alt Hacker NewsYeah, I'm not a fan of these things. If they were just ALPRs, I could probably give them a bit of slack -if they tightened up their security-, but all the other stuff they do, makes them pretty much untenable.
However:
> This makes AI powered cameras like Flock's distinct from traditional surveillance or traffic cams, which require someone to manually look over footage in order to find a specific vehicle or individual.
Is a bit misleading. These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
Replies
I think there's a limit to how misleading.
There's a very important difference between "anyone could walk through my door and steal my stuff" and "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff".
That's interesting, because the ALPR part of Flock is what caused all the problems here; the rest of it, of characterizing vehicles with attributes beyond just plates, wasn't really problematic at all.
Personally I don’t mind having Flock cameras or other surveillance to make it easier to stop crime. Right now in many cities there is simply no consequence for various crimes - especially property crimes. But I want these tools to be protected - requiring imminent danger or warrants for access. I don’t think the answer is to get rid of them entirely.
What makes Flock bizarre is that it's a private business, and this is precisely how police departments are getting around a lot of traditional gates and checks on this sort of thing.
Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc.
Some private business doing the same, and then letting the same police use it at will as a paying customer -- yay, all of the invasive monitoring with none of the oversight.
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>These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
Is a bit misleading itself, to do this at scale requires all those iffy data centers.
What LLM can I get and feed hundreds of hours of video into that will give me the position of a specific vehicle alongside when that happened?
An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.