So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources? Why not hit them with theft of service for continuing to draw power and use public infrastructure?
They will never change their behavior when there are no consequences for their actions.
> So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources?
They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled. How is that legal? I thought you had to be city-approved to install equipment like that. One would think that no contract = no approval?
Maybe they need to set up a "sting" operation at one of the disabled units and start makin' some arrests/fines for unapproved equipment installation/construction on public property? See if that changes some minds over at Flock about what they can and cannot get away with?
This is unfounded pessimism. The genesis of the article is civic engagement that rejected Flock, prompting elected officials, whose decision is then being supported by the police department.
People need to see their lives improve materially within a reasonable period of time before they will trust politics again I would wager. I don't think people aren't voting due to apathy, they aren't voting because they don't trust the system.
You're describing Russia, not America. In America voter turnout is at record highs, people are protesting loud and visibly, and "Flock camera" is a cultural byword for oppressive dragnet surveillance.
I don't think people have connected the dots between Flock and Ring yet, but it's only a matter of time.
Depends on how you frame it I suppose. If your experience is that every candidate in the last 20+ years has been a different flavor of awful for the average jane you could say it's zen-like acceptance.
I am not impressed by the destruction of easily replaced obsolete hardware. I will consider people as engaged when they start cutting down and smashing the corporate executives who force these bad ideas on us.
There is no single point, instead there’s a build up of actions just like you see in this case. I’m curious what else you’re waiting on. What evidence will be sufficient for you that, yes, citizens are engaged in civics?
Ring cameras recording outside people’s doors are what catalyzed the installation of more surveillance. After all people can’t complain one camera but not another when they all have the claimed justification of safety and security.
You absolutely can complain about Flock and other such cameras over Ring.
Ring cameras are privately owned, installed on private property, by the choice of the property owner. Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.
Flock cameras are a completely different situation. They're installed on public property, data sharing controls are an utter shitshow, and they give police the ability to do unconstitutional dragnet-style fishing for crime and even pre-crime, i.e. "suspicious patterns of behavior".
Equating the two is a complete misunderstanding of what's happening, but companies like Flock rely on that kind of ignorance to push their product.
Its insincere to act like the control of data through ring doorbells and similar products are in anyway customer controlled. Even if we ignore when the agreed protocols have been actively ignored ( i.e., employees being able to access unauthorized: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51048406), the amount of control over the data the customer has is very little but most are simply unaware of this. Uninformed consent is not a thing.
Surveillance infrastructure is surveillance infrastructure, who is supposed to "own" it is irrelevant. Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
> Surveillance infrastructure is surveillance infrastructure, who is supposed to "own" it is irrelevant. Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
You and the poster you're replying to are making related but separate points which partially overlap yet are both valid within a certain scope. It can be simultaneously true that:
* The fact a consumer has to 'make a choice' to install a Ring camera does make the situation materially different and better than Flock in a civil rights and property rights sense.
* The fact that most consumers are unaware (or don't care) that the Ring (or similar device) click-through EULA can permit all manner of invasive outcomes which are bad and companies can easily ignore whatever the EULA permits with (probably) little consequence, resulting in even worse privacy outcomes.
Bottom line: Judged by net outcomes in practice, Ring-like cloud cameras can be every bit as bad for privacy as Flock cameras. Judged through the lens of 'balance of rights and privileges between state and individual', Flock is even worse then a camera installed by a citizen on private property.
You're reducing a spectrum to a binary, with all the errors that always come along with that.
Flock is at one rather extreme end of that spectrum, at least in the context of a democratic country with some civil liberties. They literally seem to be breaking laws in order to achieve their goals. Ring occupies a point pretty far from that.
All of these issues can be addressed with government laws and regulations, and hopefully will be. But the laws needed to constrain what Ring is doing are nowhere near what will be needed to constrain Flock.
> Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
This is trivially false. But if you live in the US and take its legal and regulatory environment as an unchangeable fact of life, I can see how you might think that.
Flock gives law enforcement privileged access to footage outside of their jurisdiction with actual features that support mass surveillance, like tracking cars across state lines. Ring footage requires a court order, warrant, or subpoena outside of customer consent and access per legal process is generally limited to a small subset of footage. That's a big difference. Only one of these two supports commercial dragnet.
> Ring footage requires a court order, warrant, or subpoena outside of customer consent and access per legal process is generally limited to a small subset of footage
Weren’t there regular scandals about local law enforcement regularly accessing Ring footage without the owner’s agreement or knowledge? Ring absolutely is a surveillance tool that can be used without oversight. See here for example: https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/corporate/amazon-ri...
Can you provide examples of Ring giving carte blanche access to government agencies, local or federal, without legal process? Do you have any examples of Ring being used to track an individual across vast distances? Or of anything you could consider mass surveillance?
You are moving the goal posts. No single Flock camera can do that, either. Instead, what they offer is a network of cameras they can access remotely and they can use with facial recognition. And yes, this can be used to track people over long distances or across states.
There are precedents with Ring being very cozy with police departments, e.g.
> Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.
The police routinely has access to Ring footage. The people who installed them give that access. Occasionally Amazon did it too even without user consent.
I’m equating the 2 because those people contribute to the internalizing of the surveillance status. When people walk down the street they are filmed by dozens of cameras and they are starting to expect this everywhere. Flock is “another one”. Flock would have had an uphill battle in a society where private surveillance is unacceptable.
When it becomes totally normal for others to use their own private (not so private n the cloud) surveillance footage of public spaces against you, Flock stops raising people’s internal alarm bells.
Why do you think Flock is big exactly in the society that was told private surveillance of public space is perfectly fine and even expected?
