Having no expectation of privacy in public used to be a reasonable stance when there was a real time+money cost to extended surveillance, which meant that you still had a moderate amount of privacy unless someone was willing to personally target you and spend significant resources.
You either had to have a cop or a PI tail you, or spend time and effort talking to neighbors and acquaintances collecting information and correlating it, and it was much harder to do so secretly.
Technology has reduced the cost of surveillance by several orders of magnitude, and although the premise is unchanged - that you've never had privacy in public - the practical impact has changed in an extremely disturbing way.
I think we're long overdue to rethink and strengthen privacy protections in public in the US. Technological limits, and policy limits on specific implementations are better than nothing, but it's clear to me that surveillance will continue to get cheaper and thus your effective privacy in public will continue to erode until a culture and legal shift in public privacy expectations. I'm not optimistic about that.
aetherson · 13h ago
I agree with your historical analysis, and I'm also uncomfortable with the total surveillance, but I'm not sure I buy there exist effective legal solutions. The truth is that everyone carries a camera, that all vehicles have cameras and will to a greater and greater degree be using those cameras all the time. I don't know what kind of limits we can put on the lack of privacy there that aren't incredibly intrusive attempts to control everyone's behavior or stop all technology.
gs17 · 10h ago
> The truth is that everyone carries a camera
But that "everyone" isn't a single entity recording everywhere in public with the intent of providing tracking information of everyone else. If I'm in the background of someone's selfie and posts it online, it could be used to get my location at a specific time, sure, but their intent wasn't to do so and the scope of their recording is dramatically more limited than Flock.
wongarsu · 11h ago
Europe provides plenty of examples of how this can work. The implementation varies from country to country, but the common thread is that you need a lot of subtlety. Rules like "it's fine to photograph a street full of people, but if you focus on a single person you need their consent" and "you can photograph a busy street for artistic reasons, but the same photograph is illegal if the intent is collecting data about the people or vehicles in the shot, unless it's for research or education"
aetherson · 11h ago
Those strike me as problematic. It strikes me as a big problem if I've got to navigate some fuzzy line about how much I am perceived to focus on someone every time I take a photo in public. Who decides too much focus is too much? How do they decide? How do I defend my artistic intent for every photo in public?
I understand how if you wave away all concepts of fallibility or enforceability, you can say to people, "It's cool that all this data exists, just don't be creepy," but you can't wave those concepts away.
Sammi · 10h ago
Ultimately it gets decided the same way all matters of law are ultimately decided: a judge decides. How this is strange to you is strange to me.
aetherson · 10h ago
When you make bad law that involves trying to apply a fuzzy rule to a fuzzy situation, judges make bad calls. And you also make it possible for people to be very harassed by bringing cases to court where it's not possible to easily dismiss them (because the rule is fuzzy and there isn't a clear standard to dismiss) so even if the judge makes a good call, you've punished good behavior.
const_cast · 9h ago
Almost all of our laws fall into this categorizations.
The idea that laws are clear-cut is largely a programmers fantasy.
Related: there's a lot of people who think that if you don't technically break the law then you're off the hook.
Uh, no, not how law works. The letter of the law doesn't matter, the spirit does. Being an asshole but not technically breaking the law is still illegal.
Yes, that's a lot different than code, isnt it? But it has to be.
aetherson · 8h ago
You're a combination of smug and wrong that I don't think is working for you.
const_cast · 7h ago
Are you going to expand on me being wrong or is "nuh uh!!" all you can offer?
The reason I'm smug is that technical people think they're hyper intelligent and cracked the code.
Ha! Those silly law makers! Don't they know I perfectly followed the laws algorithm and hit an edge case? Now they HAVE to let me off the hook!
No they don't. Why would they have to do that? Laws aren't algorithms, they're natural language intended to curb bad behavior.
If your behavior is bad, and a judge or jury thinks it's bad, you're getting curbed.
The inverse of that is you can actually break the law and get away with it, if the behavior isn't bad. Maybe it's justified, maybe you're a struggling single mother or something... the jury can just say "nahhh" and you go home.
godelski · 12h ago
> Having no expectation of privacy in public
This has always been a false narrative. There's always been some expectation of privacy in public. It's just that it got messier. You should expect to not be overheard by walking away from others. You should expect not to be seen by entering the stall of a public restroom. The thing that changed is now we can see without eyes and hear without ears.
nickff · 13h ago
People have been getting more risk-averse, as well as nosier over time. Both of these changes increase the push for surveillance. I agree with your intuition that people shouldn't have to worry about being constantly monitored, but if you look at the recent internet pile-on after both the Coldplay concert and tennis match incidents, I am not sure the (voting) public agrees.
>"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
-H. L. Mencken
korse · 10h ago
Break the system. Non-trivial for various reasons but flood the market with low cost microwave imaging devices. I wonder how people would react if Flock camera sized devices that could see through clothes existed at a competitive price point?
Oh lord, think of the children folks. We're going to have to shut it all down.
tiahura · 11h ago
No expectation of privacy in public is tautological, that’s what public means. Your feelings of embarrassment or paranoia don’t trump my right to observe what’s going on in the public domain.
scottbez1 · 10h ago
Absolutist stances like this generally lead to undesirable outcomes as technology advances and changes the scale-per-dollar practical limitations of surveillance, which is exactly my point around our need to adjust how absolutely we consider the lack of privacy expectations in public.
The absolutist "no public privacy" stance suggests that I would be ok (legally and morally) to create a widespread camera system that tracks cellphone screens in public and automatically records any passwords that are being entered within view of the cameras and sends them to me. This is ok because, in the absolutist view, your screen and finger movements were visible in public. This feels pretty wrong to me.
It's the difference between targeted surveillance and dragnet surveillance. Technology has made things that were previously only possible through targeted surveillance to be cheaply achieved through dragnet means, both to governments and individual citizens.
reop2whiskey · 11h ago
True but in public you can collect almost any data a person would reasonably expect to be private. What remains private?
There's a lot of local Flock maps out there. You can also submit your own.
For those who are more inclined to direct protest, you can spraypaint the lenses and/or the solar panels. If you dont want to get caught with spraypaint, use nutella or peanut butter. Its sticky and easily spreadable. Not that I would ever recommend vandalization.
Sure, the EFF and ACLU are going the legal route. That's all they can do.
