alt Hacker News> governments have a lot of personal data about citizens that interact (often involuntarily) with those governments.
If it's recorded on a Flock camera it happened in public where there's zero expectation of privacy. If the police in Texas are being so careless about people's actually private data that it's showing up in Flock camera feeds the public should absolutely be able to see the evidence of that so that something can be done to stop it.
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The comment to which I was responding was saying all digital government records should be free, so I assumed they were not talking just about Flock camera data.
As far as Flock feeds go, do you think that if you do something or something happens to you in a place with no expectation of privacy, but you get lucky and no members of the public are around to see it but it does get captured by a Flock camera the police should be obligated to release it to anyone who asks?
How does that serve the public interest? From a privacy point of view I'd be much happier if the rule is that the government cannot release private info about me, no matter how it was acquired, unless there is a significant public interest in doing so.
I think the whole reason there's controversy about Flock is that whatever the law says people do actually expect a certain amount of privacy in a public place, and being watched and recorded 24/7 in public is meaningfully different.