If your CCTV system captures images of people outside the boundary of your private domestic property – for example, from neighbours’ homes or gardens, shared spaces, or from public areas – then the GDPR and the DPA will apply to you. You will need to ensure your use of CCTV complies with these laws. If you do not comply with your data protection obligations you may be subject to appropriate regulatory action by the ICO, as well as potential legal action by affected individuals.
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However, as with anything in the UK, it's virtually impossible to enforce it on sh*thead neighbours recording you with their Chinese cloud enabled devices 24/7.
Wasn't this basically Uber's model? They just ignored any local regulation they didn't like, even to the point of building a system to prevent government officials were trying to take Ubers so they couldn't get fined.
Flock has real human officers who direct it and shareholders who profit from it (those groups overlap), it is not an inert object wielded by the State.
This doesn't reduce the responsibility of the state for misdeeds it does or attempts with Flock, but neither does the State’s role absolve Flock’s leadership and owners of the misdeeds they do and profit from, whether or not some or all are at the request of the State.
I would hazard a guess that they hire local contractors through some shell company. Not because they're worried about it being traced back to them, just because they don't want the workers on their books. Much like all the Amazon-not-actually-Amazon delivery trucks and drivers.
> They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled.
Where? I live in Denver, are there clandestine Flock folks running around in fake electrician outfits like a cheap imitation of the Town? we could use a little Situationist urban guerilla theater here, complete with the vacant commercial space repurposed for data centers
> Dayton, another city in Minnesota located just 10 miles north of Plymouth, has also paused its Flock program and disabled the two devices in the area. The Dayton police became aware that the company intended to replace these cameras and told Flock not to proceed with the work order. However, it moved forward with the replacement anyway despite being instructed otherwise.
The article doesn't really tell us what the contract terms are, though. Just because the city voted to cancel the contract doesn't mean it ends immediately and Flock has to come remove all the cameras upon request. It's very likely the contract has a fixed term, and cancellation really just means they're not going to renew it at the end of the term. If that's the case, you can't charge them with crimes for using infrastructure that the contract permits them to use.
Still terrible that Flock isn't responding to them, and of course even if they intend to hold the city to the contract in terms of expecting to be paid for the full duration, they should still honor the request to shut off service.
If nothing else, this is a good example of why the contract terms for government vendors MUST be public records and NDAs of private companies on public officials for the purposes of sales should not be legally enforceable.
The first thing the city should do when cancelling is lock down the data so no jurisdictions have access to the data. Even if the cameras are still powered on and connected, any ongoing searches should not return any results from that jurisdiction.
One week to respond to a letter delivered by US postal mail isn't really much time. Not that I support Flock or the concept of Flock-style public cameras, but I don't think you can judge them to be "not responding" that quickly.
Maybe we find a company recording the public that is attentive to public relations? They sure had a quick response when the ceos' home was placed in Google maps.
Seems like their PR fire is self induced by sucking up to Money and whatever they qualify as investors?
Yes, also it says that the account management team had been in contact within the week, just that they didn't have a 'legal/corporate' response within the week, which is also not an unreasonable length of time as those things can take a bit of time.
LT26 is one example of a 10 calendar day limit. But the point is, we know companies can move mountains when they have to. They obviously don't feel compelled to.
That's a letter you get as a final notice after previous non-response.
Companies can move mountains yes, but a routine request to cancel a service probably isn't seen as requiring that. Especially since the service contract undoubtedly defines the terms upon which either side can cancel.
I'm hoping that they are inundated with thousands of jurisdictions trying to back out these days so they are legit out of bandwidth to deal with cancellations in real time.
> So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources? Why not hit them with theft of service for continuing to draw power and use public infrastructure?
Well we don't know what was in this contract was that they had with Flock in the first place, but usually a contract termination like this would have some requirement to give a reasonable notice to allow Flock to disconnect cameras etc, and a week probably isn't reasonable notice.
even if they were totally off-grid, are there any other municipal functions you can use rent-free to put up private infrastructure of your own without pay?
tl;dr : there is a cost associated to allowing a random company to cement down a galvanized steel pole somewhere in town; for installation, removal, and liability.
That's what confuses me too. If they aren't making money any longer, they're basically saying "fuck you" to their own target customers?
What's the aim? ~~Bribing~~ Lobbying someone else in the government with the data they are gathering anyways in the hopes of cementing this?
So what this is telling me is if I don't like the way the government or public services is doing something, I should just plow ahead without any care and just force it and then be immune because I said so?
Perhaps their real customer isn't the City of East Bumfuck, Minnesota, but the FBI or ICE or NSA. Though even in that case it seems a bit inept: they need some buyin from the locals to get their cameras installed in the next small town.
The Flock search system is supposedly limited so the city/police employee has to choose the permissions (eg. Which other jurisdictions will search results show up for).
If a city wants to exempt ICE, they can. However, if the city has a rogue officer who accesses the Flock search, they can forward the results to their ICE/DHS boyfriend (the claims of a recent firing and lawsuit).
The local government isn't their only customer. They also have contracts with the federal government who wants piggyback access to as many cameras as they can.
The data can still be sold to other municipalities. That’s kind of the problem here, handling this as anything other than a privacy violation, because anything else allows them to just lease private land to install them, then sell the data to whoever wants it. But the US has been anti privacy for a while now.
I suspected that Flock cameras also notified repossesses, but a quick Google search suggests that police contracts don't, but that private property Flock installs (like shopping malls) do/can.
Maybe it's a shitty "you didn't actually cancel until you called us and sat through our upsell speeches for hours" kinda dark pattern.
flock cameras aren't powered from the power grid, they have their own solar panels and batteries (which is what allows them to be deployed to quickly and widely) so I presume the article just meant unplugging those.
Yep, there's pretty much only one rule that matters. You can do anything you want as long as it's to people below you socially. All other rules and laws come second to that one.
