Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'

License plate reader?

So the device should require very specific license plates to scan for—not the current dragnet. The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)—and merely log which license plate, time stamp a single photo, and note the confidence level of it being a match.

The frame buffer should be the only place (a frame of) video is ever stored at all (excepting the high-confidence match indicated above).

The only issue remaining would be whether we trust the device/software to have complied (and not have a backdoor) and of course there needs to be a legal warrant for every license plate uploaded (and it should expire fairly frequently, likely requiring a new warrant to continue canning for the plate).

I'm pretty sure we're living in the prequel to Minority Report right now.

Yes, that's what they are. But does that mean are they breaking federal law or unconstitutional? I believe we've been told by the courts repeatedly that we should have no expectation of privacy out in public.

To Google and apple's credit they have at the least made location history stored on device instead of dealing with the slippery slope of warrants that ask for all devices around a point. Google specifically decided after a court ruling to get out of the morass of server side storage. There is a lot wrong with how permissioning works on android and Google services but this is not one of them.

> The deputy then used the woman’s travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth.

That sentence does make this less of a win tbh, given that with it, it's just an actual example of the technology doing the job it is supposed to do.

Like this, it's almost a trojan horse of something pretending to be PR for A, but actually being effective PR for B.

Is there realistically a chance that we won't get total surveillance in the next decades? Unless something dramatically changes, I just don't see how it won't end any other way.

"Flock is mass surveillance", say people who are posting Ring doorbell footage on Reddit for the 50th time, trying to gangstalk the guy who stole the mail order coffee beans off their porch.

"he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth"....not helping the case but overall I agree against mass surveillance like this

They suck until they find your missing child/wife/husband... Resolving abuse of the system should be the focus.

That's interesting because that wording implies that Flock sniffers are breaking the US constitution, since it bypasses e. g. a judge coming to issuing a warrant. That means that Flock tries to bypass the judicial system in this regard.

Is that characterization even controversial? Isn’t this their self description and marketing pitch?

I'm honestly kind of surprised it took this long.

I love activist judges

Lately whenever I take a walk down a certain suburban street there's a security patrol vehicle and often I feel they're paying too much attention to me. Driving slow, flip light bar on. It's very disturbing. Not the first time it's happened, another private security company has seemed to be too interested in me. In each case I've resorted to making obscene gestures to them because it disturbs my peace. It's like a counter punch to a punch, but most would not see it that way. They're just doing their job, or a little more in the case of watching me on a public street. But when it becomes an expected part of a daily routine, it's too much.

No doubt erratic behavior gets me logged by that security team, if not escalated to local police, who may come to check up on me themselves later. Nobody knows what's happening with this footage. What their putting a wrapper in their pocket may look like in low res video.

Mass surveillance thru cameras and movement logging isn't so active but I 100% understand people who take action against the cameras. It's just as in a person's face every single day, in more and more places, and you don't know who is on the other end or what they're looking for or what you are doing may appear as.

That's exactly what it is. Great news.

I don't think we can backtrack at this point but at least it should be heavily regulated and restricted (i.e. only run queries if there's a court order, etc).

Just the other day I got pulled over when a license plate reader false flagged my drivers license. It was an embarrassing traffic stop because it was all due to the automated system.

archived; with no ads or bs: https://nonograph.com/federal-judge-calls-flock-indiscrimina...

Water found to be wet. Experts assert Pope "almost certainly Catholic". News at 11.

I think i'm like the last person who's still defending flock. This is as a result of living with very small women for years who were constantly attacked in the streets. This basically ended with surveillance. That being said, I would prefer actual police on every block with crime.

What you do on public roads is public.

The idea that law enforcement tapping into existing law enforcement knowledge constitutes as a search of "persons, houses, papers, and effects" does not logically follow for me. It is a search of law enforcements own property.

so just like anyone else except people profiting or abusing it

“Federal judge rules” is a phrase whose impact has been dramatically reduced during the trump era. You know that all flock need do is donate a few mill to trumps idiotic ballroom project or buy some of his idiotic meme coin or hire one of his idiot sons as a consultant and the problem disappears. The US is a despotic kleptocracy.

> Flock CEO Garretty Langley — who we’ll be interviewing on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt — has called for a “compromise” between privacy and safety

Don't be fooled. Flock's CEO has stated multiple times that the purpose of his company is to intimidate people into thinking they will be caught if they commit any crime, in order for him to achieve a crime-free world. The only way to make people think they will always be caught, is if people believe their every movement is tracked everywhere they go. Intimidation via zero privacy. It's literally the surveillance part of Nineteen Eighty Four.

The fact that these aims are impossible (some criminals don't mind going to jail, many are stupid/hubristic, a criminal can spraypaint a camera, etc) should also indicate how disconnected the guy is from reality. He's called people who non-violently protest the cameras terrorists. He's backpedaling now so that he can convince enough people to let him continue installing cameras and doing the same things Flock did before.

Flock keeps hurting people and only tries to do the right thing after so much outrage that it hurts its sales. This is not a company anyone should trust.

TBH the words of an individual judge shouldn't mean too much now -> they are obviously very political judges now.