So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources? Why not hit them with theft of service for continuing to draw power and use public infrastructure?
They will never change their behavior when there are no consequences for their actions.
> So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources?
They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled. How is that legal? I thought you had to be city-approved to install equipment like that. One would think that no contract = no approval?
Maybe they need to set up a "sting" operation at one of the disabled units and start makin' some arrests/fines for unapproved equipment installation/construction on public property? See if that changes some minds over at Flock about what they can and cannot get away with?
This is unfounded pessimism. The genesis of the article is civic engagement that rejected Flock, prompting elected officials, whose decision is then being supported by the police department.
People need to see their lives improve materially within a reasonable period of time before they will trust politics again I would wager. I don't think people aren't voting due to apathy, they aren't voting because they don't trust the system.
You're describing Russia, not America. In America voter turnout is at record highs, people are protesting loud and visibly, and "Flock camera" is a cultural byword for oppressive dragnet surveillance.
I don't think people have connected the dots between Flock and Ring yet, but it's only a matter of time.
Depends on how you frame it I suppose. If your experience is that every candidate in the last 20+ years has been a different flavor of awful for the average jane you could say it's zen-like acceptance.
Ring cameras recording outside people’s doors are what catalyzed the installation of more surveillance. After all people can’t complain one camera but not another when they all have the claimed justification of safety and security.
You absolutely can complain about Flock and other such cameras over Ring.
Ring cameras are privately owned, installed on private property, by the choice of the property owner. Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.
Flock cameras are a completely different situation. They're installed on public property, data sharing controls are an utter shitshow, and they give police the ability to do unconstitutional dragnet-style fishing for crime and even pre-crime, i.e. "suspicious patterns of behavior".
Equating the two is a complete misunderstanding of what's happening, but companies like Flock rely on that kind of ignorance to push their product.
Its insincere to act like the control of data through ring doorbells and similar products are in anyway customer controlled. Even if we ignore when the agreed protocols have been actively ignored ( i.e., employees being able to access unauthorized: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51048406), the amount of control over the data the customer has is very little but most are simply unaware of this. Uninformed consent is not a thing.
Surveillance infrastructure is surveillance infrastructure, who is supposed to "own" it is irrelevant. Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
> Surveillance infrastructure is surveillance infrastructure, who is supposed to "own" it is irrelevant. Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
You and the poster you're replying to are making related but separate points which partially overlap yet are both valid within a certain scope. It can be simultaneously true that:
* The fact a consumer has to 'make a choice' to install a Ring camera does make the situation materially different and better than Flock in a civil rights and property rights sense.
* The fact that most consumers are unaware (or don't care) that the Ring (or similar device) click-through EULA can permit all manner of invasive outcomes which are bad and companies can easily ignore whatever the EULA permits with (probably) little consequence, resulting in even worse privacy outcomes.
Bottom line: Judged by net outcomes in practice, Ring-like cloud cameras can be every bit as bad for privacy as Flock cameras. Judged through the lens of 'balance of rights and privileges between state and individual', Flock is even worse then a camera installed by a citizen on private property.
You're reducing a spectrum to a binary, with all the errors that always come along with that.
Flock is at one rather extreme end of that spectrum, at least in the context of a democratic country with some civil liberties. They literally seem to be breaking laws in order to achieve their goals. Ring occupies a point pretty far from that.
All of these issues can be addressed with government laws and regulations, and hopefully will be. But the laws needed to constrain what Ring is doing are nowhere near what will be needed to constrain Flock.
> Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
This is trivially false. But if you live in the US and take its legal and regulatory environment as an unchangeable fact of life, I can see how you might think that.
Flock gives law enforcement privileged access to footage outside of their jurisdiction with actual features that support mass surveillance, like tracking cars across state lines. Ring footage requires a court order, warrant, or subpoena outside of customer consent and access per legal process is generally limited to a small subset of footage. That's a big difference. Only one of these two supports commercial dragnet.
If your CCTV system captures images of people outside the boundary of your private domestic property – for example, from neighbours’ homes or gardens, shared spaces, or from public areas – then the GDPR and the DPA will apply to you. You will need to ensure your use of CCTV complies with these laws. If you do not comply with your data protection obligations you may be subject to appropriate regulatory action by the ICO, as well as potential legal action by affected individuals.
---
However, as with anything in the UK, it's virtually impossible to enforce it on sh*thead neighbours recording you with their Chinese cloud enabled devices 24/7.
Wasn't this basically Uber's model? They just ignored any local regulation they didn't like, even to the point of building a system to prevent government officials were trying to take Ubers so they couldn't get fined.
> They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled.