MisterTea · 13h ago
Why not link to an actual map such as https://deflock.me/ instead of a walled garden that is likely a surveillance and data mining platform?
If this is related to your other point about spraypainting lenses, I don't want to accidentally start clicking links for Discords about vandalizing government operations from my home IP address.
1970-01-01 · 13h ago
So if you're scared to even look at countermeasures, they've already won.
It's also illogical to encourage this behavior if your goal is protesting. Smart protesters would practice the most basic of OPSEC practices, like not joining random Discord links shared without context.
chaps · 13h ago
"It's also illogical to encourage this behavior if your goal is protesting."
Yeah, if you lack imagination ;)
There are many, many forms of protesting that don't escalate to destruction. I really think you're exaggerating what the risks are here. For one, VPNs and disposable accounts exist.
freedomben · 12h ago
I don't disagree, but you are arguing against a strawman that was started upthread. GP didn't say they were afraid to look at countermeasures, they were questioning the wisdom of clicking a random link that goes to a closed platform that collects a ton of surveillance data and has a history of sharing with law enforcement. I try to avoid Discord for everything, regardless how innocuous the subject matter is.
chaps · 12h ago
We're agreement that discord sucks and should not be used for these sorts of communities.
But I truly don't think that clicking on a discord link that already has 1500 people in it is going to be problematic to any degree that would lead to prosecution, banning, etc.
Aurornis · 11h ago
> But I truly don't think that clicking on a discord link that already has 1500 people in it is going to be problematic to any degree that would lead to prosecution, banning, etc.
This comment section is about efforts to avoid driving past ALPR cameras that might collect your license plate number while doing innocuous driving around.
Do you not see the logical inconsistency with encouraging people to join a Discord from a comment that talks about vandalizing government property, an actual crime?
Aurornis · 11h ago
> they were questioning the wisdom of clicking a random link that goes to a closed platform that collects a ton of surveillance data and has a history of sharing with law enforcement
Surprisingly ironic, given that the topic is about security cameras from a company that collects data and shares it with law enforcement.
chaps · 11h ago
It's not ironic at all. It doesn't take much threat modeling to understand that the risk of getting banned from discord isn't the same risk. And whatever risk there is becomes offset by a need to want to protect your loved ones.
If you don't want to put yourself into a limited risky situation, then you're good. But braver people will and that's okay.
Aurornis · 11h ago
So avoiding ALPR security cameras while doing innocuous driving: Important for privacy
Joining random Discord links from people discussing how to vandalize government property (a literal crime): Perfectly fine, nothing to worry about, just click the link and don't ask questions?
chaps · 11h ago
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Aurornis · 13h ago
> I really think you're exaggerating what the risks are here
Not exaggerating. Have had multiple friends lose Discord accounts suddenly because an old Discord they forgot about was flagged for illegal activity. There's an entire subreddit full of similar posts.
chaps · 12h ago
Yes, I'm aware that discord does it. But what I'm responding to is you saying that that the act of clicking a discord link will lead to a ban. That's an exaggeration.
Aurornis · 11h ago
> Yeah, if you lack imagination ;)
> There are many, many forms of protesting that don't escalate to destruction.
The comment with the Discord was giving advice for vandalizing the cameras. Direct quote to what I was responding to:
> you can spraypaint the lenses and/or the solar panels. If you dont want to get caught with spraypaint, use nutella or peanut butter. Its sticky and easily spreadable.
chaps · 11h ago
You cropped out the first part that implicitly indicates that there are more forms of protesting than direct action. I get what your point is, but I think you're making a mountain out of an ant hill. Just don't click the damn link lmao.
1970-01-01 · 13h ago
Oh, come on yourself. Being in trouble for visiting a chatroom about illegal surveillance can be a badge of honor.
pavel_lishin · 13h ago
Some of us prefer not to wear badges.
freedomben · 13h ago
This is terrible advice unless you're trying to be a martyr. Considering and asking links before you click them is not unreasonable.
bongodongobob · 13h ago
Yep just shut up and comply.
freedomben · 13h ago
Yep, because there are only two possibilities in this entirely binary world: click opaque links from strangers on the internet, or just shut up and comply
crackez · 12h ago
"you're either with me or you're against me" is an indicator for a bad decision being forced upon you, often by a bad person. Best to just disregard and move on.
bongodongobob · 12h ago
You're right. Holding signs in the government approved free speech zone has totally worked historically.
The discord itself isn't about the destruction of the ALPRs. It's just a community to map the devices and to understand their use throughout the US. Things people do outside of that community is separate.
ProllyInfamous · 13h ago
I've seen when trashbags and duct tape cover them: no damage, but knocks'em out.
Have also seen others erect new signs... just conveniently enough right in front of the lenses.
JohnFen · 13h ago
I use flock maps (but not this discord -- it smells suspicious to me) so that I can be aware of what streets to avoid traveling on.
aerostable_slug · 13h ago
It's an abuse of the system so I'm not advocating it, but there's a temptation to add my residential subdivision to the map.
I have to be honest: I don't really want people who wish to avoid police tracking in my neighborhood. I don't care why you don't want to be tracked; I suspect that some subset of those who don't want to be tracked may be criminals, and there's zero loss to me from reduced vehicular traffic, so why not? Why not take advantage of the perceived threat to privacy? It's like putting signs up on one's home or business windows that advertise surveillance cameras are in place — it's either neutral or a win to me no matter why the existence of said surveillance bothers someone.
freedomben · 12h ago
I disagree with you, but I applaud your willingness to be honest even though you had to have known it wouldn't be popular in this thread. I think you are articulating the same feelings that the majority of people probably feel, so I think your perspective is valuable. Thank you for sharing!
Citizen8396 · 13h ago
Using one surveillance platform to organize against another...
Der_Einzige · 13h ago
Giving detailed instructions and then saying "but I wouldn't recommend it" is just saying "please do this but don't put me in jail for telling you to do it".
Governments are not stupid and such tactics don't work.
I'm wondering if it's possible to make a "reasonable" looking frame (that sits entirely outside the plate, not obstructing or obscuring it) for a license plate that breaks up the shape (with the same colors) to reduce detection success further. Possibly with some IR retroreflector decorations.
jp191919 · 13h ago
I'm currently experimenting with this. It's been hard for me to find a pattern that the ai can't read without making it hard to visually read the plate.
