It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution.
Thankfully the supreme court seems to agree here in two ways:
1) Just because a third party (Google in Chatrie case but Flock here) collects the data and the government requests it from them, doesn't mean that that isn't a 'search' which requires a warrant ("obtaining someone's cell-phone location history from Google constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.")
2) Delegating "searches" to a private party isn't permitted if they are acting as an "instrument or agent of the Government" (Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Association (1989) - also cited in Chatrie).
In the Google case, users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information... but when the Police ask for that information it's a 'search' and requires a specific warrant.
In the Flock case the entire REASON the cameras are there is the the government (Police or local municipality) has contracted Flock to surveil the public. Asking flock for the whereabouts of a specific person seems like it should likewise require a warrant. That's inherently different than a crime being reported and then going to dig up a video from the area from Flock - which is different than seeing someone in that video and asking Flock to find every time they've been captured by any Flock camera anywhere... that would seem to be a 'search' and would require a warrant (which in this scenario would probably be easy to get).
There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent. Filming a car on a street and giving that video to the government is not the same as me giving private information to a third party, and then them giving it to the government such as Carpenter v United states covers.
Private citizens filming in public and setting up an array of surveillance cameras in public somehow don’t seem equivalent. I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t quite articulate it. But it is different and the majority of citizens agree with me.
Is it legal for US citizens to all put cameras on their cars and set up a network where we can all see where all police are at any given time?
It’s very hard to regulate outcomes when the component steps are legal. Not saying we shouldn’t try, just saying that path is well-trodden and rarely works. See: media consolidation, etc
IMO it is much more practical to regulate and penalize the activity of using such a network than to preempt its creation. Heck, BitTorrent can be seen as a surveillance network. But intent and usage make it obvious it’s not.
Multiple things can be true at the same time... do you think the seller doesn't want a closely surveilled world with no exits?
Besides, money keeps businesses in the economy afloat, it's an artificial good with (more or less) constant value. Money's a systematic means to an end and rarely an end goal, its purpose is the transportation of value, and not the communication of value.
There are buyers who want drugs for recreational reasons, murders for emotional reasons, or spy cams on hotel rooms for business reasons. But those are simply 3 instances where existent demand doesn't mean we should be allowing any offer to exist.
I'd personally agree to put Flock-levels of civil vigilance in the same bag.
At the very least they need to make public accessible all data collected about all employees and owners of Flock, and everyone in government agencies that contract with Flock. This means we can see all photos and videos of these people, every trip they make, etc. All searchable with AI, with no audit trail (just like it is for government agencies).
The political left has really decided to go nuclear over Flock, but I'm not understanding the fundamental principle from which this view arises. Libertarian sorts don't like it either -- but that's entirely consistent with their entire existence. Is this a broad-based phenomenon on the left, or are sections perfectly fine with it? Some of the other comments here seem to endorse full on 1984-style surveillance, so perhaps this is just a libertarian-left-leaning Silicon Valley strain of leftism that's in revolt against Flock? While possible I don't traditionally see outfits like New Yorker falling in that category. When the worldview is very permissive of broad state power and often admiring of Europe, which has itself been struggling to fight off legislation weakening encryption, it's hard to make sense of this.
I'd be curious to see if Mamdani or someone similar employing Flock or an equivalent would yield the same firestorm; if not, then it's not a principled stand against surveillance, rather just another form of political warfare. Perhaps Antifa wants to not be tracked in certain locales, is less concerned in other politically favorable locales because they know they won't be prosecuted anyway?
That's only for bad people who don't agree with the right thoughts and the right thinking. Don't worry as long as you don't disagree with the government you'll be fine citizen, after all you wouldn't want to disagree with the government would you?
There probably was very little street crime, graffiti, and vandalism in the German Democratic Republic and in the USSR. And there very likely is little street crime in North Korea.
If the benefits can be had at too high a price, that doesn't make the price worth paying.
A bunch of CCTV is one thing. If the police have to come and knock on each business owner's door to ask "hey, you got some footage from 2 days ago, someone was shot in the area", that's fine with me.
But what's not fine is that capability in a fully automated, fully remotely accessible way, because that openly invites abuse of all kinds.
