Exactly. We have an individual that started doing this constantly in our local neighborhood meetings. It makes the entire meeting so dreadful attendance began to drop off. Fortunately we finally acted and threatened to bar and trespass them if they didn't stop. Complete lack of respect for the process and others.
Your only other submitted story this year has been promoting Flock's "new safety standards. Most of your recent posts are trying to promote flock. I wonder if you actually attend any local neighborhood meetings.
Yes. An individual with a lack of regard for the process trying to talk about flock in a slot allocated for a separate topic. People don't just get to make up their own rules in these meetings. When people do this, it destroys their credibility, the credibility of whatever they are trying to speak on, and is disrespectful to all the people in attendance.
The irony of this quote, is it's about a communities right to fund their own defense when the greater powers (London at the time, federal gov't now) will not provide what is needed. It's about a community having the power and holding that power. The flock business model is precisely this. Those who pay for the cameras decide how it is used. Your participation in local government will have greater and faster impact in the use of your local ALPR technology than the federal government will have for a long time.
This is why the courts have not ruled it a violation. It’s not following you. Not literally taking precise measurements of your position. It’s not even you, nor could it be proven you are even driving in the majority of cases. It’s an image of the rear of a car. Only while passing a stationary point.
What is to be decided, is how many single points does it take to be considered “precise” measurement. If I put a camera every 500ft of roadway, is it tracking how? Probably. Still not your though, it’s a car. Is a car an extension of you? Do your rights extend to the car?
In case law, even though a phone is not you, it’s considered an extension of you. A car is not. A phones location data continues even when in the privacy of your home, or in a private building. A church, a hospital, whatever.
That is why cellular gps data requires a warrant.
Dispersed points on a map, with a timestamp, and image of the rear of a car are not the same.
>Dispersed points on a map, with a timestamp, and image of the rear of a car are not the same.
It might as well be the same for all intents and purposes though. If you place a Flock camera every 100m, the accuracy effectively becomes <50m. You can reveal basically every outdoor movement of a human with that level of precision.
Across weeks and months it can be used to profile you. The statistical analysis capabilities are insane. It also is not just "license plates" its everything. How you look, how you walk, your clothing, everything gets captured.
These cameras aren't just placed on road sides, the capture footpaths, parks, entries to peoples home, swimming pools even!
The general public are not lawyers and will not always understand all the terms across the multi-page terms of service. For all intents and purposes. The customers “own” it. For a SaaS company. What this looks like legally is “licensing” of data to Flock from the customer. Terms like that are needed to properly and defensibly “handle” footage and assets. Manage storage, retrieve and serve the content, etc.
The ToS is negotiable. As it usually is when talking large sums of money. You can retrieve this with a FOIA request and see how they tend to be unique to each city. Some customers like to define the relationship differently or make additional restrictions for data handling.
I really just want to point out that layman terms and contract law are two different things.
I wouldn’t care if anonymized data is being used,I would care if I’m told I control sharing but it turns out I don’t. It’s not clear to me Flock did anything wrong. It sounds like that department inadvertently shared with a federal agency because it wasn’t obvious to them they were doing so. (Federal agencies are clearly marked as such now, product complies with state law to prevent accidental sharing)
> I really just want to point out that layman terms and contract law are two different things.
Totally agreed. My point is that their layman use of "ownership" is inaccurate at best, misleading at worst. I'm speaking to the words as they are commonly understood, not the legal definition.
You're probably right this this problem is not unique to Flock: other SaaS companies probably make the same misleading claims about ownership.
That wasn't the CEO, and "lie" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. A non-product person (CISO) was being asked if a specific feature exists and they believed it did not. Should they have said something along the lines of, "as far as I know, no" yes, they should have. It's a mistake, not a lie. Lie would require intentionally having knowledge of it and trying to obscure that fact.
They do not deserve the benefit of doubt. If anything their executives or officers say is not truthful it must be interpreted as being knowing and malicious. Flock's systems have been too easily abused to assume anything else. A company their size can't be so stupid as to allow for the abuse that's happened without everyone in the decision chain being well aware of the possibility and those use cases.
