it so plainly I'm gonna piss off a lot of people and draw the ire of many who want to see their favorite rules enforces with an iron fist at low cost. I don't care. I have judged those people to have bad ideas and bad morals and they are fundamentally bad people so long as they maintain them.

or are you just making things up

- Garry Tan

[1] https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955

Do this to him and you'll likely be in deep trouble.

”We don’t really turn it off… without a court order”

Then there were some expose pieces about how the data is routinely used by police to do things like track people's everyday whereabouts (which should require a warrant). There were also a variety of other issues:

- They misidentified someone's license plate consistently, leading to him being harassed by the police.

- There were big security vulnerabilities which meant people could live stream the video from some the cameras and access some of the data.

- They have been used by police officers to stalk people for romantic/sexual reasons.

- They are being used to enforce a lot of laws that people think are unjust (abortion bans, immigration laws, etc.).

Arguably those two types of power are in conflict in terms of desired outcomes.

Your line about capitalised 'Antifa' suggest an unserious lack of familiarity with left-wing groups and causes.

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

If people want to surveil the inside of their own homes and businesses that's fine. I think some public areas should be surveilled and others private, with indicators, so if people want to be watched for their own safety when they go outside they can, but if they want to avoid tracking they can go through unmonitored areas. Those will fix your latter and former concern respectively. More centralized surveillance won't help much more but certainly lead to harm (as Flock has, already, by mistakenly accusing people with similar faces for crimes across the country, and letting corrupt cops stalk their spouses).

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

This sort of thing is just starting more broadly in the US and Americans are not happy about it.

It’s the new political hot potato where behind the scenes they’re pressured to support it but publicly saying so is political kryptonite.

For US politicians the only thing worse than saying you support Flock cameras is advocating for an AI data center in your community.

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..."

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…

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

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

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.

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).

HIPPA is an extremely very poor model for this sort of thing. It's just this side of worthless in terms of maintaining medical privacy. It's actually very difficult to maintain the privacy of your medical data in the US.

Stay strong big brother is watching!

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

If you suggest mass surveillance as a "solution" to the next pandemic (I might be wrong on this and maybe I've misread your comment) I'm afraid that the world won't just stand still and face it. The recent pandemic has proven it, we're not all Australia/China.