The fact that they’re gonna shut it down, implies the scale of indiscriminate nature of data capture and the volume of data being captured.
These cameras are popping up all over the nation and if people realize how much data is being captured and where that data is going (or who it’s being sold to) and how it’s being used by government and private entities they would be appalled.
There’s been exposés about these cameras, everything from AI misidentification of “stolen” (not) vehicles and erroneous arrests and police encounters, to analysis of shopping patterns being sold back to private entities for better ad targeting. It’s wild.
it’s ok for me to observe a person in public park - it should be ok to watch camera for an activity
But if it’s not ok for me to stalk someone I think it should be illegal for a network of cameras to watch my movements too!
Slapping AI onto stalking is still stalking.
> The laws need to be updated. Having police officers monitor public streets was fine because they wouldn't actually recall anything unless there was an incident. Now it's possible to go back and review specific footage and identify everyone on those camera's -- we need new privacy laws to reflect this capability.
This is data collected with public funds — our money — for public purposes.
Not only should it be available to any US resident by request, it should be public, as in in an online library, and any US resident without a criminal record should be able to get continuous access, not only a batch of records (yes, keep out anyone with a restraining order or any other crime).
It is our tax dollars, any of us should be able to do research on the data. Including watching the watchers. Where do the government employees go and when? Where do the Flock employees go, and when?
Or, if that kind of instantly-available stalking of anyone is too much of a risk, shut it down. Hard. All of it.
The real-world dynamics of the system is either 1) everybody's motions in public are public, or 2) it is a tool of a totalitarian state. There is no other option, and option 2 is intolerable in a free society.
If only; they temporarily shut off their cameras, while other jurisdictions look to change their laws removing this data from the public record. Neither of these moves are close to "wins"
Or it implies that the .gov, it's agents and those associated with it are not squeaky clean and that any aggrieved party being able to request footage would be bad for the .gov.
> “We were very disappointed,” Franklin said. “That means perpetrators of crime, people who are maybe engaged in domestic abuse or stalkers, they can request footage and that could cause a lot of harm.”
The whole point is that they should have been collecting data on perpetrators of crimes only in the first place, not a massive dragnet.
It took a lot of naivete, to put it gently, and head-in-sand attitude to believe otherwise. Flock had everything in place to collect a treasure trove of data but they would decide not to do it? Out of principle? Or even if we take the very charitable interpretation that they don't do it today, but also that they'll never cave in to the pressure to do it in the future?
These people are fooling themselves if they think that keeping the cameras but not allowing the public to see the data will stop domestic abuse or stalkers. We've already seen these cameras used to stalk people and it wasn't random members of the public doing it, it was police officers. As long as this data is being collected it will be abused. If not by the public, then by police, or by Flock employees, or by hackers. The only way to protect people is to not gather the data at all. Anyone who keeps these cameras doesn't actually care about the public's safety.
* https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105...
* https://www.fox6now.com/news/milwaukee-police-officer-charge...
Policymakers were warned about precisely these dangers ahead of time. They went ahead anyway, and now they want to play blameless and are trying to shift the blame on anyone but themselves.
The defense of the photos not being government business until accessed seems shaky. That the physical camera installations were purposeful intentions to conduct government business in those areas is a reasonable line; this doesn't set precedent for Google's information becoming public records because the police might do a google search, to use an extreme example.
The proposed legislative amendment that would exclude Flock footage from public records (which would make this judgment moot) makes sense in the light of red light cameras already being excluded by the same legislators. However, I'd like to see a more incisive law covering both that would compel a reasonable amount of public insight into the footage.
It's reminiscent of the NSA's argument that data "collection" occurs only when a search is performed on existing "gathered" data. File under "Stuff that's only legal when the government does it."
The core issues are that aggregation and exfiltration of this data means that privacy is dead and the AI world allows analysis for almost no cost. We need an idea in our laws that puts back the limited scope that technology has removed. If the police have to expend one person's worth of time to listen to a wiretap then it really isn't possible to get out of control. We need that level of cost associated with ALPR and all surveillance so that the abuse of these systems doesn't get out of control. Make it appropriately hard and it won't be a problem.
The database CANNOT EXIST SAFELY. Why don’t people who “might be okay with this IF…” understand that?
Collect the data and it WILL be misused, eventually, with 100% certainty. Has nobody read Snowden’s book? They even have a name for intel agents casually spying on their partners/crushes.
