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Comment by blooalien | Hacker News Reader

> So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources?

They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled. How is that legal? I thought you had to be city-approved to install equipment like that. One would think that no contract = no approval?

Maybe they need to set up a "sting" operation at one of the disabled units and start makin' some arrests/fines for unapproved equipment installation/construction on public property? See if that changes some minds over at Flock about what they can and cannot get away with?

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We're quickly moving into cyberpunk territory where corporations simply stop being accountable to governments.

At what point do citizens become more engaged in civics? Apparently cameras recording outside their door is an insufficient catalyst.

Ring cameras recording outside people’s doors are what catalyzed the installation of more surveillance. After all people can’t complain one camera but not another when they all have the claimed justification of safety and security.

You absolutely can complain about Flock and other such cameras over Ring.

Ring cameras are privately owned, installed on private property, by the choice of the property owner. Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.

Flock cameras are a completely different situation. They're installed on public property, data sharing controls are an utter shitshow, and they give police the ability to do unconstitutional dragnet-style fishing for crime and even pre-crime, i.e. "suspicious patterns of behavior".

Equating the two is a complete misunderstanding of what's happening, but companies like Flock rely on that kind of ignorance to push their product.

Its insincere to act like the control of data through ring doorbells and similar products are in anyway customer controlled. Even if we ignore when the agreed protocols have been actively ignored ( i.e., employees being able to access unauthorized: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51048406), the amount of control over the data the customer has is very little but most are simply unaware of this. Uninformed consent is not a thing.

Also pertinent imo: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49191005

Surveillance infrastructure is surveillance infrastructure, who is supposed to "own" it is irrelevant. Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.

Flock gives law enforcement privileged access to footage outside of their jurisdiction with actual features that support mass surveillance, like tracking cars across state lines. Ring footage requires a court order, warrant, or subpoena outside of customer consent and access per legal process is generally limited to a small subset of footage. That's a big difference. Only one of these two supports commercial dragnet.

That is not true for Ring.

Can you provide examples of Ring giving carte blanche access to government agencies, local or federal, without legal process? Do you have any examples of Ring being used to track an individual across vast distances? Or of anything you could consider mass surveillance?

You are moving the goal posts. No single Flock camera can do that, either. Instead, what they offer is a network of cameras they can access remotely and they can use with facial recognition. And yes, this can be used to track people over long distances or across states.

There are precedents with Ring being very cozy with police departments, e.g.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-y...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/amazon-ring-stop...

And many more over the years (all the way until February of this year, when they cancelled a deal with Flock). Amazon is not a company to trust.

> Ring footage requires a court order, warrant, or subpoena outside of customer consent and access per legal process is generally limited to a small subset of footage

Weren’t there regular scandals about local law enforcement regularly accessing Ring footage without the owner’s agreement or knowledge? Ring absolutely is a surveillance tool that can be used without oversight. See here for example: https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/corporate/amazon-ri...

You're reducing a spectrum to a binary, with all the errors that always come along with that.

Flock is at one rather extreme end of that spectrum, at least in the context of a democratic country with some civil liberties. They literally seem to be breaking laws in order to achieve their goals. Ring occupies a point pretty far from that.

All of these issues can be addressed with government laws and regulations, and hopefully will be. But the laws needed to constrain what Ring is doing are nowhere near what will be needed to constrain Flock.

> Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.

This is trivially false. But if you live in the US and take its legal and regulatory environment as an unchangeable fact of life, I can see how you might think that.

> 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.

> Ring cameras are privately owned, installed on private property, by the choice of the property owner.

... recording the street, meaning https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-on-the-u... applies in the UK:

---

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.

> Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.

The police routinely has access to Ring footage. The people who installed them give that access. Occasionally Amazon did it too even without user consent.

I’m equating the 2 because those people contribute to the internalizing of the surveillance status. When people walk down the street they are filmed by dozens of cameras and they are starting to expect this everywhere. Flock is “another one”. Flock would have had an uphill battle in a society where private surveillance is unacceptable.

When it becomes totally normal for others to use their own private (not so private n the cloud) surveillance footage of public spaces against you, Flock stops raising people’s internal alarm bells.

Why do you think Flock is big exactly in the society that was told private surveillance of public space is perfectly fine and even expected?

People need to see their lives improve materially within a reasonable period of time before they will trust politics again I would wager. I don't think people aren't voting due to apathy, they aren't voting because they don't trust the system.

The problem is that they are the system. If they sit back and expect someone else to fix it for them, they get what they deserve.

Isn't that a part of apathy?

Depends on how you frame it I suppose. If your experience is that every candidate in the last 20+ years has been a different flavor of awful for the average jane you could say it's zen-like acceptance.

You're describing Russia, not America. In America voter turnout is at record highs, people are protesting loud and visibly, and "Flock camera" is a cultural byword for oppressive dragnet surveillance.

I don't think people have connected the dots between Flock and Ring yet, but it's only a matter of time.

We're so, so far off from that point.

except for, you know the city in TFA. And Asheville, NC.

I'm sure there's more but not enough for sure.

This is unfounded pessimism. The genesis of the article is civic engagement that rejected Flock, prompting elected officials, whose decision is then being supported by the police department.

Thread you’re in:

> They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled.

You know people have taken them down and covered them up physically, right?

Do you not count people cutting down and smashing flock cams as being engaged?

I am not impressed by the destruction of easily replaced obsolete hardware. I will consider people as engaged when they start cutting down and smashing the corporate executives who force these bad ideas on us.

Any give up free next-day shipping?

There is no single point, instead there’s a build up of actions just like you see in this case. I’m curious what else you’re waiting on. What evidence will be sufficient for you that, yes, citizens are engaged in civics?

I thought that happened decades ago.

Wasn't this basically Uber's model? They just ignored any local regulation they didn't like, even to the point of building a system to prevent government officials were trying to take Ubers so they couldn't get fined.

The difference is Uber provided a service the public wanted.

it's clear that 3 letter agencies wants flock online, bit weird to put blame on flock, when it's just a gun that's being handled by the federal gov.

It's a mass-surveillance dragnet, not a gun.

Flock has real human officers who direct it and shareholders who profit from it (those groups overlap), it is not an inert object wielded by the State.

This doesn't reduce the responsibility of the state for misdeeds it does or attempts with Flock, but neither does the State’s role absolve Flock’s leadership and owners of the misdeeds they do and profit from, whether or not some or all are at the request of the State.

Fines are already nothing but a cost to them. Cyberpunk is now...

Depends on where it is as many of their cameras are on private property.

I would hazard a guess that they hire local contractors through some shell company. Not because they're worried about it being traced back to them, just because they don't want the workers on their books. Much like all the Amazon-not-actually-Amazon delivery trucks and drivers.

> They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled.

Where? I live in Denver, are there clandestine Flock folks running around in fake electrician outfits like a cheap imitation of the Town? we could use a little Situationist urban guerilla theater here, complete with the vacant commercial space repurposed for data centers

I suspect that Flock might even employ real electricians.

From the article:

> Dayton, another city in Minnesota located just 10 miles north of Plymouth, has also paused its Flock program and disabled the two devices in the area. The Dayton police became aware that the company intended to replace these cameras and told Flock not to proceed with the work order. However, it moved forward with the replacement anyway despite being instructed otherwise.

oh that doesn't count, it is part of the Plymouth Syndicate

but doing a little legwork it looks like Flock has done that in Evanston and Cambridge. rollin' in hot with the Fall River Five

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