Similarly to how many don't want to tax the rich because their goal is to become rich themselves, many people in here, especially on the startup side, want to be the next Elon musk
That ship done sailed already. The ultra-mega-totally-too-rich are doing everything in their power to try to ensure that they're the last of their kind come hell or high-water...
Flock is turning into a textbook case of what “toxic brand” means. Municipalities are fleeing for the hills over Flock. Increasingly no official wants to be associated with or seen to be supporting the brand in any way. The only points to be scored with constituents now is firing Flock.
Your comment reminds me of a post I read on a popular police forum about J Edgar Hoover (the infamous Director of the FBI for half a century). He created a professionalized police / intelligence force, but he also abused the rights of many citizens and elected political officials with that force. Supposedly he even used it to blackmail some of the Congressmen who were legally obligated to oversee his department.
And the comments in that post were a Rorschach test of where the commenter fell on how "necessary" the abuses of the FBI were.
It's important to understand that the FBI's power was very asymmetric.
J Edna Hoover could assign a team to gather kompromat on a person and to surveil them or harass them.
A Congressperson has no equivalent ability to threaten the Director of the FBI. At best, they could spread a rumor, but a rumor doesn't catch fire when journalists / editors had too high of ethics to repeat unverified rumors.
Right, but if you ask J Edgar Hoover supporters, MLK was an adulterer and a Socialist / Communist agitating the American populace (during a time when mass protests and riots were spreading like wildfire). The thing is, there is some truth in those claims.
Also, American society in the 1960s was not nearly as supportive of MLK Jr when he was alive as much as they are now that he was martyred. You and I are looking back and projecting our modern values on people who were still largely racist in a time when racism was both a de facto and de jure truth.
That is to say that lots of America would likely have supported the effect of the blackmail letter, if not the method itself. It was a different time. The frequent threat of the USSR, encroaching Communism, and the specter of nuclear war was suffocating and the "Law and Order" marketing of Nixon and J Edgar Hoover were appealing to many people, even if they suppressed the freedoms of many.
We did change the laws and provide more de jure rights since the 1960s.
I think there's lots of conflation of the more traditional definition of "racism" with the contemporary definition, which is not a direct correlation to the older one. The older one was a descriptor of the attributes of an individual's beliefs whereas the contemporary is a descriptor of the societal system / incentives.
Companies with deep pockets aren't throwing advertising dollars at Nick Fuentes or Kanye West when they are deep in their racist mania arc. It is no longer socially acceptable to be associated with what used to be common, the societal norm, and legally enforced.
We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.
I will, however, completely agree that the time of Nixon's presidency is remarkably similar to Trump's terms.
Im enjoying watching HBO's The WhiteHouse Plumbers and CNN's Ticky Dick. There are soooo many references thick rhyme with Trump's rhetoric, actions, and policies.
This right here. If we're going to oust this anti-American Flock and its less prominent "competitors", then we need the police to realize they're not friends, but rather foes. Extra work arresting motorists with frivolous/incompetent warrants from distant cities, civil suits for violating rights where the police department is left holding the bag, spending budget that could instead be spent on actual policing, defiant disobedience when they're asked to take the cameras down or make changes, making your city more likely to be a flashpoint for federal action, etc.
Of course this is in addition to state-level political action against flocks and other types of surveillance to preserve our freedom uniformly. The point is that we want the police lobby to be neutral or even on our side, rather than having to fight against them.
Some are. Usually on a campaign of "law and order", which makes Flock cameras an easy sell to their voting base. Because they let you keep an eye on the sort of people who are likely to be criminals. You know. Those people.
They themselves generally don't mind the invasion of privacy, at least not until it catches them specifically. In general they are much, much more afraid of the "crime wave" than of the police. (A crime wave which never seems to diminish, despite more and more policing and punishment. And which is contradicted by crime statistics.)
The absence of cameras necessitates much more a reliance on "those people" profiling style policing than their presence.
Do people feel the same way about speeding cameras?
I find the backlash against ALPRs wildly disproportionate. It earnestly saddens me that our political focus has flowed to these issues, datacenters, college sports rules, etc. while we remain incapable of confronting far more consequential structural problems, like an inability to tax and redistribute wealth.
I feel the same way about speeding cameras. As I found they impede the flow of traffic.
Ultimately this is due to the fact that the systems are used to generate revenue from citizens trying to live from day to day. Speed cameras don't really impact the wealthy the way they do the working class. Same goes for video surveillance.
So why should we the people give up our right to privacy for some fake sense of safety and huge bill
The law and order people are nuts. On a local thread complaining about our township budget it was pointed out that we spend 45% of tax revenue on policing and that if we want real cuts, some has to come from there.
And a repeated response from a certain kind of person was "Well, if we're spending 45% on policing, we must need it right..."
Depends on the type of police. Sheriff's are, I know. But I'm pretty sure city chiefs and state chiefs are just appointed by other elected officials. So I guess one step removed?
I have trouble understanding why anyone would even want to be associated with a company that displayed such low ethics, repeatedly. Never mind doing business with them.
CEO... sure that beach vacation will still be nice after they've collected their golden parachute while company goes up in flames. But anyone else?
I live in a county where the Sheriff was investigated by her deputies for requiring bribes from Apple HQ's head of security (to approve armed security guard's right to CCW). The didn't actually charge her (the Sheriff), but it was kryptonite against her running for re-election, so there was a bit of justice.
You won't be able to out-cynic me, but even I recognize that there are ways to break through injustice. The deeper you fall into cynicism, the more people you turn off from seeking justice.
The NYPD has their own terrorism and counterintelligence divisions. They are pretty much an FBI governed at a city level (minus all of the cool forensics science).
I wouldn't put it beyond NYPD (in theory) except IIRC the NYPD actually drives him around in their SUVs and he has an NYPD team that does his personal security.