Where? I live in Denver, are there clandestine Flock folks running around in fake electrician outfits like a cheap imitation of the Town? we could use a little Situationist urban guerilla theater here, complete with the vacant commercial space repurposed for data centers
> Dayton, another city in Minnesota located just 10 miles north of Plymouth, has also paused its Flock program and disabled the two devices in the area. The Dayton police became aware that the company intended to replace these cameras and told Flock not to proceed with the work order. However, it moved forward with the replacement anyway despite being instructed otherwise.
I would hazard a guess that they hire local contractors through some shell company. Not because they're worried about it being traced back to them, just because they don't want the workers on their books. Much like all the Amazon-not-actually-Amazon delivery trucks and drivers.
The article doesn't really tell us what the contract terms are, though. Just because the city voted to cancel the contract doesn't mean it ends immediately and Flock has to come remove all the cameras upon request. It's very likely the contract has a fixed term, and cancellation really just means they're not going to renew it at the end of the term. If that's the case, you can't charge them with crimes for using infrastructure that the contract permits them to use.
Still terrible that Flock isn't responding to them, and of course even if they intend to hold the city to the contract in terms of expecting to be paid for the full duration, they should still honor the request to shut off service.
One week to respond to a letter delivered by US postal mail isn't really much time. Not that I support Flock or the concept of Flock-style public cameras, but I don't think you can judge them to be "not responding" that quickly.
Maybe we find a company recording the public that is attentive to public relations? They sure had a quick response when the ceos' home was placed in Google maps.
Seems like their PR fire is self induced by sucking up to Money and whatever they qualify as investors?
Yes, also it says that the account management team had been in contact within the week, just that they didn't have a 'legal/corporate' response within the week, which is also not an unreasonable length of time as those things can take a bit of time.
That's what confuses me too. If they aren't making money any longer, they're basically saying "fuck you" to their own target customers?
What's the aim? ~~Bribing~~ Lobbying someone else in the government with the data they are gathering anyways in the hopes of cementing this?
So what this is telling me is if I don't like the way the government or public services is doing something, I should just plow ahead without any care and just force it and then be immune because I said so?
Perhaps their real customer isn't the City of East Bumfuck, Minnesota, but the FBI or ICE or NSA. Though even in that case it seems a bit inept: they need some buyin from the locals to get their cameras installed in the next small town.
The local government isn't their only customer. They also have contracts with the federal government who wants piggyback access to as many cameras as they can.
> So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources? Why not hit them with theft of service for continuing to draw power and use public infrastructure?
Well we don't know what was in this contract was that they had with Flock in the first place, but usually a contract termination like this would have some requirement to give a reasonable notice to allow Flock to disconnect cameras etc, and a week probably isn't reasonable notice.
flock cameras aren't powered from the power grid, they have their own solar panels and batteries (which is what allows them to be deployed to quickly and widely) so I presume the article just meant unplugging those.
Yep, there's pretty much only one rule that matters. You can do anything you want as long as it's to people below you socially. All other rules and laws come second to that one.
Similarly to how many don't want to tax the rich because their goal is to become rich themselves, many people in here, especially on the startup side, want to be the next Elon musk
That ship done sailed already. The ultra-mega-totally-too-rich are doing everything in their power to try to ensure that they're the last of their kind come hell or high-water...
Your comment reminds me of a post I read on a popular police forum about J Edgar Hoover (the infamous Director of the FBI for half a century). He created a professionalized police / intelligence force, but he also abused the rights of many citizens and elected political officials with that force. Supposedly he even used it to blackmail some of the Congressmen who were legally obligated to oversee his department.
And the comments in that post were a Rorschach test of where the commenter fell on how "necessary" the abuses of the FBI were.
It's important to understand that the FBI's power was very asymmetric.
J Edna Hoover could assign a team to gather kompromat on a person and to surveil them or harass them.
A Congressperson has no equivalent ability to threaten the Director of the FBI. At best, they could spread a rumor, but a rumor doesn't catch fire when journalists / editors had too high of ethics to repeat unverified rumors.
Right, but if you ask J Edgar Hoover supporters, MLK was an adulterer and a Socialist / Communist agitating the American populace (during a time when mass protests and riots were spreading like wildfire). The thing is, there is some truth in those claims.
Also, American society in the 1960s was not nearly as supportive of MLK Jr when he was alive as much as they are now that he was martyred. You and I are looking back and projecting our modern values on people who were still largely racist in a time when racism was both a de facto and de jure truth.
That is to say that lots of America would likely have supported the effect of the blackmail letter, if not the method itself. It was a different time. The frequent threat of the USSR, encroaching Communism, and the specter of nuclear war was suffocating and the "Law and Order" marketing of Nixon and J Edgar Hoover were appealing to many people, even if they suppressed the freedoms of many.