No comments yet
gogurt2000 · 12h ago
I certainly expect Tesla to use the cameras on their cars for similar purposes if they haven't already. Although I would expect them to distance themselves from it by selling the location data 'in aggregate' to another company that interfaces with law enforcement agencies.
jimt1234 · 13h ago
I used to say, "If you're gonna commit crimes, leave your cell phone at home." [1] However, now it's, "If you're gonna commit crimes, leave your cell phone at home at cover your license plates." ... But seriously, just don't commit crimes.
[1] I was a juror on a case years ago, maybe 2010 - some dudes robbed a jewelry store early in the morning. It took the cops about 15 minutes to figure out who did it because the crooks all brought their cell phones, and it was early, so they were the only cell phones in the area at the time. The accused looked shell-shocked during the trial when the cops explained this. Oh yeah, it didn't help that they told all their friends what they had done, and they tried to pawn the jewelry to a former cop.
potato3732842 · 12h ago
During the whole Fannie Willis shindig they dredged up decade old (i.e. before any of these people mattered) cell location data reports and introduced them as evidince with less than no fanfare as though they were as standard as googling someone's name. I think that speaks volumes about the kind of tracking we're subject to.
EvanAnderson · 11h ago
Presumably today the lack of your cell phone following its normal location patterns (i.e. you left the phone at home while you committed the crime) would be a data point, too.
kylehotchkiss · 12h ago
Just throw a SovCit plate on the back of your car. You weren't driving, you were traveling.
People on here regularly bash the EU's GDPR, but blocking this kind of corporate-driven police state is a heavy point in its favor.
dylan604 · 14h ago
"Such a system provides even small-town sheriffs access"
Huh? Sheriffs are top law enforcement for a county, not a particular city. There's only one per county, everyone else is a deputy. This seems strange for someone like the ACLU to not know this
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 14h ago
Yeah, in Washington state law, sheriffs are called out "the chief executive officer and conservator of the peace of the county."
Additionally, they're the only law enforcement officer directly accountable to the people, since they're elected. This isn't true of literally any other law enforcement at any level (local to fed).
alistairSH · 13h ago
Here in Fairfax County, VA, we have a sheriff, who is elected, but they only run the courthouse and prison. We also have an unelected (appointed by the county board of supervisors, who are elected) police department that handles regular law enforcement.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 13h ago
Very interesting. In King County WA they have an elected "County Executive" who then appoints the King County Sheriff. That Sheriff does have normal law enforcement and court duties.
I believe that is an aberration in WA state though.
alistairSH · 12h ago
Neighboring Loudoun County has a sheriff handle all law enforcement duties.
And the other neighboring county, Prince William, has a distinct sheriff, police department, and the detention center runs itself (not the sheriff). So the sheriff only does court room security and tracking of fugitives.
lupusreal · 13h ago
> Additionally, they're the only law enforcement officer directly accountable to the people, since they're elected.
Usually this is probably a good thing, but sometimes their need to be popular with locals means the position gets filled by loud mouthed showboaters who even get themselves into national news with their not always harmless antics. Most of the most famous/notorious police in America have been sheriffs for this reason. Joe Arpaio, Mike Chitwood, etc.
alistairSH · 13h ago
While true, they're still accountable to their electorate. Their electorate just happens to love loudmouthed bullies.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 13h ago
This is the primary critique of democracy, not just American sheriffs.
int_19h · 10h ago
In Washington specifically we have Loren Culp, who breaks that trend - he was a Police Chief of Republic, WA rather than a sheriff.
kube-system · 14h ago
A sheriff would typically have an office in the county seat, and that county seat could be a small town. This is what the sentence is referring to.
BryantD · 12h ago
It's an American English idiom -- "small town" as a synonym for remote rural areas. Not incredibly common but not unusual. It shows up as a tag in TMDB (movie database) and Goodreads, and I believe there's at least one romance novel using the term.
dylan604 · 11h ago
nobody's questioning what a small town is. sheriffs patrol the whole county, not just a small town. there are plenty of small towns that do not have a local police department and depend on the sheriff's office; I grew up in one. maybe my sheriff was just a dick about it, but he was quick to distance from the small town label in conversation.
BryantD · 9h ago
Yes. When I say tag, I mean specifically "small town sheriff" as a tag. Saying "small town sheriff" is technically inaccurate but understandable in context.
buildbot · 14h ago
More of turn of phrase than a statement of belief on where sheriffs work I’d say. Calling in a vague wild west vibe.
aerostable_slug · 13h ago
That's exactly it. The ACLU would be well-advised to police their use of that kind of language (pun intended), because it comes off as the kind of thing a member of the coastal elite who unironically uses the phrase "flyover state" would say.
dragonwriter · 14h ago
> Huh? Sheriffs are top law enforcement for a county, not a particular city. There's only one per county, everyone else is a deputy. This seems strange for someone like the ACLU to not know this
A “small-town sheriff” is a common idiom describing the sheriff of a county whose seat is a small town, rather than big city. It is a common phrase in American English.
This seems strange that someone commenting on HN that has enough concern for American society to have an opinion about what the ACLU should not know this.
ChrisArchitect · 13h ago
Related just yesterday:
AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America
Once again I am struck by how tech makes the world smaller. We're back to a small village or tribal camp where everyone knows your business all the time. It appears the last 50-100 years were a golden age of privacy and an aberration, not the norm.
vjvjvjvjghv · 13h ago
"everyone knows your business all the time"
Not everyone. Only the people with access to the surveillance data. This asymmetry is a big problem.
EvanAnderson · 12h ago
The asymmetry bothers the heck out of me. I've been personally involved in investigations of law enforcement officers abusing access to privileged information. I don't get the sense that it's at all rare.
I sort of wish we could go full ADS-B[0] with cars and have public decentralized tracking (like [1]). Level the playing field for everybody.
Since I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle I'd love to see what kind of useful applications could be created if everybody had access to the same surveillance data that government and large corporations have.
The "what about stalkers" argument always comes next. I suspect being a stalker would be more difficult if the victim (or their agents) had the ability to react to surveillance data about the stalker.
I'd have to think about this. It doesn't seem true.
If you knew the location of every police car or city councilman's car, what would that change?
redserk · 12h ago
I’d be willing to bet they would take privacy protections a bit more seriously.
potato3732842 · 12h ago
Or at the very least they'd think twice before grandstanding against the construction of a strip club or whatever when anyone can look back and see their patronage of such.
bobbylarrybobby · 12h ago
It would change how much surveillance there was in the first place.
hooverd · 12h ago
Oh no no no, those are private for security reasons!