I wonder if the Flock contracts allow for the removal of equipment? The camera installation is generally incidental to the services provided. The contract might allow for the permanent installation while cancelation just terminates services provided.
I think this is sensationalised - it looks like they only waited about a week after cancellation before they started unplugging them.
But I can't find any easy information on the contract they had with Flock, but it could well take a week for Flock to be able to respond properly after working out what to do with lawyers etc. The article says that the account management team had been in touch... so... I think this is just a PR piece for the police chief to look 'hard'.
You have to show harm to have a case. If you were the victim of a wrongful stop, that's harm. But if your license plate was just recorded and nothing else, I'm skeptical that would give you standing in small claims court. Certainly there's other legal avenues against Flock though.
Most Data Privacy laws require actual harm and can only be enforced by the State AG. Some, like California have exemptions for security related failures that cause harm.
Then others, like Washington have strict laws around Health Data and have a private right of action. Still that would require a specific camera facing to possibly be considered for standing.
*Not a lawyer, just spends all day, every day, taking about privacy law with lawyers
And the real answer that needs to be done is a charge PER FLOCK DEVICE of criminal trespass, per day.
And the charge needs to be applied via RICO to all the C levels and the board of directors.
This doesn't abrogate the paid contract. But you trespass the owners of said hardware after being formally notified for removal.
A counter-example: how well received would it be if I made a solar/camera/battery/cell device that was called "PigSty" and only tracked police vehicles? How would the city/county/state go after me for those devices?
The under discussed thing with ALPR cameras is how when municipalities dont approve funding for flock contracts on the basis of budget constraints, police departments will suddenly get mysterious one million dollar grants from the federal government to use them.
Flock will also operate free of charge and are more than willing to take promisary notes and install them without ever getting payment while budgets are debated. Because once they're up they know they'll just get the grants approved, and its much harder to take them down.
Flock seems way more like a government program larping as a private company. Its kind of hard to approach congress for multi billion dollar budget as the NSA/CIA/FBI for Orwellian domestic spy programs, so intelligence finds a nice tech bro to be the face of it and bankroll the startup with private capital, and then funnel money to them through less discretionary programs like grants for public saftey and local law enforcement.
Call me a conspiracy head but this is clearly a psuedo private company.
What a nonsense news article, perfectly aligned to titillate the impotent rage of redditor type persons - and unfortunately hackers.
Contract ended in September and the company hasn't yet collected their equipment. Oh, what an amazing modern battlefield between everybody I don't like and everybody I like.
> but it failed to respond even after a week
Read that sentence again and think about it. Are you being propagandized?
I once had to wait for 3 years for an ice cream vendor to come take back their freezers, and 5 years for the beer vendor to come take their fridges. These kind of things aren't exactly priority.
So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources? Why not hit them with theft of service for continuing to draw power and use public infrastructure?
They will never change their behavior when there are no consequences for their actions.
> So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources?
They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled. How is that legal? I thought you had to be city-approved to install equipment like that. One would think that no contract = no approval?
Maybe they need to set up a "sting" operation at one of the disabled units and start makin' some arrests/fines for unapproved equipment installation/construction on public property? See if that changes some minds over at Flock about what they can and cannot get away with?
We're quickly moving into cyberpunk territory where corporations simply stop being accountable to governments.
At what point do citizens become more engaged in civics? Apparently cameras recording outside their door is an insufficient catalyst.
This is unfounded pessimism. The genesis of the article is civic engagement that rejected Flock, prompting elected officials, whose decision is then being supported by the police department.
Thread you’re in:
> They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled.
You know people have taken them down and covered them up physically, right?
People need to see their lives improve materially within a reasonable period of time before they will trust politics again I would wager. I don't think people aren't voting due to apathy, they aren't voting because they don't trust the system.
You're describing Russia, not America. In America voter turnout is at record highs, people are protesting loud and visibly, and "Flock camera" is a cultural byword for oppressive dragnet surveillance.
I don't think people have connected the dots between Flock and Ring yet, but it's only a matter of time.
Isn't that a part of apathy?
Depends on how you frame it I suppose. If your experience is that every candidate in the last 20+ years has been a different flavor of awful for the average jane you could say it's zen-like acceptance.
The problem is that they are the system. If they sit back and expect someone else to fix it for them, they get what they deserve.
Do you not count people cutting down and smashing flock cams as being engaged?
I am not impressed by the destruction of easily replaced obsolete hardware. I will consider people as engaged when they start cutting down and smashing the corporate executives who force these bad ideas on us.
There is no single point, instead there’s a build up of actions just like you see in this case. I’m curious what else you’re waiting on. What evidence will be sufficient for you that, yes, citizens are engaged in civics?
Any give up free next-day shipping?
We're so, so far off from that point.
except for, you know the city in TFA. And Asheville, NC.
I'm sure there's more but not enough for sure.
Ring cameras recording outside people’s doors are what catalyzed the installation of more surveillance. After all people can’t complain one camera but not another when they all have the claimed justification of safety and security.
You absolutely can complain about Flock and other such cameras over Ring.
Ring cameras are privately owned, installed on private property, by the choice of the property owner. Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.
Flock cameras are a completely different situation. They're installed on public property, data sharing controls are an utter shitshow, and they give police the ability to do unconstitutional dragnet-style fishing for crime and even pre-crime, i.e. "suspicious patterns of behavior".
Equating the two is a complete misunderstanding of what's happening, but companies like Flock rely on that kind of ignorance to push their product.
Its insincere to act like the control of data through ring doorbells and similar products are in anyway customer controlled. Even if we ignore when the agreed protocols have been actively ignored ( i.e., employees being able to access unauthorized: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51048406), the amount of control over the data the customer has is very little but most are simply unaware of this. Uninformed consent is not a thing.
