They will never change their behavior when there are no consequences for their actions.
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?
> They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled.
I don't think people have connected the dots between Flock and Ring yet, but it's only a matter of time.
When you have two choices and the rich decide what those choices are they will always ensure than half the population hates one of the choices and the other half hate the other one and then you vote based on which candidate you hate the least which means the rich always get what they want and you always get screwed.
If you ever want anything to change then you need to treat both parties like the parasitic treasonous scum that they are and make it clear to all americans that anyone who puts a party before their nation is a traitor.
Then you vote for actual people, not a party, not whoever your favorite celebrity was paid to endorse.
IF YOU WANT TO VOTE, FIRST YOU LEARN THE CANDIDATES, THEN YOU LEARN THE POLICIES THEY PROPOSE, THEN YOU CHALLENGE THOSE POLICIES WITH THE BEST STEELMAN YOU CAN FIND.
only then should you even consider voting. But thats way too much responsibility for americans. They prefer to be given a binary choice, heads or tails their both the same except one fucks you left the other fucks you right, unless you happen to belong to the class of people that own the politicians in which case you dont actually care which way the election goes because you paid both sides so you win no matter what.
Those banks should have been nationalized or auctioned off and those executives should have gone to jail and had all their assets confiscated to help pay for the bailout.
Im not advocating the use of the guilotines yet mind you, its just a little reminder for now.
I'm sure there's more but not enough for sure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
... 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.
---
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.
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.
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.
but doing a little legwork it looks like Flock has done that in Evanston and Cambridge. rollin' in hot with the Fall River Five
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.
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.
Seems like their PR fire is self induced by sucking up to Money and whatever they qualify as investors?
Why not? Because it takes long to deliver, or because they can't be expected to read their mail?
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.
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.
Not an alpr apologist but aren't they almost always solar with lithium storage?
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.
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?
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).
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.
The billonaires suffered no laws, Holmes did, who was a nobody except for very briefly holding a few of others' billions.