JohnFen · 13h ago
> We're back to a small village or tribal camp where everyone knows your business all the time.
I would be much less concerned about the issue if it were limited to the equivalent of a small village. The problem is that it's not.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 13h ago
I think if you were in that small village you wouldn't appreciate the distinction ("meet the new boss same as the old boss").
JohnFen · 13h ago
Having lived in such a small village for a long while, I absolutely appreciate the distinction.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 13h ago
I'm having trouble parsing your position. Are you saying you're okay with this tech being used by law enforcement of small villages, but not so much big cities?
JohnFen · 13h ago
> Are you saying you're okay with this tech being used by law enforcement of small villages, but not so much big cities?
No. These systems aren't just local, even if the institutions installing them are.
I'm saying that if my privacy is compromised to the people in my immediate community, that's many orders of magnitude better than my privacy being compromised in a widespread, industrial way. At least I know the people in my community.
More importantly, the privacy invasion isn't going to be as all-encompassing as what happens with systems like flock, where everything gets put into databases and combined with the data in other databases. And the potential for me suffering unintended consequences are far lower with the small village.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 12h ago
Makes a ton of sense. Thanks for the response.
Sanzig · 14h ago
At least you could always leave the small village. Can't really do that anymore.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 13h ago
I don't know that this was true.
I was recently reading "A Hangman's Diary", which included a Forward for the modern reader. It would appear that outsiders were viewed with extreme suspicion in those times. Obvi that's just a single snapshot of a single region, but it makes sense.
"what did this person do that they left all their family and friends to come to our town"
barbazoo · 13h ago
There's archeological evidence that early humans mixed with outsiders quite a but so it's probably something that comes and goes depending on what's happening at the time.
squigz · 13h ago
You couldn't always just leave your village. Family, friends, livelihood was all tied there. And it's still just as difficult to up and leave.
giraffe_lady · 12h ago
You couldn't in practical terms. The vast majority of premodern people were peasant farmers who owned no capital other than (possibly!) the land & livestock they farmed and the tools used to farm them. All this having almost no liquid value in the market such as it existed at the time. It was essentially impossible to pick up and start over somewhere else. That's aside from if you even had the right to do that; depending on time and place peasants were sometimes legally bound to their landlord.
1970-01-01 · 13h ago
I will argue that it was heavily decentralized, but there was never a golden era when the village didn't know what you were up to. Even if someone was well known in the mafia and street goons weren't talking, there were detectives writing down who you were talking to, and putting it all together, and saving it in a filing cabinet.
troupo · 14h ago
Anything you've read about and was appalled by in dystopian literature is already here, and not in some distant future.
technothrasher · 13h ago
Wait, you mean if I go for a nice morning drive, I'm going to get harassed by people in Modern Safety Vehicles trying to run my MGB off the road?
linksnapzz · 13h ago
Happened to me once, while visiting my elderly uncle out in the countryside.
andrewla · 13h ago
I continue to believe that privacy in public spaces is not a civil liberty and we should not be treating it as such. You have the right to be secure in your home or in private spaces, but it is your obligation to ensure that you have made an effort to preserve that privacy. Once you are in public, there should be no expectation that anything that another person could see or otherwise observe is not subject to public exposure.
We should not be expending effort trying to regulate the state's ability to observe and record any publicly observable thing. When the state takes action to deliberately make public or otherwise observe things that are reasonably private, then we can activate the right to be free of searches and seizures without probably cause.
The one area that I do feel affects this particular debate is whether it should be legal to conceal your vehicle's identity, so long as it is not being done for fraudulent or criminal purposes. Here I think the fact that your car's identity is being observed and recorded is sufficient cause to make it reasonable to mask or alter your license place or other identifying aspects of your car.
JohnFen · 13h ago
> We should not be expending effort trying to regulate the state's ability to observe and record any publicly observable thing.
But then what can we do? Are we supposed to just never leave our homes? If we can't regulate the power of the state to minimize the harm it can cause, then all is lost.
Also, Flock isn't just a "power of the state" sort of thing. It's a private company and is often used by private entities.
andrewla · 12h ago
No, go ahead and leave your home. Why wouldn't you leave your home?
What if a police officer or a nosy neighbor is watching your house specifically and writes down your comings and goings? You surrender a certain amount of privacy by leaving a private space, and this is just how the world works.
The Flock is a private company does not entitle them to fewer powers than the state. The state has a lot of power and is severely constrained; many of those constraints simply do not apply to private entities and individuals. The only reason why this is an issue at all is that law enforcement uses data from Flock, and the various rights that you have prevent agents of the state from doing things that the state itself is not entitled to do.
For "harm" you need to be extremely specific. If the state uses this data to blackmail you or extort you, then they are committing the crimes of blackmail and extortion. Those are illegal already, regardless of the method used to obtain the data.
If they use the data to interfere with the rights of freedom of association in any way then that is also illegal and they should be prosecuted for it, or at the very least be unable to use that as evidence.
g42gregory · 11h ago
There was a time, when I sincerely thought ACLU was there to protect civil liberties.
These days, I don’t know. Certainly an instrument of a particular party. Plus, owned by various special interest groups beyond that.
Seriously, though - they’re 100% correct on this one. Flock cameras are abhorrent, and I’m honestly aghast that people aren’t up in arms.
hamdingers · 13h ago
Remember that you are not being tracked, the vehicle is, because the vehicle is the dangerous thing.
The baseline expectation of anyone operating heavy machinery in public should be that it is tracked for safety and accountability. This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
I understand for many people, their movements and their vehicle's movements are 1:1, so it can feel like tracking their vehicle is tracking them. If you care about privacy, travel without the heavy machinery. Walk, bike, transit. If your region does not allow you to do this, direct your privacy-related energy towards making that possible, rather than reducing accountability for drivers.
Edit: I wonder how the commenters below feel about tracking jets, probably similar to how I feel about tracking their cars.
potato3732842 · 13h ago
That's a whole lotta words for "it's ok because it's happening to people who do a thing I don't like"
And then you justify it by lying to us?
> This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
Taxes was priority #1. This is a matter of public record. Being able to ascribe ownership as needed in edge case circumstances as a second order goal. Tracking was never really a priority because it was never really possible to do at scale before.
