It sure would be interesting if suddenly all of the Flock employees coming to work were being constantly watched by a network of crowdfunded private cameras. Might drive home the point of invasion of privacy if its someone other than them watching...them. Or if all of the neighbors of the CEO of Flock suddenly joined some service like this so that everyone could track his activity at all times. I'm sure he'd wouldn't mind the entire world knowing exactly what he or his family are doing always.
It's a very important tool to figure out which people in positions of authority are coordinating for authoritarian purposes or just plain old corruption.
I'm instantly suspicious of anyone in government who is critical of this idea.
I mean they don't hide much anymore. Our current admin is simply awash in corruption, and nothing happens because a majority of lawmakers are also in on it, getting rich, and just aren't required to do anything. Our police rob and murder the populace, and on the rare occasion they see any consequences at all, it's paid for by the same taxpayers they abuse. And even more broadly worldwide, corporations trade in human suffering by the ton, our planet continues to be destroyed by people who will be dead long before the consequences of their greed come to fruition, and the wealthy trade children to exploit either by way of their blood or much, much darker things.
We don't need a citizen surveillance network, we already know what they're doing, perhaps not all of it but far more than enough to justify mass civil unrest. They just figured out all they had to do was get us exhausted, overwhelmed and of course fighting each other enough to make certain we wouldn't. The globe is various kinds of prison for the majority of humanity, in degrees of horror, and a theme park for the 1%.
How would the video captured from those cameras be used? These people are already driving on the same streets you and I do, so how would they not also be in the Flock footage? If you capture TBs of video footage and nobody sees it, what's the point? Are you going to start sending harassing posts to employees with footage of the car driving by your camera?
The anti-flock movement is real, but half baked ideas don't really serve a purpose to actually doing anything. Not sure how I feel about those destroying Flock cameras, but that's action moving the needle a lot further than establishing an entirely new anti-Flock camera network.
great, so now what? who are you giving access to that data that will mean anything? the cops aren't going to do anything with it as it does not pertain to anything within the purview. the only thing I could think that would be done with that information is not good with people showing up to their house or some such.
Flock operates on the foundational constitutional model of "Our cameras are in public, there is not an expectation of privacy in public, therefore we can capture anything/everything our camera sees in any way possible" (including LPR logging and even video recording).
And thus, so does any other system of recording public activity and processing/storing data collected from it.
It quite literally does not matter what people do or don't do with the information. If someone does use the information for something illegal (like stalking) them the police aught to take a police report filed by said Flock employee seriously and perform an investigation within the bounds of the law and constitution.
So then flock employees are unlikely to care at all since they are already being tracked by flock. The it will concern them once some crazy person is driven to the point of enacting real world violence. The entire point of this project is to collect that data in hopes that someone acts on it.
Fun fact: in some municipalities you can FOIA for the GPS records of police vehicles. Here's Chicago Police's. They removed 0-15mph for, erm, privacy reasons.... but it's not the worst.
The speed limit in neighborhoods is usually 25, so... 0-15mph limiting seems useless? I imagine some level of police <-> home address / general home area is in that data.
Right there's another gotcha with the data. They gave 15-60mph data in :30 minute increments.
"This would still identify officers blocks or get within a couple blocks of their home for those with take home cars. Would speeds of 15 miles per hour or more but only pings on the :30 minute mark, so one ping per hour from 2019 until the end of April work for you?"
Even gave them this SQL to run to get around that problem but they never got back to me, heh:
WITH immobile_pings as (
select count(*), vehicleid, round(xcoord::numeric, 3) as xcoord_rounded,
round(ycoord::numeric,3) as ycoord_rounded,date_trunc('day', datetime) as day
FROM gps_table
WHERE speed = 0
GROUP BY
vehicleid,
xcoord_rounded,
ycoord_rounded,
day
having count(*) > 1440), --4 hours
day_counts as (
select count(*), vehicleid, xcoord_rounded, ycoord_rounded
from immobile_pings
group by vehicleid, xcoord_rounded, ycoord_rounded having count(*) > 15 -- 15 days
)
select gps_table.* from gps_table s inner join day_counts i
ON i.vehicleid = s.vehicleid
AND array[round(s.xcoord::numeric, 3), round(s.ycoord::numeric, 3)] != array[i.xcoord_rounded,i.ycoord_rounded]
AND speed > 15; -- 15mph
All public servants should have all their info publicly available, some safety measures can be put like some delays or similar, but as the name implies, public servant! Police for example should be watched and they should feel they are actively being watched by the public, also their badge numbers should be available on these maps so you just click and you can report them if needed.
To the wonderful creators, who will presumably find this thread: did you know that sparrows had at least two full millenia of being associated with lust and depravity, rather than the connotation used here and in the final book of ISOIAF (Game Of Thrones)? Well... now you do! I beg of you to fit an easter egg to this effect somwhere in this site, for us followers of the old ways out there.
To get a bit more on-topic: this is a perfect example of the missing scale in HN's "no politics" rule. There are facets of politics that you simply cannot ignore while still being an individually-minded technologist (closest thing this community has to a shared ethos).
It's a very important tool to figure out which people in positions of authority are coordinating for authoritarian purposes or just plain old corruption.
I'm instantly suspicious of anyone in government who is critical of this idea.
What are they hiding?
We don't need a citizen surveillance network, we already know what they're doing, perhaps not all of it but far more than enough to justify mass civil unrest. They just figured out all they had to do was get us exhausted, overwhelmed and of course fighting each other enough to make certain we wouldn't. The globe is various kinds of prison for the majority of humanity, in degrees of horror, and a theme park for the 1%.
heh as a foia nerd, heh.
The anti-flock movement is real, but half baked ideas don't really serve a purpose to actually doing anything. Not sure how I feel about those destroying Flock cameras, but that's action moving the needle a lot further than establishing an entirely new anti-Flock camera network.
Flock operates on the foundational constitutional model of "Our cameras are in public, there is not an expectation of privacy in public, therefore we can capture anything/everything our camera sees in any way possible" (including LPR logging and even video recording).
And thus, so does any other system of recording public activity and processing/storing data collected from it.
It quite literally does not matter what people do or don't do with the information. If someone does use the information for something illegal (like stalking) them the police aught to take a police report filed by said Flock employee seriously and perform an investigation within the bounds of the law and constitution.
Have a glance:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/hj4jtcag2i9qvl4sj6mg2/AF6c9r7...
"This would still identify officers blocks or get within a couple blocks of their home for those with take home cars. Would speeds of 15 miles per hour or more but only pings on the :30 minute mark, so one ping per hour from 2019 until the end of April work for you?"
Even gave them this SQL to run to get around that problem but they never got back to me, heh:
select gps_table.* from gps_table s inner join day_counts i ON i.vehicleid = s.vehicleid AND array[round(s.xcoord::numeric, 3), round(s.ycoord::numeric, 3)] != array[i.xcoord_rounded,i.ycoord_rounded] AND speed > 15; -- 15mphJust say "Stalking their ex partners" its fine we all know about it in 2026.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/His_Eye_Is_on_the_Sparrow
To get a bit more on-topic: this is a perfect example of the missing scale in HN's "no politics" rule. There are facets of politics that you simply cannot ignore while still being an individually-minded technologist (closest thing this community has to a shared ethos).