>China, which is a country with very little street crime, grafitti, vandalism etc
And very little ability for anyone or any group of people from any walk of life to resist getting screwed by the government if the government chooses to screw them.
The long term cost of putting locks on doors and bars on windows and all the other things that need to be done to deter small scale crime is peanuts compared to the cost of giving up the ability to disobey the government and work counter to the government with a low likelihood of being caught so long as one's profile is low.
I know that by putting it so plainly I'm gonna piss off a lot of people and draw the ire of many who want to see their favorite rules enforces with an iron fist at low cost. I don't care. I have judged those people to have bad ideas and bad morals and they are fundamentally bad people so long as they maintain them.
> And very little ability for anyone or any group of people from any walk of life to resist getting screwed by the government if the government chooses to screw them.
Sorry to break it to you but if the Feds in the US have it out for you, it won't matter how squeaky clean your record is. They'll fuck you up and ruin your life without batting an eye.
There is a huge difference between the feds having it out for a specific person and the feds having it out for a whole class of people.
Society is not rich enough for the government to skim enough off of us to provide itself with the kind of resources it would need to go after every petty deviant or inconvenient activist the way they'd go after a mob boss.
> And very little ability for anyone or any group of people from any walk of life to resist getting screwed by the government if the government chooses to screw them.
There isn’t, and has never been, a nation in human history where regular people have meaningful recourse against random targeting by the government. This is as true in Sweden as it is in China.
The best you can hope for is that a court eventually rules in your favor, after years or decades of spending all your money and energy on it, having your life utterly destroyed in the process, and at the end you get a half-hearted apology (very often not even that), plus a tiny fraction of your expenses back if you’re really lucky. The shame and desperation will be with you until your last day.
This happens all the time and absolutely everywhere in the world. I’m not even convinced it happens more frequently in China than elsewhere, though people in the West certainly like to pretend so.
> There isn’t, and has never been, a nation in human history where regular people have meaningful recourse against random targeting by the government. This is as true in Sweden as it is in China.
I've been very pleased to see the reaction to Flock in the US. I was talking to a younger guy, very normal kid who keeps his nose clean, studying criminal justice in his junior year at college. I jokingly mentioned to him that maybe he could bring some anti-surveillance awareness to whatever law enforcement agency he goes to work for and he said, very seriously, "oh yeah, definitely. I've only gotten two cameras so far but I want to get at least five." It turns out that he and his friends all follow an app that marks the location of Flock cameras and there's a whole youth culture around knocking them down.
I wonder if we can win that battle as a society over the decades. A "traditional" human-only surveillance state is bad enough, but with LLMs involved it's just a nightmare. It would be extremely cheap to now have full automated surveillance over cameras, phone lines, etc. "Computer, send me a scored list of any dissident violations conducted on any channel under surveillance in District 14 over the past two weeks. Cut off their credit cards and send a notice to appear in Civilian Oversight Court".
Linked cameras everywhere all the time has been coming for a while. Cheap hardware, connectivity, and analysis means who pays is not only not limited to governments and big companies but is barely even relevant. The remaining question is what if any rules there will be.
I find palantir and flock are more obsessed with rules on data. The seriously insidious companies tend to be international and change names every year or so. The idea that you could get that flock CE to bend the rules for the feds are basically 0. Some random middle eastern country, the issue is trusting them .
I’ll get on board with mass surveillance just as soon as every single elected and unelected leader, business executive, politician, celebrity, oligarch, Capitalist, all board members, all C-Suites, and every single VC has a live, uninterrupted, 24/7 publicly-accessible feed of their lives as they live by example and demonstrate the benefits of such a regime.
Which is to say I will never, ever be on board with mass surveillance, because those in or of power are conveniently left out of its dragnet.
I was surprised to learn that many countries have what amounts to a flock equivalent. UK for instance has a National ANPR Service w 12k fixed cameras and 90-100m plates read a day. They also store it much longer.
Never understood why the outrage of flock in particular is so big online.
The UK has been a surveillance state for decades. Heck you can’t even watch television without going on a register and inspectors coming to your door verifying your TV paperwork is in order. Imagine trying that in the US!
This sort of thing is just starting more broadly in the US and Americans are not happy about it.