Also pertinent imo: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49191005
Surveillance infrastructure is surveillance infrastructure, who is supposed to "own" it is irrelevant. Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
> Surveillance infrastructure is surveillance infrastructure, who is supposed to "own" it is irrelevant. Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
You and the poster you're replying to are making related but separate points which partially overlap yet are both valid within a certain scope. It can be simultaneously true that:
* The fact a consumer has to 'make a choice' to install a Ring camera does make the situation materially different and better than Flock in a civil rights and property rights sense.
* The fact that most consumers are unaware (or don't care) that the Ring (or similar device) click-through EULA can permit all manner of invasive outcomes which are bad and companies can easily ignore whatever the EULA permits with (probably) little consequence, resulting in even worse privacy outcomes.
Bottom line: Judged by net outcomes in practice, Ring-like cloud cameras can be every bit as bad for privacy as Flock cameras. Judged through the lens of 'balance of rights and privileges between state and individual', Flock is even worse then a camera installed by a citizen on private property.
You're reducing a spectrum to a binary, with all the errors that always come along with that.
Flock is at one rather extreme end of that spectrum, at least in the context of a democratic country with some civil liberties. They literally seem to be breaking laws in order to achieve their goals. Ring occupies a point pretty far from that.
All of these issues can be addressed with government laws and regulations, and hopefully will be. But the laws needed to constrain what Ring is doing are nowhere near what will be needed to constrain Flock.
> Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
This is trivially false. But if you live in the US and take its legal and regulatory environment as an unchangeable fact of life, I can see how you might think that.
Flock gives law enforcement privileged access to footage outside of their jurisdiction with actual features that support mass surveillance, like tracking cars across state lines. Ring footage requires a court order, warrant, or subpoena outside of customer consent and access per legal process is generally limited to a small subset of footage. That's a big difference. Only one of these two supports commercial dragnet.
> Ring footage requires a court order, warrant, or subpoena outside of customer consent and access per legal process is generally limited to a small subset of footage
Weren’t there regular scandals about local law enforcement regularly accessing Ring footage without the owner’s agreement or knowledge? Ring absolutely is a surveillance tool that can be used without oversight. See here for example: https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/corporate/amazon-ri...
That is not true for Ring.
Can you provide examples of Ring giving carte blanche access to government agencies, local or federal, without legal process? Do you have any examples of Ring being used to track an individual across vast distances? Or of anything you could consider mass surveillance?
You are moving the goal posts. No single Flock camera can do that, either. Instead, what they offer is a network of cameras they can access remotely and they can use with facial recognition. And yes, this can be used to track people over long distances or across states.
There are precedents with Ring being very cozy with police departments, e.g.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-y...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/amazon-ring-stop...
And many more over the years (all the way until February of this year, when they cancelled a deal with Flock). Amazon is not a company to trust.
> Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.
The police routinely has access to Ring footage. The people who installed them give that access. Occasionally Amazon did it too even without user consent.
I’m equating the 2 because those people contribute to the internalizing of the surveillance status. When people walk down the street they are filmed by dozens of cameras and they are starting to expect this everywhere. Flock is “another one”. Flock would have had an uphill battle in a society where private surveillance is unacceptable.
When it becomes totally normal for others to use their own private (not so private n the cloud) surveillance footage of public spaces against you, Flock stops raising people’s internal alarm bells.
Why do you think Flock is big exactly in the society that was told private surveillance of public space is perfectly fine and even expected?
> Ring cameras are privately owned, installed on private property, by the choice of the property owner.
... recording the street, meaning https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-on-the-u... applies in the UK:
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If your CCTV system captures images of people outside the boundary of your private domestic property – for example, from neighbours’ homes or gardens, shared spaces, or from public areas – then the GDPR and the DPA will apply to you. You will need to ensure your use of CCTV complies with these laws. If you do not comply with your data protection obligations you may be subject to appropriate regulatory action by the ICO, as well as potential legal action by affected individuals.
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However, as with anything in the UK, it's virtually impossible to enforce it on sh*thead neighbours recording you with their Chinese cloud enabled devices 24/7.
Fines are already nothing but a cost to them. Cyberpunk is now...
Wasn't this basically Uber's model? They just ignored any local regulation they didn't like, even to the point of building a system to prevent government officials were trying to take Ubers so they couldn't get fined.
The difference is Uber provided a service the public wanted.
it's clear that 3 letter agencies wants flock online, bit weird to put blame on flock, when it's just a gun that's being handled by the federal gov.
Flock has real human officers who direct it and shareholders who profit from it (those groups overlap), it is not an inert object wielded by the State.
This doesn't reduce the responsibility of the state for misdeeds it does or attempts with Flock, but neither does the State’s role absolve Flock’s leadership and owners of the misdeeds they do and profit from, whether or not some or all are at the request of the State.
It's a mass-surveillance dragnet, not a gun.
I thought that happened decades ago.
Depends on where it is as many of their cameras are on private property.
I would hazard a guess that they hire local contractors through some shell company. Not because they're worried about it being traced back to them, just because they don't want the workers on their books. Much like all the Amazon-not-actually-Amazon delivery trucks and drivers.
> They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled.
Where? I live in Denver, are there clandestine Flock folks running around in fake electrician outfits like a cheap imitation of the Town? we could use a little Situationist urban guerilla theater here, complete with the vacant commercial space repurposed for data centers
From the article:
> Dayton, another city in Minnesota located just 10 miles north of Plymouth, has also paused its Flock program and disabled the two devices in the area. The Dayton police became aware that the company intended to replace these cameras and told Flock not to proceed with the work order. However, it moved forward with the replacement anyway despite being instructed otherwise.
oh that doesn't count, it is part of the Plymouth Syndicate
but doing a little legwork it looks like Flock has done that in Evanston and Cambridge. rollin' in hot with the Fall River Five
I suspect that Flock might even employ real electricians.