We did change the laws and provide more de jure rights since the 1960s.
I think there's lots of conflation of the more traditional definition of "racism" with the contemporary definition, which is not a direct correlation to the older one. The older one was a descriptor of the attributes of an individual's beliefs whereas the contemporary is a descriptor of the societal system / incentives.
Companies with deep pockets aren't throwing advertising dollars at Nick Fuentes or Kanye West when they are deep in their racist mania arc. It is no longer socially acceptable to be associated with what used to be common, the societal norm, and legally enforced.
We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.
I will, however, completely agree that the time of Nixon's presidency is remarkably similar to Trump's terms.
Im enjoying watching HBO's The WhiteHouse Plumbers and CNN's Ticky Dick. There are soooo many references thick rhyme with Trump's rhetoric, actions, and policies.
This right here. If we're going to oust this anti-American Flock and its less prominent "competitors", then we need the police to realize they're not friends, but rather foes. Extra work arresting motorists with frivolous/incompetent warrants from distant cities, civil suits for violating rights where the police department is left holding the bag, spending budget that could instead be spent on actual policing, defiant disobedience when they're asked to take the cameras down or make changes, making your city more likely to be a flashpoint for federal action, etc.
Of course this is in addition to state-level political action against flocks and other types of surveillance to preserve our freedom uniformly. The point is that we want the police lobby to be neutral or even on our side, rather than having to fight against them.
Some are. Usually on a campaign of "law and order", which makes Flock cameras an easy sell to their voting base. Because they let you keep an eye on the sort of people who are likely to be criminals. You know. Those people.
They themselves generally don't mind the invasion of privacy, at least not until it catches them specifically. In general they are much, much more afraid of the "crime wave" than of the police. (A crime wave which never seems to diminish, despite more and more policing and punishment. And which is contradicted by crime statistics.)
The absence of cameras necessitates much more a reliance on "those people" profiling style policing than their presence.
Do people feel the same way about speeding cameras?
I find the backlash against ALPRs wildly disproportionate. It earnestly saddens me that our political focus has flowed to these issues, datacenters, college sports rules, etc. while we remain incapable of confronting far more consequential structural problems, like an inability to tax and redistribute wealth.
I feel the same way about speeding cameras. As I found they impede the flow of traffic.
Ultimately this is due to the fact that the systems are used to generate revenue from citizens trying to live from day to day. Speed cameras don't really impact the wealthy the way they do the working class. Same goes for video surveillance.
So why should we the people give up our right to privacy for some fake sense of safety and huge bill
The law and order people are nuts. On a local thread complaining about our township budget it was pointed out that we spend 45% of tax revenue on policing and that if we want real cuts, some has to come from there.
And a repeated response from a certain kind of person was "Well, if we're spending 45% on policing, we must need it right..."
Depends on the type of police. Sheriff's are, I know. But I'm pretty sure city chiefs and state chiefs are just appointed by other elected officials. So I guess one step removed?
I live in a county where the Sheriff was investigated by her deputies for requiring bribes from Apple HQ's head of security (to approve armed security guard's right to CCW). The didn't actually charge her (the Sheriff), but it was kryptonite against her running for re-election, so there was a bit of justice.
You won't be able to out-cynic me, but even I recognize that there are ways to break through injustice. The deeper you fall into cynicism, the more people you turn off from seeking justice.
You have to show harm to have a case. If you were the victim of a wrongful stop, that's harm. But if your license plate was just recorded and nothing else, I'm skeptical that would give you standing in small claims court. Certainly there's other legal avenues against Flock though.
And the real answer that needs to be done is a charge PER FLOCK DEVICE of criminal trespass, per day.
And the charge needs to be applied via RICO to all the C levels and the board of directors.
This doesn't abrogate the paid contract. But you trespass the owners of said hardware after being formally notified for removal.
A counter-example: how well received would it be if I made a solar/camera/battery/cell device that was called "PigSty" and only tracked police vehicles? How would the city/county/state go after me for those devices?
The under discussed thing with ALPR cameras is how when municipalities dont approve funding for flock contracts on the basis of budget constraints, police departments will suddenly get mysterious one million dollar grants from the federal government to use them.
Flock will also operate free of charge and are more than willing to take promisary notes and install them without ever getting payment while budgets are debated. Because once they're up they know they'll just get the grants approved, and its much harder to take them down.