>Walk, bike, transit.
Ah, yes, the bus and subway with their always on 4k cameras that are being fed into god knows what software and algorithms which are then populating god knows what databases.
hiatus · 13h ago
> We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
We have been putting license plates on vehicles for decades with the intent of tracking their individual movements down to the minute? And here I thought it was for identifying their owners.
foxyv · 13h ago
It's not just license plates.
> Turn Partial Details Into Leads
Start with a vague description and surface real evidence from LPR and video.
> Search With Natural Language
Just type what you’re looking for, like “man in blue shirt and cowboy hat,” and get visual matches instantly.
While I sort of agree with the premise, Flock is a camera system - I can't opt out of being recorded by the camera. By walking, I'm only opting out of being easily catalogued by default. It's not a reach for Flock to add a "men with black hoodies" mechanism alongside the existing "BMW with plate ABC-1234" mechanism.
jMyles · 13h ago
> I can't opt out of being recorded by the camera.
That's the nature of the universe, though. Photons are emitted (including by you), captured, and the impressions they make are recorded and recalled (by biological brains and now electronic ones).
It's the police that we need to abolish, not the cameras that they (and every other organism) uses.
alistairSH · 12h ago
It's the scale - 20 years ago, somebody could stall a VHS camera and record me, but that video didn't get fed into massive databases that linked back to my purchases that day, job history, medical history, etc. Yeah, drawing a line on what's close enough to the past vs what's unpalatable is tricky - does't mean massive surveillance and data processing is a good thing.
jMyles · 8h ago
Scale is real, but I want to suggest that we can be more optimistic than to regard it as dispositive on this matter.
As a thought experiment: imagine that in the next 20 years, a device or procedure is developed which allows a human to copy, from their visual memory, anything that they've seen (or at least seen recently) onto a digital medium, which some sort of verifiability of its veracity. This obviously presents the same scale challenges to which you're pointing - it will be impossible to walk around in public without being seen and identified in a way that's digitally verifiable.
But does it make police states and surveillance more likely, in the same way that Flock does? I think we can probably all agree that it does not.
And that tells us that it's not the vision or the memory of the vision that is the threat.
When the entirety of the commons is recorded, and the recordings made available for analysis by all, it's perfectly possible (and I think, inevitable) that police brutality (and even police legitimacy) will decrease.
We need to develop the bravery to say out loud that, as vision (meaning, better and smaller cameras, cheaper storage, etc) continues to improve, our need for police (and perhaps for states) decreases.
In this way, the problem of scale to which you correctly point is naturally counterbalanced.
LtWorf · 13h ago
Megacorps hoarding your data and oppressive governments are part of the nature of the universe‽
I agree that the camera is not the problem per se, but your framing is a bit strange. There's more to a camera than passively receiving photons.
jMyles · 8h ago
> Megacorps hoarding your data and oppressive governments are part of the nature of the universe‽
No, I _certainly_ didn't intend to suggest that. In fact, I think that the proliferation of vision is likely to bring about an end to those institutions.
> I agree that the camera is not the problem per se, but your framing is a bit strange. There's more to a camera than passively receiving photons.
Of course, but those properties (namely, storage) are shared widely. At some very low-but-experimentally-verifiable-level, photons are force carriers for many of the most easily observed phenomena in our reality.
From that, I think it's probably the peaceful and radical way to derive that, as time moves forward, the universe (and the human condition in particular) is likely to gain vision and not lose it.
Cameras will get better and smaller. Storage will get faster and cheaper and more distributed. The photons in the public sphere will be captured with ever-increasing fidelity.
When all the public sphere is recorded, and all the recordings are available to everyone's analysis, can we overcome despotic tendencies, corruption, and police brutality, and eventually statism itself?
I think that the answer is 'yes'. So I am very cautious about shifting the blame onto the (inevitably widening) vision instead of the institution. As vision grows, the need for police is decreased (and thus, the need for an abolitionist movement is increased). That's the prize on which I hope we keep our... eye.
LtWorf · 6h ago
> When all the public sphere is recorded, and all the recordings are available to everyone's analysis, can we overcome despotic tendencies, corruption, and police brutality, and eventually statism itself?
No because not everyone can afford to do all of that.
jMyles · 6h ago
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here; I don't think I made that a prerequisite of any theory.
Frankly, it sounds now like _you_ are the one defending the existence of megacorps and states, on the basis that nobody else will have the capability to be a watcher of public spaces.
2close4comfort · 13h ago
I dont't recall this being anywhere in the documentation or terms of the licensing of a vehicle. Did I miss that part?
kevin_thibedeau · 13h ago
You don't own your license plate. It is government property, as is a driver's license.
2close4comfort · 13h ago
Yes, but there is nothing that says that I have to consent to a random 3rd party monitoring where I go for either of those licenses.
rconti · 12h ago
You mean transit, where they increasingly use facial recognition?
You mean cycling, which many walkers consider to be dangerously fast? You think they wouldn't start mandating registration tags if it became too popular?
sylos · 12h ago
You sound like a "if you have nothing to hide" kind of person
kevin_thibedeau · 13h ago
They are tracking people. It's trivial to add a passive phone IMEI catcher at every video surveillance site and correlate them with plate numbers.
2close4comfort · 13h ago
Just one more data point for any 3rd party to buy from Flock and use how ever they please. Well you know as long as the check clears.
evilDagmar · 13h ago
This is completely missing the point.
Until there's a substantial number of driverless cars on the roads, LPR systems will always equate to tracking people. You might as well argue that exposing geospatial data about cell phone movements is fine because cell phones aren't people.
These systems, when abused, amount to warrantless monitoring of civilians over long periods of time. A judge can not and will not order someone's movements to be tracked over the last six months. They can facilitate someone's movements going forward to be monitored for a specific period of time.
...and these systems are always abused. To the degree that if you've put an RFP out there for a LPR system that disposes of the scan data after 30 days, suddenly no one wants to submit a proposal.
Abuse is pretty much the default state unless there are hard guardrails against it. That knucklehead in Millersville was pretty obviously using FINCEN data to go looking up the life details of people his political party didn't like, probably because the only safeguard was that someone had to enter a relevant case number to show that the search was legal. Lo and behold a regular audit being performed by the TBI resulted in a near immediate lockout of Millersville from their system and a warranted search of said knucklehead's residence because of "irregularities". It's not hard to figure out what was going on there.