It’s the new political hot potato where behind the scenes they’re pressured to support it but publicly saying so is political kryptonite.
For US politicians the only thing worse than saying you support Flock cameras is advocating for an AI data center in your community.
I never thought of UK as a police state. How about Netherlands w a similar program? Non watchlist plates are kept for 28 days compared to most flock implementations that keep for 7
The funny thing is that countries commonly called “police states” aren’t, while countries not thought of as such are.
Most Western countries have 2-3 times as many police officers per capita as China and Russia. Many people in China have had not a single encounter with authorities in their lifetime (other than basic administrative tasks).
Meanwhile, in some EU countries, you need government approval to add a roof window to your own house, and you better believe there are inspectors and fines enforcing that.
By “police state” people generally mean one where day to day behavior, speech, and thought are tightly controlled by the government. Not so much police per capita or building codes.
We can debate whether the government has a legitimate interest in ensuring that rooftop windows don’t make house fires dramatically more dangerous, but I don’t think there’s much debate to be had about whether it should be a crime to own a picture of a man standing in front of a tank.
Western countries are richer per capita. Higher yields mean more overhead for taxes. More overhead more taxes means more money for the lord. More money for the lord means more men at arm. More men at arms means more ability to shake down the peasants for even more.
Not at all true of your average Chinese. Remember, the Great Leap Forward and it's enormous famine and death and violent social upheaval is all within living memory. A few small pockets of the country had only minimal starving thanks to local authorities that quietly disobeyed Mao's directives and managed to 'fly under the radar' so to speak, but outside of those areas virtually everyone was touched in one way or another. Most of them are also extremely aware and very effected by the modern day rural/urban birth location apartheid, where if you're born outside of certain areas you can move to others -- but your kids will get 2nd-rate (if any) education, you won't get health care, etc.
And that's not to even speak of your lived experience if you're an ethnic minority in China. Tibetans don't self-immolate out of boredom.
Can't speak about Russia, the Russians I know personally all left before the Putin era really got going and isn't reflective of the current state of affairs over there, but what you said is the opposite of truth regarding China.
Because Flock is privately owned while ANPR seems to my cursory research to be government owned.
And we all know what private corporations do to peoples data.
I'm not sure about your exp w government agencies, but in my experience, I much prefer private companies. Much easier to hold to account.
Just as an example, NYC mayor is going after landlords for violations and tenant rights. He has hearings regularly. However there is no enforcement of the law when it comes to government owned housing projects, which are very often not kept up to code and are outright dangerously mismanaged
Does the city have exclusive jurisdiction over those projects? Honest question, not familiar with NYC government housing. Some places have county, state, or federal preemption.
The US isn't the UK or China and different cultures deem different things as acceptable. The UK for example is also a monarchy, which would rial up people in the US if proposed there.
Additionally the trust that the government uses these cameras as intended is apparently higher in the UK than the trust of Americans that Flock will not misuse their surveillance technology.
Flock became a controversy when it was being used for ICE raids and tracking people who got abortions rather than its original stated purpose of finding stolen cars.
Yes, but in that very link it explains how they work with the public to establish some trust?
"Any current issues of public concern?
It is recognised the extent of the UK network is a privacy concern and the scale of that network is likely to remain so for...
The NPCC ANPR lead has established an Independent Advisory Group (IAG) chaired by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner (SCC), with a broad representation from civil society and other..."
Putting aside how disproportionately noisy some activist types are, it probably has to do with Americans having practically no trust in one another, corporations in particular, and their government by extension. At the same time, Americans tend to value some positive forms of liberty - like the ability to say and do what you want in one moment - far more than other forms of liberty - like the ability for all people to feel safe enough to be able to do the things they want.
I’m an American living in Japan, I’ve always felt a great sense of liberty because of how safe it is here; I can live a lifestyle that would get me robbed pretty much immediately in the USA. While crime rates have always been relatively low here; part of that is because Japan got tough on crime around the turn of the century, and one part of that was pervasive rollout of automated license scanners used for reconstructing vehicle movement, like Flock. I suspect that Japanese people didn’t accept this because they don’t care about privacy - they absolutely do - but instead because they have a healthy enough social context to be able to consider the tradeoffs, and a government responsive enough to design around those tradeoffs; rather than immediately flying into a rage and vandalizing their cities like some angry Americans are doing now.