Flock seems way more like a government program larping as a private company. Its kind of hard to approach congress for multi billion dollar budget as the NSA/CIA/FBI for Orwellian domestic spy programs, so intelligence finds a nice tech bro to be the face of it and bankroll the startup with private capital, and then funnel money to them through less discretionary programs like grants for public saftey and local law enforcement.
Call me a conspiracy head but this is clearly a psuedo private company.
I think this is sensationalised - it looks like they only waited about a week after cancellation before they started unplugging them.
But I can't find any easy information on the contract they had with Flock, but it could well take a week for Flock to be able to respond properly after working out what to do with lawyers etc. The article says that the account management team had been in touch... so... I think this is just a PR piece for the police chief to look 'hard'.
They will never change their behavior when there are no consequences for their actions.
They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled. How is that legal? I thought you had to be city-approved to install equipment like that. One would think that no contract = no approval?
Maybe they need to set up a "sting" operation at one of the disabled units and start makin' some arrests/fines for unapproved equipment installation/construction on public property? See if that changes some minds over at Flock about what they can and cannot get away with?
I don't think people have connected the dots between Flock and Ring yet, but it's only a matter of time.
I'm sure there's more but not enough for sure.
Ring cameras are privately owned, installed on private property, by the choice of the property owner. Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.
Flock cameras are a completely different situation. They're installed on public property, data sharing controls are an utter shitshow, and they give police the ability to do unconstitutional dragnet-style fishing for crime and even pre-crime, i.e. "suspicious patterns of behavior".
Equating the two is a complete misunderstanding of what's happening, but companies like Flock rely on that kind of ignorance to push their product.
Also pertinent imo: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49191005
Surveillance infrastructure is surveillance infrastructure, who is supposed to "own" it is irrelevant. Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
You and the poster you're replying to are making related but separate points which partially overlap yet are both valid within a certain scope. It can be simultaneously true that:
* The fact a consumer has to 'make a choice' to install a Ring camera does make the situation materially different and better than Flock in a civil rights and property rights sense.
* The fact that most consumers are unaware (or don't care) that the Ring (or similar device) click-through EULA can permit all manner of invasive outcomes which are bad and companies can easily ignore whatever the EULA permits with (probably) little consequence, resulting in even worse privacy outcomes.
Bottom line: Judged by net outcomes in practice, Ring-like cloud cameras can be every bit as bad for privacy as Flock cameras. Judged through the lens of 'balance of rights and privileges between state and individual', Flock is even worse then a camera installed by a citizen on private property.
Flock is at one rather extreme end of that spectrum, at least in the context of a democratic country with some civil liberties. They literally seem to be breaking laws in order to achieve their goals. Ring occupies a point pretty far from that.
All of these issues can be addressed with government laws and regulations, and hopefully will be. But the laws needed to constrain what Ring is doing are nowhere near what will be needed to constrain Flock.
> Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
This is trivially false. But if you live in the US and take its legal and regulatory environment as an unchangeable fact of life, I can see how you might think that.
... recording the street, meaning https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-on-the-u... applies in the UK:
---
If your CCTV system captures images of people outside the boundary of your private domestic property – for example, from neighbours’ homes or gardens, shared spaces, or from public areas – then the GDPR and the DPA will apply to you. You will need to ensure your use of CCTV complies with these laws. If you do not comply with your data protection obligations you may be subject to appropriate regulatory action by the ICO, as well as potential legal action by affected individuals.
---
However, as with anything in the UK, it's virtually impossible to enforce it on sh*thead neighbours recording you with their Chinese cloud enabled devices 24/7.
Where? I live in Denver, are there clandestine Flock folks running around in fake electrician outfits like a cheap imitation of the Town? we could use a little Situationist urban guerilla theater here, complete with the vacant commercial space repurposed for data centers
> Dayton, another city in Minnesota located just 10 miles north of Plymouth, has also paused its Flock program and disabled the two devices in the area. The Dayton police became aware that the company intended to replace these cameras and told Flock not to proceed with the work order. However, it moved forward with the replacement anyway despite being instructed otherwise.
but doing a little legwork it looks like Flock has done that in Evanston and Cambridge. rollin' in hot with the Fall River Five
Still terrible that Flock isn't responding to them, and of course even if they intend to hold the city to the contract in terms of expecting to be paid for the full duration, they should still honor the request to shut off service.
Seems like their PR fire is self induced by sucking up to Money and whatever they qualify as investors?
What's the aim? ~~Bribing~~ Lobbying someone else in the government with the data they are gathering anyways in the hopes of cementing this?
So what this is telling me is if I don't like the way the government or public services is doing something, I should just plow ahead without any care and just force it and then be immune because I said so?
