YouTuber builds 'Flock-like' camera to track police vehicles, gets police visit | Hacker News Reader

YouTuber builds 'Flock-like' camera to track police vehicles, gets police visit

tomshardware.com

84 pointsljf31 comments

Citizens sometime commit crime. The Police justify indiscriminate gathering of evidence preemptively against all citizens using Flock based on the rationale that when a crime does end up being committed, the evidence will already be gathered.

Well, guess what? Police also commit crime. The same justification applies. If Flock is justified, this is justified.

No justification is required. Police visiting this person over completely legal public photography is an egregious violation of First Amendment rights.

This was in Canada

A bit pedantic, don't you think? Canada has protections for speech, even if they aren't the "first amendment".

canada doesn't really have those actually.

They also ride into work on Polar Bears.

I can make stuff up too!

no we use moose for that

Same with Australia, individual free speech is not formally protected in legislation.

Why police would never abuse their power. /sarc

Discussed yesterday: "YouTuber Says Cops Visited Him After He Built a Flock-Style Camera to Track Cops (gizmodo.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50026555 356 comments

Every law that lets police and politicians spy on citizens should have a corollary that lets citizens spy on police and politicians.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50026555

I've often thought about a number plate reading dashcam app for citizens that would warn you of dangerous drivers around you, let people flag the cars they want to call out. Moderation would be a nightmare though, but I thought you could have to submit some sort of proof (recorded from. The dashcam) but that just increases the moderation overhead... Of course AI could be help and hinder.

You could allow the user to flag it and keep the alerts to only them. They would get the alert, they could add notes of what happened so when that plate shows again they will know. Maybe build it so that you can add friends to a group and share plate details. It's GOLD Jerry!

But yeah moderation would be a nightmare still - I could see a ton of ways to abuse this. Criminals will figure it out as a source to track individuals, placing themselves in their known travel path, setup satellite spots to alert, that way for example if they're casing the joint they could have alerts when then individual is coming back.

Great, now ppl are going to make this app and use it for bad, see what you did.

But I trust my friends. When my group tags an obnoxious driver's car and I'm alerted to it being nearby, then: That makes me feel safer.

All I had to do was log in on Autora and make a little friends group for everyone to join, and they handle the rest. It doesn't cost us anything! It's so nice of them to provide this service for everyday people like us.

I also signed up for some other groups I found on Facebook and those are pretty neat, too! I just do my regular driving like I always have, and every week they each drop a few dollars into my PayPal account. It feels great to make the world a little safer, and I haven't had to worry about paying for Disney+ for months now!

#blessed #couponing #sidegigs

Yeah you can’t even trust video any more, I’m not sure if there’s anything you can do with people who want to game the system.

> “One of them [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk for any bad apples that might want to track them down,”

Yeah well, if you're not doing anything wrong you've nothing to worry about, eh?

I really detest the way surveillance seems to just increase without any democratic mandate.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50026555

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