The same thing plays out for other things that would pretty clearly be a good thing, like having a real secure national ID instead of relying on social security numbers for identity verification (terrible). Can’t do it, people (as well as criminals) value the liberty of being difficult to trace far more than the liberty of not being defrauded regularly, or having a civil service that is able to do basic functions like authenticating you for benefits efficiently. Sigh…
> Never understood why the outrage of flock in particular is so big online.
A big reason is because there's virtually no oversight, and it's managed by a single private corporation nationwide. Neither of those things are true in the UK case.
You should really educate yourself on things like this. They matter, and by your apathy and ignorance you're helping sleepwalk your country into a dystopia.
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.
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).
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.
1. Privacy is not secrecy. Your neighbours know what you are doing, they just politely don’t mention it, or try to sell you something on the back of it.
2. Almost everything we do we do in public, with our face uncovered for the world to see.
3. The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous - epidemiology is gonna rock in 20 years. New medical insights as well as simple stuff like “how many passengers take the train regularly” (not how many passenger journeys but how many individual people will get inconvenienced if we shut this line down.
4. The problem is not you thought your life was secret, it never has been, the problem is what will we as society allow people to do with this new information. At some basic level treat it like HIPPA or medical data - keep it well managed and use in the best interests of the individual. (I disagree with the Chinese justification of “best interests of society - that can be warped so easily)
In short society is like your grandfathers financial advice - look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves
1. There is a huge difference between my neighbors accidentally seeing me leaving my place, vs an anonymous person 7 months later, being able to statistically analyze when I leave my place in the morning, and when I return in the evening, even getting a list of the places I stayed over night on the days where I did not return in the evening.
2. see above
3. The downsides are enormous as well - Want to know who went to that protest last night? Query your local palantir console. Who met with your former wive within the last 2 weeks? Flock will give you answers.
4. The problem is scale (in the number of people who can observe me, the time frame I can be observed over and the length of time over which that information is available)
> 3. The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous
And the downsides are disastrous. If you live in a free, open, inclusive and tolerant state, the surveillance might matter little to you. When that starts slipping, you need the privacy, and the secrecy to fight what comes next.
We can't have this safely. It's been proven time and time again that they people with access to these systems are not all to be trusted. The systems will be abused and people will be hurt. I'm all for cameras and so on in isolated areas of high likelihood of crime, but not as a means to tracking everyone, just in case.
Profoundly patronizing tone here, telling folks that they need help thinking about why something as personal as the human right to privacy ought to be written off.
No, my neighbors do not know everything I’m doing. We have doors and windows and we quite like it that way. We choose what to share. Same in public, same in any reasonable situation.
Losing the ability to choose what we share with the world is a deeply frightening development and makes for a world that many of us, justifiably, do not want to live in.
You can choose to expose your private life if you want, but don’t pat my head and tell me it’s good for me.
2. But not permanently recorded and stored, searchable and logged for anyone to go back in time. Also, not potentially incorrectly stored and mislabeled as you instead of someone else doing something bad. This is happening.
3. I like the benefits of our current world. I guess those aren't real or considered?
4. I never thought "my life was secret". Cops are using this to stalk ex-partners, harass citizens that raise complaints, and arrest people on false information. No one has shown these cameras directly cause a decrease in crime, and the scant few anecdotal pieces of evidence where they do individual good versus "social good" (wild way to spin this given Flock wants this for the good of all society), do not outweigh the harms, costs, abuses, and loss of privacy.
I have no idea how imposing a permanent surveillance society on everyone-everywhere-all the time at all relates to the proverb raised.
The only way I could come up with a connection is what you wanted to say, but politely, is "shut up, worry about your own damn small little problems in life. The bigger problems? Us VCs have billions to make on".
Which, yea. That makes sense. It is why VCs don't want us talking about it. They stand to make billions, while the rest of us need to count our pennies, because they aren't giving us anything else.
Did I misread that?
(Flock isn't the only one doing this. So is Axon, of Taser fame. They are arguably worse. They come into towns where Flock was removed and just install Axon cameras. Their history is nasty).
