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GardenLetter27today at 11:47 AM9 repliesview on HN

Good. It helps solve crimes, and can even resolve general anti-social behaviour.

I'd rather have the cameras than have family members die to drugged up drivers, or robbers get away with their crimes.


Replies

toasty228today at 11:48 AM

Then put one in your house, chip yourself with a gps and share your passwords with the government

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bigmadshoetoday at 12:43 PM

It’s a tradeoff between privacy/freedom from government overreach and solving these crimes. This is fine as long as you and the government agree on exactly what constitutes bad behavior. Does the current regime in the US give you hope that those two will stay aligned for long? Any technology you introduce that can be abused will be abused.

jmvoodootoday at 12:05 PM

It could also help foreign adversaries. I have 0 confidence that Flock hasn’t already been compromised given the current security environment and the value of the data that they have.

Planktonnetoday at 12:04 PM

It's not clear that it actually does help solve crimes. It might even exacerbate them.

There's been a lot of stalking enabled by Flock cameras.

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malfisttoday at 11:57 AM

What makes you think flock would prevent those crimes?

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armchairhackertoday at 11:56 AM

This is a hot take, the problem is that powerful tools like surveillance are easily (and inevitably by humans) abused to suppress what shouldn't be crimes, including expressions; and even when they don't, the potential to (including retroactively going through stored logs in the future) causes a "chilling effect" that increases anti-social behavior.

If people want to surveil the inside of their own homes and businesses that's fine. I think some public areas should be surveilled and others private, with indicators, so if people want to be watched for their own safety when they go outside they can, but if they want to avoid tracking they can go through unmonitored areas. Those will fix your latter and former concern respectively. More centralized surveillance won't help much more but certainly lead to harm (as Flock has, already, by mistakenly accusing people with similar faces for crimes across the country, and letting corrupt cops stalk their spouses).

mrweaseltoday at 12:01 PM

> and can even resolve general anti-social behaviour

And who desides what that is? Because right now, in the US, Trump and ICE appear to have strong opinions on that.

archerxtoday at 11:49 AM

Great let’s install a bunch of cameras in and around your house and live stream it on the web 24/7. You can be a great first case study. You have nothing to hide right, so you should have no issues with this.