The article doesn't really tell us what the contract terms are, though. Just because the city voted to cancel the contract doesn't mean it ends immediately and Flock has to come remove all the cameras upon request. It's very likely the contract has a fixed term, and cancellation really just means they're not going to renew it at the end of the term. If that's the case, you can't charge them with crimes for using infrastructure that the contract permits them to use.
Still terrible that Flock isn't responding to them, and of course even if they intend to hold the city to the contract in terms of expecting to be paid for the full duration, they should still honor the request to shut off service.
If nothing else, this is a good example of why the contract terms for government vendors MUST be public records and NDAs of private companies on public officials for the purposes of sales should not be legally enforceable.
The first thing the city should do when cancelling is lock down the data so no jurisdictions have access to the data. Even if the cameras are still powered on and connected, any ongoing searches should not return any results from that jurisdiction.
One week to respond to a letter delivered by US postal mail isn't really much time. Not that I support Flock or the concept of Flock-style public cameras, but I don't think you can judge them to be "not responding" that quickly.
Maybe we find a company recording the public that is attentive to public relations? They sure had a quick response when the ceos' home was placed in Google maps.
Seems like their PR fire is self induced by sucking up to Money and whatever they qualify as investors?
> One week to respond to a letter delivered by US postal mail isn't really much time.
Why not? Because it takes long to deliver, or because they can't be expected to read their mail?
Yes, also it says that the account management team had been in contact within the week, just that they didn't have a 'legal/corporate' response within the week, which is also not an unreasonable length of time as those things can take a bit of time.
Fuck that. If the IRS sent them a letter would they respond in time? Give me a fucking break.
The IRS generally gives you 30 days to respond to a letter. At least in my experience.
LT26 is one example of a 10 calendar day limit. But the point is, we know companies can move mountains when they have to. They obviously don't feel compelled to.
That's a letter you get as a final notice after previous non-response.
Companies can move mountains yes, but a routine request to cancel a service probably isn't seen as requiring that. Especially since the service contract undoubtedly defines the terms upon which either side can cancel.
I'm hoping that they are inundated with thousands of jurisdictions trying to back out these days so they are legit out of bandwidth to deal with cancellations in real time.
The political grandstanding will continue at least through the end of midterm season and realistically we're just getting geared up for 2028.
> So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources? Why not hit them with theft of service for continuing to draw power and use public infrastructure?
Well we don't know what was in this contract was that they had with Flock in the first place, but usually a contract termination like this would have some requirement to give a reasonable notice to allow Flock to disconnect cameras etc, and a week probably isn't reasonable notice.
> Why not hit them with theft of service for continuing to draw power and use public infrastructure?
Not an alpr apologist but aren't they almost always solar with lithium storage?
even if they were totally off-grid, are there any other municipal functions you can use rent-free to put up private infrastructure of your own without pay?
tl;dr : there is a cost associated to allowing a random company to cement down a galvanized steel pole somewhere in town; for installation, removal, and liability.
That's what confuses me too. If they aren't making money any longer, they're basically saying "fuck you" to their own target customers?
What's the aim? ~~Bribing~~ Lobbying someone else in the government with the data they are gathering anyways in the hopes of cementing this?
So what this is telling me is if I don't like the way the government or public services is doing something, I should just plow ahead without any care and just force it and then be immune because I said so?
Perhaps their real customer isn't the City of East Bumfuck, Minnesota, but the FBI or ICE or NSA. Though even in that case it seems a bit inept: they need some buyin from the locals to get their cameras installed in the next small town.
The Flock search system is supposedly limited so the city/police employee has to choose the permissions (eg. Which other jurisdictions will search results show up for).
If a city wants to exempt ICE, they can. However, if the city has a rogue officer who accesses the Flock search, they can forward the results to their ICE/DHS boyfriend (the claims of a recent firing and lawsuit).
The local government isn't their only customer. They also have contracts with the federal government who wants piggyback access to as many cameras as they can.
The data can still be sold to other municipalities. That’s kind of the problem here, handling this as anything other than a privacy violation, because anything else allows them to just lease private land to install them, then sell the data to whoever wants it. But the US has been anti privacy for a while now.
I suspected that Flock cameras also notified repossesses, but a quick Google search suggests that police contracts don't, but that private property Flock installs (like shopping malls) do/can.
Maybe it's a shitty "you didn't actually cancel until you called us and sat through our upsell speeches for hours" kinda dark pattern.
Love how we’re gonna have to start treating tech companies like literal children who can’t keep their hands out of the cookie jar.
flock cameras aren't powered from the power grid, they have their own solar panels and batteries (which is what allows them to be deployed to quickly and widely) so I presume the article just meant unplugging those.
If I had to guess their processes for handling sudden contract changes differs and lags behind the processes behind installing them.
They're just following the Uber business model. Consequences for thee, not for me.
American laws don't apply to billionaires or corporations.
Isn’t Bill Gates’ daughter in a tight legal spot for things she did? And didn’t that medical upstart lady get put in prison for several years?
Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried were "successful" people but they defrauded wealthy investors who were way above their own pay grade.
Yep, there's pretty much only one rule that matters. You can do anything you want as long as it's to people below you socially. All other rules and laws come second to that one.
Holmes is only in jail for harming other billionaire's money, not for harming people with bad medical tests.
The billonaires suffered no laws, Holmes did, who was a nobody except for very briefly holding a few of others' billions.
Your argument is one and a half case in a ocean of nonstop billionaire bullshittery?