I agree this is double plus good fellow citizen. Only bad persons who want to do bad things and Eastasia supporters would not want to have their activities tracked at all times, why would anyone want to allow bad things to happen when we could all be under the watchful care of big brother at all times. After all these measures are necessary to defeat Eurasia!
> The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous - epidemiology is gonna rock in 20 years.
If you suggest mass surveillance as a "solution" to the next pandemic (I might be wrong on this and maybe I've misread your comment) I'm afraid that the world won't just stand still and face it. The recent pandemic has proven it, we're not all Australia/China.
Thankfully the supreme court seems to agree here in two ways:
1) Just because a third party (Google in Chatrie case but Flock here) collects the data and the government requests it from them, doesn't mean that that isn't a 'search' which requires a warrant ("obtaining someone's cell-phone location history from Google constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.")
2) Delegating "searches" to a private party isn't permitted if they are acting as an "instrument or agent of the Government" (Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Association (1989) - also cited in Chatrie).
In the Google case, users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information... but when the Police ask for that information it's a 'search' and requires a specific warrant.
In the Flock case the entire REASON the cameras are there is the the government (Police or local municipality) has contracted Flock to surveil the public. Asking flock for the whereabouts of a specific person seems like it should likewise require a warrant. That's inherently different than a crime being reported and then going to dig up a video from the area from Flock - which is different than seeing someone in that video and asking Flock to find every time they've been captured by any Flock camera anywhere... that would seem to be a 'search' and would require a warrant (which in this scenario would probably be easy to get).
Elect to is a bit strong here. Acquiesce to, maybe, or perhaps suffer to.
Is it legal for US citizens to all put cameras on their cars and set up a network where we can all see where all police are at any given time?
Seems like a good idea at this point.
Primary example:
U.S. government officials pressuring social-media platforms through intermediaries to suppress constitutionally protected speech.
It’s very hard to regulate outcomes when the component steps are legal. Not saying we shouldn’t try, just saying that path is well-trodden and rarely works. See: media consolidation, etc
IMO it is much more practical to regulate and penalize the activity of using such a network than to preempt its creation. Heck, BitTorrent can be seen as a surveillance network. But intent and usage make it obvious it’s not.
I'm sure we're a golden statue or private jet away from the supreme court having a change of heart there.
I don't think this is going to work out like you think it will...
Besides, money keeps businesses in the economy afloat, it's an artificial good with (more or less) constant value. Money's a systematic means to an end and rarely an end goal, its purpose is the transportation of value, and not the communication of value.
I'd personally agree to put Flock-levels of civil vigilance in the same bag.
I'd be curious to see if Mamdani or someone similar employing Flock or an equivalent would yield the same firestorm; if not, then it's not a principled stand against surveillance, rather just another form of political warfare. Perhaps Antifa wants to not be tracked in certain locales, is less concerned in other politically favorable locales because they know they won't be prosecuted anyway?
- Larry Ellison
https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-ai-surveillanc...
Now, let's hope you agree with Larry Ellison's definition of what constitutes best behavior or they will soon be sending drones after you.
> "You just have a drone follow the car," Ellison said. "It's very simple in the age of autonomous drones."
and a lot of human rights violations
If the benefits can be had at too high a price, that doesn't make the price worth paying.
But what's not fine is that capability in a fully automated, fully remotely accessible way, because that openly invites abuse of all kinds.
And very little ability for anyone or any group of people from any walk of life to resist getting screwed by the government if the government chooses to screw them.
The long term cost of putting locks on doors and bars on windows and all the other things that need to be done to deter small scale crime is peanuts compared to the cost of giving up the ability to disobey the government and work counter to the government with a low likelihood of being caught so long as one's profile is low.
I know that by putting it so plainly I'm gonna piss off a lot of people and draw the ire of many who want to see their favorite rules enforces with an iron fist at low cost. I don't care. I have judged those people to have bad ideas and bad morals and they are fundamentally bad people so long as they maintain them.
Sorry to break it to you but if the Feds in the US have it out for you, it won't matter how squeaky clean your record is. They'll fuck you up and ruin your life without batting an eye.
Society is not rich enough for the government to skim enough off of us to provide itself with the kind of resources it would need to go after every petty deviant or inconvenient activist the way they'd go after a mob boss.