Well we don't know what was in this contract was that they had with Flock in the first place, but usually a contract termination like this would have some requirement to give a reasonable notice to allow Flock to disconnect cameras etc, and a week probably isn't reasonable notice.
Not an alpr apologist but aren't they almost always solar with lithium storage?
The billonaires suffered no laws, Holmes did, who was a nobody except for very briefly holding a few of others' billions.
And the comments in that post were a Rorschach test of where the commenter fell on how "necessary" the abuses of the FBI were.
J Edna Hoover could assign a team to gather kompromat on a person and to surveil them or harass them.
A Congressperson has no equivalent ability to threaten the Director of the FBI. At best, they could spread a rumor, but a rumor doesn't catch fire when journalists / editors had too high of ethics to repeat unverified rumors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_letter
Also, American society in the 1960s was not nearly as supportive of MLK Jr when he was alive as much as they are now that he was martyred. You and I are looking back and projecting our modern values on people who were still largely racist in a time when racism was both a de facto and de jure truth.
That is to say that lots of America would likely have supported the effect of the blackmail letter, if not the method itself. It was a different time. The frequent threat of the USSR, encroaching Communism, and the specter of nuclear war was suffocating and the "Law and Order" marketing of Nixon and J Edgar Hoover were appealing to many people, even if they suppressed the freedoms of many.
We did change the laws and provide more de jure rights since the 1960s.
I think there's lots of conflation of the more traditional definition of "racism" with the contemporary definition, which is not a direct correlation to the older one. The older one was a descriptor of the attributes of an individual's beliefs whereas the contemporary is a descriptor of the societal system / incentives.
Companies with deep pockets aren't throwing advertising dollars at Nick Fuentes or Kanye West when they are deep in their racist mania arc. It is no longer socially acceptable to be associated with what used to be common, the societal norm, and legally enforced.
We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.
Im enjoying watching HBO's The WhiteHouse Plumbers and CNN's Ticky Dick. There are soooo many references thick rhyme with Trump's rhetoric, actions, and policies.
Of course this is in addition to state-level political action against flocks and other types of surveillance to preserve our freedom uniformly. The point is that we want the police lobby to be neutral or even on our side, rather than having to fight against them.
They themselves generally don't mind the invasion of privacy, at least not until it catches them specifically. In general they are much, much more afraid of the "crime wave" than of the police. (A crime wave which never seems to diminish, despite more and more policing and punishment. And which is contradicted by crime statistics.)
Do people feel the same way about speeding cameras?
I find the backlash against ALPRs wildly disproportionate. It earnestly saddens me that our political focus has flowed to these issues, datacenters, college sports rules, etc. while we remain incapable of confronting far more consequential structural problems, like an inability to tax and redistribute wealth.
Ultimately this is due to the fact that the systems are used to generate revenue from citizens trying to live from day to day. Speed cameras don't really impact the wealthy the way they do the working class. Same goes for video surveillance.
So why should we the people give up our right to privacy for some fake sense of safety and huge bill
And a repeated response from a certain kind of person was "Well, if we're spending 45% on policing, we must need it right..."
A picture of a known prison escapee driving the mayor's car should drive the point home after the police pull the mayor over and investigate.
I want to live in the fantasy world you have described.
You won't be able to out-cynic me, but even I recognize that there are ways to break through injustice. The deeper you fall into cynicism, the more people you turn off from seeking justice.
There are non-destructive ways to disable them (covering them with a garbage bag, for one), but I'm also fully in favor of the destructive ways.
And the charge needs to be applied via RICO to all the C levels and the board of directors.
This doesn't abrogate the paid contract. But you trespass the owners of said hardware after being formally notified for removal.
A counter-example: how well received would it be if I made a solar/camera/battery/cell device that was called "PigSty" and only tracked police vehicles? How would the city/county/state go after me for those devices?
https://web.archive.org/web/20220524000533/https://popehat.c...
Flock will also operate free of charge and are more than willing to take promisary notes and install them without ever getting payment while budgets are debated. Because once they're up they know they'll just get the grants approved, and its much harder to take them down.
Flock seems way more like a government program larping as a private company. Its kind of hard to approach congress for multi billion dollar budget as the NSA/CIA/FBI for Orwellian domestic spy programs, so intelligence finds a nice tech bro to be the face of it and bankroll the startup with private capital, and then funnel money to them through less discretionary programs like grants for public saftey and local law enforcement.
Call me a conspiracy head but this is clearly a psuedo private company.
But I can't find any easy information on the contract they had with Flock, but it could well take a week for Flock to be able to respond properly after working out what to do with lawyers etc. The article says that the account management team had been in touch... so... I think this is just a PR piece for the police chief to look 'hard'.