It took months to get the LPR system in Mt. Juliet, TN to actually start disposing of the scanned data, and we've already seen reports of LPR systems being abused by ICE/CBP to search for people all over the nation. What's currently holding up Nashville getting such a system? I'm pretty sure it's the data destruction policy, because the state-level government is being run by people who think such Orwellian surveillance is just dandy.
Ancapistani · 4h ago
> What's currently holding up Nashville getting such a system? I'm pretty sure it's the data destruction policy, because the state-level government is being run by people who think such Orwellian surveillance is just dandy.
Nashville has tons of Flock cameras now. I was just there over the weekend and noticed at least four on the interstates.
gs17 · 12h ago
>bike
And in places where bikes need license plates? Or let's say everyone switches to a bike. Do you think Flock would say "oh well, I guess we can't track them anymore" and close up shop?
>transit
Even if they still let you pay with cash, there's cameras all over there too. Maybe not automated tracking through a third party that removes the need for warrants... yet.
So that leaves "walk", which even if feasible, is something Flock already advertises tracking of as a feature. This isn't a "car tracking" issue, it's a warrantless mass surveillance issue. You may think it's only for the drivers you despise right now, but it will come for you too.
antinomicus · 13h ago
and I think you would do well to remember this system has led to dozens of false arrests and traumatic experiences for small children in the cases of faulty OCR identifying the wrong car, and millions in taxpayer settlement money having to be spent as a result. Okay, let’s say your premise is correct, that for some reason, the size of our vehicles means they must be tracked everywhere they go (but also how exactly does this make sense? A license plate is a far cry from an ALPR, they serve very different functions) — Do you honestly think that we should as a society allow a private company to do this job?
mindslight · 13h ago
Please don't engage in simplistic whataboutism to push your tangential hobby horse about cars. Surveillance cameras will just as easily track pedestrians, bicycles [0], and public transit use.
And if you're actually trying to champion the benefits of increased accountability by tracking where every car goes, then it is incumbent upon you to first push for real effective privacy laws that prevent the already-ongoing abuses of such systems.
[0] can also easily be mandated to have identifying number plates on public roads, especially now with this surveillance infrastructure in place
hnpolicestate · 13h ago
I'm sorry but is this argument in good faith? There is a loud minority of anti-car activists on HN and Reddit that simply will advocate for any policy that harass drivers.
I support private vehicle ownership and am opposed to any kind of tracking/nuisance enforcement behavior.
You either had to have a cop or a PI tail you, or spend time and effort talking to neighbors and acquaintances collecting information and correlating it, and it was much harder to do so secretly.
Technology has reduced the cost of surveillance by several orders of magnitude, and although the premise is unchanged - that you've never had privacy in public - the practical impact has changed in an extremely disturbing way.
I think we're long overdue to rethink and strengthen privacy protections in public in the US. Technological limits, and policy limits on specific implementations are better than nothing, but it's clear to me that surveillance will continue to get cheaper and thus your effective privacy in public will continue to erode until a culture and legal shift in public privacy expectations. I'm not optimistic about that.
But that "everyone" isn't a single entity recording everywhere in public with the intent of providing tracking information of everyone else. If I'm in the background of someone's selfie and posts it online, it could be used to get my location at a specific time, sure, but their intent wasn't to do so and the scope of their recording is dramatically more limited than Flock.
I understand how if you wave away all concepts of fallibility or enforceability, you can say to people, "It's cool that all this data exists, just don't be creepy," but you can't wave those concepts away.
The idea that laws are clear-cut is largely a programmers fantasy.
Related: there's a lot of people who think that if you don't technically break the law then you're off the hook.
Uh, no, not how law works. The letter of the law doesn't matter, the spirit does. Being an asshole but not technically breaking the law is still illegal.
Yes, that's a lot different than code, isnt it? But it has to be.
The reason I'm smug is that technical people think they're hyper intelligent and cracked the code.
Ha! Those silly law makers! Don't they know I perfectly followed the laws algorithm and hit an edge case? Now they HAVE to let me off the hook!
No they don't. Why would they have to do that? Laws aren't algorithms, they're natural language intended to curb bad behavior.
If your behavior is bad, and a judge or jury thinks it's bad, you're getting curbed.
The inverse of that is you can actually break the law and get away with it, if the behavior isn't bad. Maybe it's justified, maybe you're a struggling single mother or something... the jury can just say "nahhh" and you go home.
>"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
-H. L. Mencken
Oh lord, think of the children folks. We're going to have to shut it all down.
The absolutist "no public privacy" stance suggests that I would be ok (legally and morally) to create a widespread camera system that tracks cellphone screens in public and automatically records any passwords that are being entered within view of the cameras and sends them to me. This is ok because, in the absolutist view, your screen and finger movements were visible in public. This feels pretty wrong to me.
It's the difference between targeted surveillance and dragnet surveillance. Technology has made things that were previously only possible through targeted surveillance to be cheaply achieved through dragnet means, both to governments and individual citizens.
There's a lot of local Flock maps out there. You can also submit your own.
For those who are more inclined to direct protest, you can spraypaint the lenses and/or the solar panels. If you dont want to get caught with spraypaint, use nutella or peanut butter. Its sticky and easily spreadable. Not that I would ever recommend vandalization.
Sure, the EFF and ACLU are going the legal route. That's all they can do.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00627
Can you describe what this is?
If this is related to your other point about spraypainting lenses, I don't want to accidentally start clicking links for Discords about vandalizing government operations from my home IP address.
It's also illogical to encourage this behavior if your goal is protesting. Smart protesters would practice the most basic of OPSEC practices, like not joining random Discord links shared without context.
Yeah, if you lack imagination ;)
There are many, many forms of protesting that don't escalate to destruction. I really think you're exaggerating what the risks are here. For one, VPNs and disposable accounts exist.
But I truly don't think that clicking on a discord link that already has 1500 people in it is going to be problematic to any degree that would lead to prosecution, banning, etc.
This comment section is about efforts to avoid driving past ALPR cameras that might collect your license plate number while doing innocuous driving around.
Do you not see the logical inconsistency with encouraging people to join a Discord from a comment that talks about vandalizing government property, an actual crime?
Surprisingly ironic, given that the topic is about security cameras from a company that collects data and shares it with law enforcement.
If you don't want to put yourself into a limited risky situation, then you're good. But braver people will and that's okay.
