alt Hacker NewsCan someone enlighten me why Flock cameras are worse than the average security camera? How is it such a big topic now when their large network suggests that they've been in operation for quite some time by now?
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Network effects. Massive difference between police having to go talk to a local business owner or private citizen and say "hey, there was a robbery here, can you please go pull the footage you got last night at 8pm and see if you can share it with us please?" and being able to do a one-click nationwide query.
My child's daycare has cameras, accessible to management, with some time period of ring buffering, available at the DVR. I know everyone with access.
Playgrounds with flock cameras allow folks I don't know to watch children live.
the best place to start, if you're legitimately curious, would probably be the many news paper articles and the many recorded city meetings where flock's controversies are brought up.
even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety#Controversies is a good start
They have not been in operation for quite some time now. The large network is not a product of a long and steady roll out, but instead significant financial investment - much of which coming from people who are on record saying that democracy is a flawed system and other authoritarian soundbytes.
Flock is a large panopticon used to control the population. It became apparent recently how Flock cameras would be used by a new administration to purge law abiding workers and residents whose only crime was their immigration status. Whether you agree or not with the policy of this purge, you still witnessed the frightening efficiency with which authorities could now track and enforce whatever policy would come down the pipe. It made clear through show of force the new threat to a free people.
If it were a single camera or location, there is much less ability to track and attempt to coerce a large population.
Louis Rossmann likes to point out that the "CC" in "CCTV" means "closed circuit." Traditional security cameras are displayed maybe in a security booth in real time somewhere, and then recorded onto an on-prem hard drive. When the drive fills up the oldest video is overwritten. They're only ever looked at after recording if there's a reason to look at them.
The Flock cameras, on the other hand, upload all data to Flock which stores all video forever. They also do image recognition to identify license plates as well as other identifiable information (they've claimed to not do facial recognition but the implication is they can).
They then make this searchable so any cop with a flock login can put, say, your license plate into a flock search and it will give him a complete record of all your movements all across the country.