The law does not apply to everyone equally. The intelligence agencies get to break any laws they want without consequences, by longstanding tradition (remember 007’s “license to kill” or the CIA’s famous heart attack gun?). There are NO legal safeguards that can prevent abuse, no matter how you word them, because there will always be some animals who are “more equal than others” to whom they do not apply (“national security carve-out”, “LEO exception”, etc).
Sadly, those to whom they do not apply are now coordinating with the new wannabe SturmAbteilung in what are called “fusion centers”.
You have to point out the Jews in Amsterdam. They had nothing to hide--until they did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Amsterdam_civil_registry_...
Or Martin Niemoller: a good Protestant German pastor who viewed the anti-theist attitudes of the Socialists and Communists as more threatening than Nazis. And then the Nazis put him in a concentration camp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
The data you found benign sharing in the past might allow unpleasant conclusions in the future and might not even come from you personally. Think about what toys you bought for your kids, or in what college milieu your worldview developed.
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
This is the bill: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=6002&Chamber=...
Find your reps: https://leg.wa.gov/legislators/
Washington State Legislative Hotline: 1-800-562-6000
> Cameras that automatically capture images of vehicle license plates are being turned off by police in jurisdictions across Washington state, in part after a court ruled the public has a right to access data generated by the technology.
https://www.geekwire.com/2025/washington-state-cities-turn-o...
When a comment comes back that someone malicious will use the tech to stalk someone I really have no answer for that. That is indefensibly a bad thing.
Of course the tech exists nonetheless (not open source as far as I know) and it could be argued it is even being used maliciously—or at least without the kind of judicial oversight we assumed would be in place. But one actor behaving badly does not justify the use of the tech by everyone.
I read about the citizens of Minneapolis using decidedly low-tech means to track ICE vehicles prowling their community and it suggested a scenario where an open license-plate-tracking solution could "balance the scales" a bit (that is if you believe the scales to be imbalanced).
I imagined not a license-plate reading dragnet but rather software where you had first to enter in very specific strings of ASCII characters and the software would only announce when there was a specific string match from the camera.
To that end I vibe-coded an app for iOS in about 15 minutes using iOS's Vision framework and the built-in phone camera. Anyone could do the same.
Nonetheless I only tested it with "HELLO" and "WORLD" using scraps of paper in my kitchen and never tried it outside as the craziness in Minneapolis seemed to have quieted down.
I moved on to other projects.
ALPR is fairly trivial now days, and a modern CPU can process thousands of plates per second (dozens of plates per frame, hundreds of frames per second coming multiple cameras pointing at different lanes of traffic).
The "product" around all of these is linking the plates traveling together, tracking routes through various cameras, identifying common travel patterns, and more disturbing travel patterns that are outside norm for a given plate or route (i.e. do they normally drive these 3 cameras M-F, but this Th, they went a different route and stopped somewhere for a while).
All that used to be done by the police/detectives/investigators on their own. Now the AI is automating this, and that is truly terrifying, especially for how often misreads occur.
So if people started using something like flock to embarrass politicians, business leaders, or newspaper leader writers then suddenly privacy might become a big issue.
our public data can only be seen by billionaires and cops, not us.
it can be used against us, but never the other way around. the faster we realize this, the faster we can move out of our “divisive” phase and get back to making billionaires dreams come true.
There are also public data examples - for example the public data on charter flights or ship locations had people like Elon Musk bleating about privacy.
https://www.everettpost.com/local-news/everett-temporarily-s...
Also i think it should be public record about every single point of data flock collects and retention period. I am not saying they have to release the data itself, but I want to know what my tax dollars are collecting, how long they are keeping it, who can access it and who they are selling, er i mean sharing it with.
> For now, Everett’s Flock camera network remains offline, as the debate over transparency, privacy and public safety continues in the Legislature. The bill in Olympia that would put guidelines on Flock's data has passed in the Senate.
No concern over the dozens (or hundreds?) of cases of police or government employees themselves doing exactly what they’re afraid of here. Strange.
I mention these locales specifically only because I have directly observed them. I would be surprised if this isn’t also happening in many other US metro areas, given how eagerly DHS/TSA/CBP/ICE are mass collecting facial geometries at every available opportunity.
Those cameras are for traffic detection, so the signal can turn green when a car comes. They aren't reading faces.
"I wouldn't be surprised if this is also happening..."
Only the second sounds correct to me.
Why does that not convince me?
This kind of ubiquitous surveillance is so dangerous to democracy and the ability of the citizens to do anything without the government knowing.
Flock is no more populate on the right than it is on the Left.