I think it’s a problem to not clarify what “track” means. Usually people are referring to and afraid of a system tracking their location, building a profile, facial recognition, etc. Yes the camera can recognize what a person is vs another object and if PTZ, will follow them. No it doesn’t do all that other stuff.
As an aside, have you noticed falcons point at the driver now? As in at the face? What's the purpose of this? Especially after lots of open PR that the alprs only capture the rear of vehicles.
I don't quite understand the leap that's made to argue in good faith they don't track people or build a profile.
You can retrieve images with FOIA. You’re not going to see good images with faces.
Some research done by others has uncovered a good bit of how they’re designed to function. They’re aimed to get a good look at plates.
The same cameras can be sold for purely video functionality. Those would be aimed differently. Like at the entrance to a store, etc. Whatever the customer wanted.
The smaller cameras can serve two product lines. Not at the same time though. One is live video, one is alpr. You will see what looks like falcons aimed at areas with no cars for this reason. Btw, all of this is on their website
Whether that is true depends on what kind of place you want to buy and the amount of the loan. In Boston's north shore, the only available apartments are triple-deckers where you can hear your neighbors, for $2500/month, while houses are something like $800k; I consider renting to be a poor value here. In Cambridge, MA rent is higher, an average of $3500/month and you can choose between a commercial apartment and triple-deckers. An actual house is something like $2 million, although if you are okay buying an apartment or the top floors of a triple-decker, maybe you could get one for $1 million. I'm not interested in buying somewhere where I can hear my neighbors talking, so triple-deckers are out. Here rent is a little better deal (except that living in Cambridge is a bad deal). In the far Chicago suburbs (admittedly not "most metros"), on the other hand, rent for a decent apartment is close to the price of a monthly mortgage payment. And if you can pay most of the purchase price (or the price is cheaper), buying looks better, because you have less interest.
When humans are involved, it's a given there will be abuse. There always has been and always will be abuse of power, in every single part of society where power can exist. The question becomes what can be done about it? If policing continues to rely more on digital tooling for tasks, there is now a trail of evidence. We should expect tools like this, and really anything digital to have strong tracking of actions performed.
Wether or not an agency takes action on internal or external reports of abuse is a local agency issue it seems.
Although much less harmful than smoke, nicotine is still not harmless to the cardiovascular system. If the goal is public health, it makes sense to move the needle a little further and try to keep people off nicotine entirely.
Alcohol is another story, we're not ready to remove that yet.
After alcohol, are we going to stop people from having multiple sexual partners in their lifetime? Because if public health is the goal, that would solve a lot of problems.
It is fine to attempt to improve public health, but not at the cost of giving people a life worth living.
This might be shifting us closer to worse overall design/performance to accommodate swapability. The pouch cells are very fragile, with the phone itself being the physical protection for the cell. If end users begin to handle these, you likely have to add additional packaging to the cell which increases the overall dimensions or reduces total capacity to maintain the same size.
Maybe it's for our own good, maybe we have to suck it up and lose a little capacity to meet sustainability goals. Or maybe this won't do much for the environment.
I am not sure people actually care that much about dimensions.
Most phones today only look thin on promotional material. With the massive camera bump that is sometimes thicker than the phone itself, and the way most people use cases, in the end, you have quite a brick. Also a glass back panel, which to me is one of the worst materials for that purpose, but it looks good on the store stand.
So to me, a removable battery will not affect the phone dimensions as much as it will affect the look, which may piss off the marketing guys, and I take it as a positive!
Seriously, bring back the removable plastic back covers, plastic may look cheap, but to me, it is the best material, and if you put on a case, as most people do, you won't even see it!
Obviously it helps with the design to embed. But it's also obvious so hard to replace batteries are by design to make those phones throw away after the 1000cycle or whatever batties last.
A good middle ground would have been to enforce an easy to replace specification..but then we are up to interpretation.
I know a common refrain with my friends is "IDGAF about an extra few centimeters, give me an audio jack". I think consumers are down for thicker phones if they get something for it. In this case, a phone that lasts longer
Where in the market can I buy a thicker phone with a 3.5mm jack that has comparable features to those of best sellers? How can I reveal a preference that isn't offered.
They optimize for enriching shareholders and experiments like exploring the market for brick phones is a needlessly costly one when existing trends can be exploited.
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