alt Hacker NewsPrivate entities surveil you to make money off you or protect their property. Law enforcement surveils you to arrest you and charge you with crimes. These are not the same, and that's why some people care more about surveillance by law enforcement.
As an example, see the recent case of the woman who was arrested simply for driving through a town at the same time as a robbery occurred. That sort of thing is why people care.
If the data collection is performed by a private entity and then sold to the government, that is government surveillance. I agree that this is more widespread than Flock and other big names. However, Flock and its ilk currently stand to do far more damage in practice. They offer integrated turnkey solutions that are available to practically any law enforcement, from shithead chud officers in tiny shithole towns to the NYPD and all its grand history of institutionalized misconduct, and we are already seeing the effects of that.
See, also, the recent case of a teenager who was arrested because a Flock camera or similar thought a Doritos bag in his pocket was a gun. I'll let you guess what color his skin was.
The thing is every thing I listed is also used by law enforcement. There is nothing stopping them from turning everything into a dragnet. We already know they use ring cameras, cell phones, tower data, etc to build a dragnet. Flock is just another player.
To be honest flock seem like the perfect distraction from the larger surveillance state we live in. I feel like most of the writing I have seen on this acts like this some new, disgusting, pervasive thing. The truth is law enforcement has been using everything available because there’s nothing stopping them from subpoenaing or straight buying the data.
The larger problem is law enforcement needs to be curtailed (good luck unless we bust their union which the pro-union left won’t do), and then cameras need to be removed from phones and homes.