Dunno why you're getting downvoted, it's the plain and simple reality of America today
Similarly to how many don't want to tax the rich because their goal is to become rich themselves, many people in here, especially on the startup side, want to be the next Elon musk
That ship done sailed already. The ultra-mega-totally-too-rich are doing everything in their power to try to ensure that they're the last of their kind come hell or high-water...
Flock is turning into a textbook case of what “toxic brand” means. Municipalities are fleeing for the hills over Flock. Increasingly no official wants to be associated with or seen to be supporting the brand in any way. The only points to be scored with constituents now is firing Flock.
All I had to see to know what Flock stands for was a video of the CEO calling people terrorists for opposing Flock.
Why do we let narcissists run so much of our world?
> Why do we let narcissists run so much of our world?
Flock's shareholders and board of directors don't pay their executives to be humanitarian moralists. Same for OpenAI, Disney, Apple, et. al.
One of the most compelling aspects of American governance is the latitude local law enforcement has. They can be both an ally and enemy to freedom.
Your comment reminds me of a post I read on a popular police forum about J Edgar Hoover (the infamous Director of the FBI for half a century). He created a professionalized police / intelligence force, but he also abused the rights of many citizens and elected political officials with that force. Supposedly he even used it to blackmail some of the Congressmen who were legally obligated to oversee his department.
And the comments in that post were a Rorschach test of where the commenter fell on how "necessary" the abuses of the FBI were.
Too bad the congressmen he blackmailed didn't know he was gay. At the time, that would have been powerful information.
It's important to understand that the FBI's power was very asymmetric.
J Edna Hoover could assign a team to gather kompromat on a person and to surveil them or harass them.
A Congressperson has no equivalent ability to threaten the Director of the FBI. At best, they could spread a rumor, but a rumor doesn't catch fire when journalists / editors had too high of ethics to repeat unverified rumors.
I mean, he did try to blackmail MLK into suicide. Even if it wasn't his personal doing, the letter was found in his confidential files.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_letter
Right, but if you ask J Edgar Hoover supporters, MLK was an adulterer and a Socialist / Communist agitating the American populace (during a time when mass protests and riots were spreading like wildfire). The thing is, there is some truth in those claims.
Also, American society in the 1960s was not nearly as supportive of MLK Jr when he was alive as much as they are now that he was martyred. You and I are looking back and projecting our modern values on people who were still largely racist in a time when racism was both a de facto and de jure truth.
That is to say that lots of America would likely have supported the effect of the blackmail letter, if not the method itself. It was a different time. The frequent threat of the USSR, encroaching Communism, and the specter of nuclear war was suffocating and the "Law and Order" marketing of Nixon and J Edgar Hoover were appealing to many people, even if they suppressed the freedoms of many.
I think everything you wrote is correct except "It was a different time."
Yes and no.
We did change the laws and provide more de jure rights since the 1960s.
I think there's lots of conflation of the more traditional definition of "racism" with the contemporary definition, which is not a direct correlation to the older one. The older one was a descriptor of the attributes of an individual's beliefs whereas the contemporary is a descriptor of the societal system / incentives.
Companies with deep pockets aren't throwing advertising dollars at Nick Fuentes or Kanye West when they are deep in their racist mania arc. It is no longer socially acceptable to be associated with what used to be common, the societal norm, and legally enforced.
We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.
I will, however, completely agree that the time of Nixon's presidency is remarkably similar to Trump's terms.
Im enjoying watching HBO's The WhiteHouse Plumbers and CNN's Ticky Dick. There are soooo many references thick rhyme with Trump's rhetoric, actions, and policies.
There have also been a number of pols trying to whitewash Nixon recently. (I believe including the VP but I'll need to dig up a source.)
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/26/politics/jd-vance-richard-nix...
One of the least democratic and accountable institutions in america, btw, along with the courts.
This right here. If we're going to oust this anti-American Flock and its less prominent "competitors", then we need the police to realize they're not friends, but rather foes. Extra work arresting motorists with frivolous/incompetent warrants from distant cities, civil suits for violating rights where the police department is left holding the bag, spending budget that could instead be spent on actual policing, defiant disobedience when they're asked to take the cameras down or make changes, making your city more likely to be a flashpoint for federal action, etc.
Of course this is in addition to state-level political action against flocks and other types of surveillance to preserve our freedom uniformly. The point is that we want the police lobby to be neutral or even on our side, rather than having to fight against them.
Are they elected?
Some are. Usually on a campaign of "law and order", which makes Flock cameras an easy sell to their voting base. Because they let you keep an eye on the sort of people who are likely to be criminals. You know. Those people.
They themselves generally don't mind the invasion of privacy, at least not until it catches them specifically. In general they are much, much more afraid of the "crime wave" than of the police. (A crime wave which never seems to diminish, despite more and more policing and punishment. And which is contradicted by crime statistics.)
The absence of cameras necessitates much more a reliance on "those people" profiling style policing than their presence.
Do people feel the same way about speeding cameras?
I find the backlash against ALPRs wildly disproportionate. It earnestly saddens me that our political focus has flowed to these issues, datacenters, college sports rules, etc. while we remain incapable of confronting far more consequential structural problems, like an inability to tax and redistribute wealth.
I feel the same way about speeding cameras. As I found they impede the flow of traffic.
Ultimately this is due to the fact that the systems are used to generate revenue from citizens trying to live from day to day. Speed cameras don't really impact the wealthy the way they do the working class. Same goes for video surveillance.
So why should we the people give up our right to privacy for some fake sense of safety and huge bill
If it makes you feel any better, data centers and Flock cameras ARE manifestations of the wealth imbalance.
The law and order people are nuts. On a local thread complaining about our township budget it was pointed out that we spend 45% of tax revenue on policing and that if we want real cuts, some has to come from there.
And a repeated response from a certain kind of person was "Well, if we're spending 45% on policing, we must need it right..."
