Why would you trust the city more than Flock. One of the common claimed abuses of Flock data is city cops using it to stalk exes and crushes.

The problem with Flock is not who owns the data, it's the potential for abuse.

Can we normalize a healthy 4th amendment posture? It’s wild that the Peter Thiel “don’t tread on me” folks are so cool with a China like police state.

Salem, Oregon, assembled its own using OpenALPR and an on-prem server. There are plenty of reasonable criticisms of that approach too, but it's currently the farthest thing from Flock on the municipal mass-surveillance tech scale bar that I'm aware of.

The city can buy cameras and install them an operate them, but I don't think there's really space for an ethical SAAS play here.

Companies are either out of the loop, or they're in the loop and the only way to do right by their shareholders is to exploit that data in every way they can.

There is no need for mass surveillance of public spaces. The moment data is collected, it can be misused, so it is better that nothing be collected in the first place. This is what a truly robust privacy policy looks like, unlike absurd laws like the GDPR that don't address the root of the issue.

that's not privacy-first. There's no such thing as privacy-first surveillance. How can Americans spend so much time criticizing surveillance states only to build the world's largest

It's astonishing to me that the largest tech hubs in the world do not have the money to invest in developing a camera system that is sovereignly owned by the city. There are a lot of very talented engineers who would work on a project like this. Also simply putting a person in between the information would certainly reduce the profile for abuse with stalking and harassing people

I'd say most are hosted first, Milestone, Genetec, Avigilon, etc. They all sell software to host feeds from your own standardized cams (Axis, Hanwah, Samsung, etc) via h.264/mpeg. The cloud hosted CCTV at scale is relatively recent.

if the data exists, it will be abused

Any number of companies sell cameras and recorders both on-premise and cloud stored which are managed entirely by the customer. Most security cameras you see on any given building work this way, and most such camera systems also support features like LPR (license plate recognition). Most of the time you're on your own to sort out connectivity and power though.

What Flock is selling is the whole package: The hardware (including power, networking, and the pole), the software, the infrastructure, the logic design, the connectivity. For someone who doesn't want to operate and support a wide area network of IoT devices, you can see why "just give them money to watch your streets" looks appealing.