Joining random Discord links from people discussing how to vandalize government property (a literal crime): Perfectly fine, nothing to worry about, just click the link and don't ask questions?
Not exaggerating. Have had multiple friends lose Discord accounts suddenly because an old Discord they forgot about was flagged for illegal activity. There's an entire subreddit full of similar posts.
> There are many, many forms of protesting that don't escalate to destruction.
The comment with the Discord was giving advice for vandalizing the cameras. Direct quote to what I was responding to:
> you can spraypaint the lenses and/or the solar panels. If you dont want to get caught with spraypaint, use nutella or peanut butter. Its sticky and easily spreadable.
The discord itself isn't about the destruction of the ALPRs. It's just a community to map the devices and to understand their use throughout the US. Things people do outside of that community is separate.
Have also seen others erect new signs... just conveniently enough right in front of the lenses.
I have to be honest: I don't really want people who wish to avoid police tracking in my neighborhood. I don't care why you don't want to be tracked; I suspect that some subset of those who don't want to be tracked may be criminals, and there's zero loss to me from reduced vehicular traffic, so why not? Why not take advantage of the perceived threat to privacy? It's like putting signs up on one's home or business windows that advertise surveillance cameras are in place — it's either neutral or a win to me no matter why the existence of said surveillance bothers someone.
Governments are not stupid and such tactics don't work.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-minecraft
“Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras”, Benn Jordan [36min, 1.7m views, 9d ago]
https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ
No comments yet
[1] I was a juror on a case years ago, maybe 2010 - some dudes robbed a jewelry store early in the morning. It took the cops about 15 minutes to figure out who did it because the crooks all brought their cell phones, and it was early, so they were the only cell phones in the area at the time. The accused looked shell-shocked during the trial when the cops explained this. Oh yeah, it didn't help that they told all their friends what they had done, and they tried to pawn the jewelry to a former cop.
Benn Jordan did a great video on this.
People on here regularly bash the EU's GDPR, but blocking this kind of corporate-driven police state is a heavy point in its favor.
Huh? Sheriffs are top law enforcement for a county, not a particular city. There's only one per county, everyone else is a deputy. This seems strange for someone like the ACLU to not know this
Additionally, they're the only law enforcement officer directly accountable to the people, since they're elected. This isn't true of literally any other law enforcement at any level (local to fed).
I believe that is an aberration in WA state though.
And the other neighboring county, Prince William, has a distinct sheriff, police department, and the detention center runs itself (not the sheriff). So the sheriff only does court room security and tracking of fugitives.
Usually this is probably a good thing, but sometimes their need to be popular with locals means the position gets filled by loud mouthed showboaters who even get themselves into national news with their not always harmless antics. Most of the most famous/notorious police in America have been sheriffs for this reason. Joe Arpaio, Mike Chitwood, etc.
A “small-town sheriff” is a common idiom describing the sheriff of a county whose seat is a small town, rather than big city. It is a common phrase in American English.
This seems strange that someone commenting on HN that has enough concern for American society to have an opinion about what the ACLU should not know this.
AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45119847
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44561716 ("Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds (sfstandard.com)", 563 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40222649 ("Flock Safety is the biggest player in a city-by-city scramble for surveillance (newsobserver.com)", 143 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41979258 ("License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars (wired.com)", 24 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33994205 ("Flock is Building a New AI-Driven Mass-Surveillance System [pdf] (aclu.org)", 15 comments)
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety (YC S17)
Not everyone. Only the people with access to the surveillance data. This asymmetry is a big problem.
I sort of wish we could go full ADS-B[0] with cars and have public decentralized tracking (like [1]). Level the playing field for everybody.
Since I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle I'd love to see what kind of useful applications could be created if everybody had access to the same surveillance data that government and large corporations have.
The "what about stalkers" argument always comes next. I suspect being a stalker would be more difficult if the victim (or their agents) had the ability to react to surveillance data about the stalker.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...
[1] https://www.adsbexchange.com/
If you knew the location of every police car or city councilman's car, what would that change?
I would be much less concerned about the issue if it were limited to the equivalent of a small village. The problem is that it's not.
No. These systems aren't just local, even if the institutions installing them are.
I'm saying that if my privacy is compromised to the people in my immediate community, that's many orders of magnitude better than my privacy being compromised in a widespread, industrial way. At least I know the people in my community.
More importantly, the privacy invasion isn't going to be as all-encompassing as what happens with systems like flock, where everything gets put into databases and combined with the data in other databases. And the potential for me suffering unintended consequences are far lower with the small village.
I was recently reading "A Hangman's Diary", which included a Forward for the modern reader. It would appear that outsiders were viewed with extreme suspicion in those times. Obvi that's just a single snapshot of a single region, but it makes sense.
"what did this person do that they left all their family and friends to come to our town"
We should not be expending effort trying to regulate the state's ability to observe and record any publicly observable thing. When the state takes action to deliberately make public or otherwise observe things that are reasonably private, then we can activate the right to be free of searches and seizures without probably cause.
The one area that I do feel affects this particular debate is whether it should be legal to conceal your vehicle's identity, so long as it is not being done for fraudulent or criminal purposes. Here I think the fact that your car's identity is being observed and recorded is sufficient cause to make it reasonable to mask or alter your license place or other identifying aspects of your car.
But then what can we do? Are we supposed to just never leave our homes? If we can't regulate the power of the state to minimize the harm it can cause, then all is lost.
Also, Flock isn't just a "power of the state" sort of thing. It's a private company and is often used by private entities.
What if a police officer or a nosy neighbor is watching your house specifically and writes down your comings and goings? You surrender a certain amount of privacy by leaving a private space, and this is just how the world works.
The Flock is a private company does not entitle them to fewer powers than the state. The state has a lot of power and is severely constrained; many of those constraints simply do not apply to private entities and individuals. The only reason why this is an issue at all is that law enforcement uses data from Flock, and the various rights that you have prevent agents of the state from doing things that the state itself is not entitled to do.
For "harm" you need to be extremely specific. If the state uses this data to blackmail you or extort you, then they are committing the crimes of blackmail and extortion. Those are illegal already, regardless of the method used to obtain the data.
If they use the data to interfere with the rights of freedom of association in any way then that is also illegal and they should be prosecuted for it, or at the very least be unable to use that as evidence.
These days, I don’t know. Certainly an instrument of a particular party. Plus, owned by various special interest groups beyond that.