The police and flock cameras are there regardless of how people vote lol. Who would bother to pitch flock cameras to people and why?
Depends on the type of police. Sheriff's are, I know. But I'm pretty sure city chiefs and state chiefs are just appointed by other elected officials. So I guess one step removed?
Generally the county Sheriff is elected, but the city police chief is usually appointed by civilian government.
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I have trouble understanding why anyone would even want to be associated with a company that displayed such low ethics, repeatedly. Never mind doing business with them.
CEO... sure that beach vacation will still be nice after they've collected their golden parachute while company goes up in flames. But anyone else?
btw Flock was funded by Y Combinator https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
I hope they sent them a hefty service charge. “Disconnection by security forces, 3000$ a piece”. Should get their attention real quick.
The cameras seem vulnerable to a simple non-invasive opaque elastic-banded plastic shower cap
I'm more interested in whether they are vulnerable to fake data being injected via a slide show of car images shown in front of the camera lens.
A picture of a known prison escapee driving the mayor's car should drive the point home after the police pull the mayor over and investigate.
> after the police pull the mayor over and investigate
I want to live in the fantasy world you have described.
I live in a county where the Sheriff was investigated by her deputies for requiring bribes from Apple HQ's head of security (to approve armed security guard's right to CCW). The didn't actually charge her (the Sheriff), but it was kryptonite against her running for re-election, so there was a bit of justice.
You won't be able to out-cynic me, but even I recognize that there are ways to break through injustice. The deeper you fall into cynicism, the more people you turn off from seeking justice.
The Sheriff wasn’t charged but the undersheriff pled guilty to felony bribery: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/ex-santa-clara-county-un...
I imagine certain parts of the NYPD would love an excuse to do that to Mamdani...
Yeah.
The NYPD has their own terrorism and counterintelligence divisions. They are pretty much an FBI governed at a city level (minus all of the cool forensics science).
I wouldn't put it beyond NYPD (in theory) except IIRC the NYPD actually drives him around in their SUVs and he has an NYPD team that does his personal security.
Gee, with vendors like this, who needs criminals?
At least the cameras make it easy to track the criminals down... to the location of the cameras.
The police?
I wonder if the Flock contracts allow for the removal of equipment? The camera installation is generally incidental to the services provided. The contract might allow for the permanent installation while cancelation just terminates services provided.
I think this is sensationalised - it looks like they only waited about a week after cancellation before they started unplugging them.
But I can't find any easy information on the contract they had with Flock, but it could well take a week for Flock to be able to respond properly after working out what to do with lawyers etc. The article says that the account management team had been in touch... so... I think this is just a PR piece for the police chief to look 'hard'.
we got physical malware politics before gta6
It is just that simple folks. Unplug it.
They have cell signals, batteries, and solar panels. Many are already not plugged into anything.
There are non-destructive ways to disable them (covering them with a garbage bag, for one), but I'm also fully in favor of the destructive ways.
spray paint is easier
I would repurpose them. Does not look difficult to extract decompile and change their firmware
nonsense. here's your pillowcase, but you have to supply your own knobs
I wonder if millions of people take it to small claims court… would it work?
You have to show harm to have a case. If you were the victim of a wrongful stop, that's harm. But if your license plate was just recorded and nothing else, I'm skeptical that would give you standing in small claims court. Certainly there's other legal avenues against Flock though.
If your plate is recorded then later searched wouldn’t that be a violation of constitutional rights?
GDPR? Doesn't give standing in US small claims court, but if you applied it to every F* camera that sureyed your vehicle??
Maybe the California privacy law??
Most Data Privacy laws require actual harm and can only be enforced by the State AG. Some, like California have exemptions for security related failures that cause harm.
Then others, like Washington have strict laws around Health Data and have a private right of action. Still that would require a specific camera facing to possibly be considered for standing.
*Not a lawyer, just spends all day, every day, taking about privacy law with lawyers
I'm not sure random citizens have standing.
And the real answer that needs to be done is a charge PER FLOCK DEVICE of criminal trespass, per day.
And the charge needs to be applied via RICO to all the C levels and the board of directors.
This doesn't abrogate the paid contract. But you trespass the owners of said hardware after being formally notified for removal.
A counter-example: how well received would it be if I made a solar/camera/battery/cell device that was called "PigSty" and only tracked police vehicles? How would the city/county/state go after me for those devices?
>via RICO
https://web.archive.org/web/20220524000533/https://popehat.c...
Don't know about you; but I really can't imagine saying no to Police!
We need flock in every politics bedrooms
The under discussed thing with ALPR cameras is how when municipalities dont approve funding for flock contracts on the basis of budget constraints, police departments will suddenly get mysterious one million dollar grants from the federal government to use them.
Flock will also operate free of charge and are more than willing to take promisary notes and install them without ever getting payment while budgets are debated. Because once they're up they know they'll just get the grants approved, and its much harder to take them down.
Flock seems way more like a government program larping as a private company. Its kind of hard to approach congress for multi billion dollar budget as the NSA/CIA/FBI for Orwellian domestic spy programs, so intelligence finds a nice tech bro to be the face of it and bankroll the startup with private capital, and then funnel money to them through less discretionary programs like grants for public saftey and local law enforcement.
Call me a conspiracy head but this is clearly a psuedo private company.
What a nonsense news article, perfectly aligned to titillate the impotent rage of redditor type persons - and unfortunately hackers.
Contract ended in September and the company hasn't yet collected their equipment. Oh, what an amazing modern battlefield between everybody I don't like and everybody I like.
> but it failed to respond even after a week
Read that sentence again and think about it. Are you being propagandized?
I once had to wait for 3 years for an ice cream vendor to come take back their freezers, and 5 years for the beer vendor to come take their fridges. These kind of things aren't exactly priority.
good
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