There isn’t, and has never been, a nation in human history where regular people have meaningful recourse against random targeting by the government. This is as true in Sweden as it is in China.
The best you can hope for is that a court eventually rules in your favor, after years or decades of spending all your money and energy on it, having your life utterly destroyed in the process, and at the end you get a half-hearted apology (very often not even that), plus a tiny fraction of your expenses back if you’re really lucky. The shame and desperation will be with you until your last day.
This happens all the time and absolutely everywhere in the world. I’m not even convinced it happens more frequently in China than elsewhere, though people in the West certainly like to pretend so.
Truly spoken like someone who lives in neither.
I wonder if we can win that battle as a society over the decades. A "traditional" human-only surveillance state is bad enough, but with LLMs involved it's just a nightmare. It would be extremely cheap to now have full automated surveillance over cameras, phone lines, etc. "Computer, send me a scored list of any dissident violations conducted on any channel under surveillance in District 14 over the past two weeks. Cut off their credit cards and send a notice to appear in Civilian Oversight Court".
https://urban-privacy.com/pages/anti-surveillance-clothing
fock flock
Which is to say I will never, ever be on board with mass surveillance, because those in or of power are conveniently left out of its dragnet.
Never understood why the outrage of flock in particular is so big online.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-anpr-ser...
This sort of thing is just starting more broadly in the US and Americans are not happy about it.
It’s the new political hot potato where behind the scenes they’re pressured to support it but publicly saying so is political kryptonite.
For US politicians the only thing worse than saying you support Flock cameras is advocating for an AI data center in your community.
https://www.politie.nl/informatie/waar-staan-anpr-cameras.ht...
Most Western countries have 2-3 times as many police officers per capita as China and Russia. Many people in China have had not a single encounter with authorities in their lifetime (other than basic administrative tasks).
Meanwhile, in some EU countries, you need government approval to add a roof window to your own house, and you better believe there are inspectors and fines enforcing that.
We can debate whether the government has a legitimate interest in ensuring that rooftop windows don’t make house fires dramatically more dangerous, but I don’t think there’s much debate to be had about whether it should be a crime to own a picture of a man standing in front of a tank.
It's a self feeding cycle.
And that's not to even speak of your lived experience if you're an ethnic minority in China. Tibetans don't self-immolate out of boredom.
Can't speak about Russia, the Russians I know personally all left before the Putin era really got going and isn't reflective of the current state of affairs over there, but what you said is the opposite of truth regarding China.
Just as an example, NYC mayor is going after landlords for violations and tenant rights. He has hearings regularly. However there is no enforcement of the law when it comes to government owned housing projects, which are very often not kept up to code and are outright dangerously mismanaged
Additionally the trust that the government uses these cameras as intended is apparently higher in the UK than the trust of Americans that Flock will not misuse their surveillance technology.
I'm not so sure about that: https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-donald-trump-king-time-...
"Any current issues of public concern?
It is recognised the extent of the UK network is a privacy concern and the scale of that network is likely to remain so for...
The NPCC ANPR lead has established an Independent Advisory Group (IAG) chaired by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner (SCC), with a broad representation from civil society and other..."
Google national ANPR [country]
I’m an American living in Japan, I’ve always felt a great sense of liberty because of how safe it is here; I can live a lifestyle that would get me robbed pretty much immediately in the USA. While crime rates have always been relatively low here; part of that is because Japan got tough on crime around the turn of the century, and one part of that was pervasive rollout of automated license scanners used for reconstructing vehicle movement, like Flock. I suspect that Japanese people didn’t accept this because they don’t care about privacy - they absolutely do - but instead because they have a healthy enough social context to be able to consider the tradeoffs, and a government responsive enough to design around those tradeoffs; rather than immediately flying into a rage and vandalizing their cities like some angry Americans are doing now.
The same thing plays out for other things that would pretty clearly be a good thing, like having a real secure national ID instead of relying on social security numbers for identity verification (terrible). Can’t do it, people (as well as criminals) value the liberty of being difficult to trace far more than the liberty of not being defrauded regularly, or having a civil service that is able to do basic functions like authenticating you for benefits efficiently. Sigh…
It's one of the most dystopian western countries when it comes to that, not sure I'd use it as an example
Nobody really cared until they realized that it could be used to more effectively round up our precious illegal immigrants.