Seriously, though - they’re 100% correct on this one. Flock cameras are abhorrent, and I’m honestly aghast that people aren’t up in arms.
The baseline expectation of anyone operating heavy machinery in public should be that it is tracked for safety and accountability. This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
I understand for many people, their movements and their vehicle's movements are 1:1, so it can feel like tracking their vehicle is tracking them. If you care about privacy, travel without the heavy machinery. Walk, bike, transit. If your region does not allow you to do this, direct your privacy-related energy towards making that possible, rather than reducing accountability for drivers.
Edit: I wonder how the commenters below feel about tracking jets, probably similar to how I feel about tracking their cars.
And then you justify it by lying to us?
> This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
Taxes was priority #1. This is a matter of public record. Being able to ascribe ownership as needed in edge case circumstances as a second order goal. Tracking was never really a priority because it was never really possible to do at scale before.
>Walk, bike, transit.
Ah, yes, the bus and subway with their always on 4k cameras that are being fed into god knows what software and algorithms which are then populating god knows what databases.
We have been putting license plates on vehicles for decades with the intent of tracking their individual movements down to the minute? And here I thought it was for identifying their owners.
> Turn Partial Details Into Leads Start with a vague description and surface real evidence from LPR and video.
> Search With Natural Language Just type what you’re looking for, like “man in blue shirt and cowboy hat,” and get visual matches instantly.
http://flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform
That's the nature of the universe, though. Photons are emitted (including by you), captured, and the impressions they make are recorded and recalled (by biological brains and now electronic ones).
It's the police that we need to abolish, not the cameras that they (and every other organism) uses.
As a thought experiment: imagine that in the next 20 years, a device or procedure is developed which allows a human to copy, from their visual memory, anything that they've seen (or at least seen recently) onto a digital medium, which some sort of verifiability of its veracity. This obviously presents the same scale challenges to which you're pointing - it will be impossible to walk around in public without being seen and identified in a way that's digitally verifiable.
But does it make police states and surveillance more likely, in the same way that Flock does? I think we can probably all agree that it does not.
And that tells us that it's not the vision or the memory of the vision that is the threat.
When the entirety of the commons is recorded, and the recordings made available for analysis by all, it's perfectly possible (and I think, inevitable) that police brutality (and even police legitimacy) will decrease.
We need to develop the bravery to say out loud that, as vision (meaning, better and smaller cameras, cheaper storage, etc) continues to improve, our need for police (and perhaps for states) decreases.
In this way, the problem of scale to which you correctly point is naturally counterbalanced.
I agree that the camera is not the problem per se, but your framing is a bit strange. There's more to a camera than passively receiving photons.
No, I _certainly_ didn't intend to suggest that. In fact, I think that the proliferation of vision is likely to bring about an end to those institutions.
> I agree that the camera is not the problem per se, but your framing is a bit strange. There's more to a camera than passively receiving photons.
Of course, but those properties (namely, storage) are shared widely. At some very low-but-experimentally-verifiable-level, photons are force carriers for many of the most easily observed phenomena in our reality.
From that, I think it's probably the peaceful and radical way to derive that, as time moves forward, the universe (and the human condition in particular) is likely to gain vision and not lose it.
Cameras will get better and smaller. Storage will get faster and cheaper and more distributed. The photons in the public sphere will be captured with ever-increasing fidelity.
When all the public sphere is recorded, and all the recordings are available to everyone's analysis, can we overcome despotic tendencies, corruption, and police brutality, and eventually statism itself?
I think that the answer is 'yes'. So I am very cautious about shifting the blame onto the (inevitably widening) vision instead of the institution. As vision grows, the need for police is decreased (and thus, the need for an abolitionist movement is increased). That's the prize on which I hope we keep our... eye.
No because not everyone can afford to do all of that.
Frankly, it sounds now like _you_ are the one defending the existence of megacorps and states, on the basis that nobody else will have the capability to be a watcher of public spaces.
You mean cycling, which many walkers consider to be dangerously fast? You think they wouldn't start mandating registration tags if it became too popular?
Until there's a substantial number of driverless cars on the roads, LPR systems will always equate to tracking people. You might as well argue that exposing geospatial data about cell phone movements is fine because cell phones aren't people.
These systems, when abused, amount to warrantless monitoring of civilians over long periods of time. A judge can not and will not order someone's movements to be tracked over the last six months. They can facilitate someone's movements going forward to be monitored for a specific period of time.
...and these systems are always abused. To the degree that if you've put an RFP out there for a LPR system that disposes of the scan data after 30 days, suddenly no one wants to submit a proposal.
Abuse is pretty much the default state unless there are hard guardrails against it. That knucklehead in Millersville was pretty obviously using FINCEN data to go looking up the life details of people his political party didn't like, probably because the only safeguard was that someone had to enter a relevant case number to show that the search was legal. Lo and behold a regular audit being performed by the TBI resulted in a near immediate lockout of Millersville from their system and a warranted search of said knucklehead's residence because of "irregularities". It's not hard to figure out what was going on there.
It took months to get the LPR system in Mt. Juliet, TN to actually start disposing of the scanned data, and we've already seen reports of LPR systems being abused by ICE/CBP to search for people all over the nation. What's currently holding up Nashville getting such a system? I'm pretty sure it's the data destruction policy, because the state-level government is being run by people who think such Orwellian surveillance is just dandy.
Nashville has tons of Flock cameras now. I was just there over the weekend and noticed at least four on the interstates.
And in places where bikes need license plates? Or let's say everyone switches to a bike. Do you think Flock would say "oh well, I guess we can't track them anymore" and close up shop?
>transit
Even if they still let you pay with cash, there's cameras all over there too. Maybe not automated tracking through a third party that removes the need for warrants... yet.
So that leaves "walk", which even if feasible, is something Flock already advertises tracking of as a feature. This isn't a "car tracking" issue, it's a warrantless mass surveillance issue. You may think it's only for the drivers you despise right now, but it will come for you too.
And if you're actually trying to champion the benefits of increased accountability by tracking where every car goes, then it is incumbent upon you to first push for real effective privacy laws that prevent the already-ongoing abuses of such systems.
[0] can also easily be mandated to have identifying number plates on public roads, especially now with this surveillance infrastructure in place
I support private vehicle ownership and am opposed to any kind of tracking/nuisance enforcement behavior.