Cities Are Covering Flock Cameras with Trash Bags

> [...] a scandal in which the city was sharing Flock camera data for immigration enforcement apparently on accident [...]

This is surely the first time I'm seeing "on accident" from a journalist. I get that it's used in casual speech but it's never been normal in formal contexts where "proper" use of language is considered important.

To back up my words with evidence, take a look at [0]. If you look at some of the examples from the late 90s [1] you'll see that most of the uses of "on accident" that did exist weren't even used in the "accidentally" sense but in contexts like "on accident compensation" or "on accident rates" - to introduce a topic. To eliminate that, we can do something like [2] and see that this modern construction basically didn't exist until 2010.

If you play with the corpus, you can see that it's not really used in English English, only American English.

[0]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=on+accident%2C...

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22on%20accident%22&tbm=bks&...

[2]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=it+accidentall...

> both Dayton and Evanston city officials told residents that they were not sure whether they could immediately deactivate or remove the cameras under the terms of their contracts.

How could they not be sure? Surely they 1. have a copy of the contract, 2. can read, and 3. have access to counsel. If not, are city officials that incompetent?

> Dayton is not the first city to cover its Flock cameras with trash bags because they can’t figure out how to immediately terminate the use of the cameras. Late last year, the city of Evanston, Illinois also covered its cameras with trash bags while it was waiting for the company to remove them from the city.

We were just discussing “1984” and “We” a few days ago, books primarily about mass surveillance and the attendant harms. Neither of those books saw profit motive, though, they were all about top-down political power making use of surveillance.

I suppose at the time of reading those I thought that would be the origin — a government decides and starts putting up cameras, like London. A for-profit entity festooning the landscape with these things, though, damn. Clearly the powers-that-be can do the math on how easy it is exfiltrate this data from private to government hands. This sympathetic cooperation between governments and corps smells very much like early fascism to me.

This is just the right thing to do.

Nice. Why stop at Flock though? Maybe they can do all ALPRs and speed cameras next. It doesn’t matter which company operates them.

Just wait until everyone flips to Axon Outposts and they see what the Axon Fusus platform does with the video coming in from them. :)

https://www.axon.com/products/axon-vision

Note the demo reels showing "fights detected" coming from their Outpost (Flock-adjacent clone) and Lightpost (UbiHub AI+ and Streetlight-mounted Axis Q1800) cameras with a level of confidence that was confirmed by a human operator.