A big reason is because there's virtually no oversight, and it's managed by a single private corporation nationwide. Neither of those things are true in the UK case.
You should really educate yourself on things like this. They matter, and by your apathy and ignorance you're helping sleepwalk your country into a dystopia.
I'd rather have the cameras than have family members die to drugged up drivers, or robbers get away with their crimes.
There's been a lot of stalking enabled by Flock cameras.
https://www.wbrc.com/2026/09/04/moody-bessemer-police-credit...
https://www.fox13news.com/news/flock-cameras-help-find-kidna...
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).
And who desides what that is? Because right now, in the US, Trump and ICE appear to have strong opinions on that.
1. Privacy is not secrecy. Your neighbours know what you are doing, they just politely don’t mention it, or try to sell you something on the back of it.
2. Almost everything we do we do in public, with our face uncovered for the world to see.
3. The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous - epidemiology is gonna rock in 20 years. New medical insights as well as simple stuff like “how many passengers take the train regularly” (not how many passenger journeys but how many individual people will get inconvenienced if we shut this line down.
4. The problem is not you thought your life was secret, it never has been, the problem is what will we as society allow people to do with this new information. At some basic level treat it like HIPPA or medical data - keep it well managed and use in the best interests of the individual. (I disagree with the Chinese justification of “best interests of society - that can be warped so easily)
In short society is like your grandfathers financial advice - look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves
2. see above
3. The downsides are enormous as well - Want to know who went to that protest last night? Query your local palantir console. Who met with your former wive within the last 2 weeks? Flock will give you answers.
4. The problem is scale (in the number of people who can observe me, the time frame I can be observed over and the length of time over which that information is available)
And the downsides are disastrous. If you live in a free, open, inclusive and tolerant state, the surveillance might matter little to you. When that starts slipping, you need the privacy, and the secrecy to fight what comes next.
We can't have this safely. It's been proven time and time again that they people with access to these systems are not all to be trusted. The systems will be abused and people will be hurt. I'm all for cameras and so on in isolated areas of high likelihood of crime, but not as a means to tracking everyone, just in case.
No, my neighbors do not know everything I’m doing. We have doors and windows and we quite like it that way. We choose what to share. Same in public, same in any reasonable situation.
Losing the ability to choose what we share with the world is a deeply frightening development and makes for a world that many of us, justifiably, do not want to live in.
You can choose to expose your private life if you want, but don’t pat my head and tell me it’s good for me.
2. But not permanently recorded and stored, searchable and logged for anyone to go back in time. Also, not potentially incorrectly stored and mislabeled as you instead of someone else doing something bad. This is happening.
3. I like the benefits of our current world. I guess those aren't real or considered?
4. I never thought "my life was secret". Cops are using this to stalk ex-partners, harass citizens that raise complaints, and arrest people on false information. No one has shown these cameras directly cause a decrease in crime, and the scant few anecdotal pieces of evidence where they do individual good versus "social good" (wild way to spin this given Flock wants this for the good of all society), do not outweigh the harms, costs, abuses, and loss of privacy.
I have no idea how imposing a permanent surveillance society on everyone-everywhere-all the time at all relates to the proverb raised.
The only way I could come up with a connection is what you wanted to say, but politely, is "shut up, worry about your own damn small little problems in life. The bigger problems? Us VCs have billions to make on".
Which, yea. That makes sense. It is why VCs don't want us talking about it. They stand to make billions, while the rest of us need to count our pennies, because they aren't giving us anything else.
Did I misread that?
(Flock isn't the only one doing this. So is Axon, of Taser fame. They are arguably worse. They come into towns where Flock was removed and just install Axon cameras. Their history is nasty).
The benefits of a mass surveilled world are absolutely not enormous. Like, what the actual fuck?
Stay strong big brother is watching!
If you suggest mass surveillance as a "solution" to the next pandemic (I might be wrong on this and maybe I've misread your comment) I'm afraid that the world won't just stand still and face it. The recent pandemic has proven it, we're not all Australia/China.