alt Hacker NewsThey were saying "don't write to us, talk to the people who own the cameras and ask them to delete the data". A company that manufactures video cameras is not the one to talk to when someone records you, talk to the person who recorded you.
But a reasonable person would say -- the data is stored on Flock servers, not with the camera owners. And Flock would say, just because we sell data storage functionality to camera owners doesn't mean we own the data, anymore than a storage service you rent a space from owns what you put in that space.
But then an even more reasonable person would say: the infrastructure is designed in such a way as to create inadvertent sharing, and the system has vulnerabilities that compromise the data, so Flock has responsibility for setting up the system in such a way that it's basically designed to violate privacy.
And that is the main criticism of Flock. You need to have a more nuanced criticism. It would be really interesting to see this litigated.
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It easily goes both ways. But we do sue American gun makers for deaths caused by lunatics. We sue drug makers for drugs prescribed by a doctor. We sue cloud providers for not reporting illegal photos. Printers are forced to id every printed page to combat counterfeiting. Banks are forced to do close accounts even though it's not their dirty money
> They were saying "don't write to us, talk to the people who own the cameras and ask them to delete the data".
The response to this should just be, "Yes, very well, please divulge a complete list of your customers, their contact information, and information about camera locations so I will be able to pursue this per instructions".
When that obviously doesn't work either then we can all agree the law as written is completely useless, and feel great about rewriting it in a way that's calculated for maximum damage to both the vendor and their customers, and collateral damage to the whole panopticon. Or, just spitballing here, we can just skip to the punchline here and do all that anyway
Isn't this the equivalent of asking Google to delete your image off every Android phone (not just yours)?
I don’t think you’re informed on the topic. They do not just manufacture cameras.
the way this has been addressed in complex product liability in the past in the USA is that the public-facing Brand Owner has certain legal liability for the product, despite contractors or supply chains. In this case, it appears that the Flock company is the brand owner and is public-facing.
AFAIK Flock owns the cameras and leases them out [0].
[0] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-does-my-neighb...