…in which I bring to you the latest news regarding America’s Most Hated Company.
Michael Carter, owner of Gun Commanders in Cleveland, Georgia, installed Flock cameras two years ago to combat burglars and help law enforcement nab illegal gun buyers.
He took down the cameras — which record license plate numbers and other data such as make, model and even bumper stickers to track vehicles — after his customers complained and posted criticisms on social media.
Their ire is but the latest manifestation of a nationwide privacy-rights backlash against Flock’s artificial intelligence-powered cameras discreetly installed on street corners, in parks, parking lots, neighborhoods or on drones buzzing overhead.
If you want to protect your premises, staff and stock by putting cameras inside your store, be my guest. But here’s where it gets sticky.
Let’s say that an ordinary citizen has, say, a website from which he has all sorts of Bad Things to say about government or universities and Commies (but I repeat myself). Let’s also say that he’s on record, by his own account, as being a proud gun owner and supporter of the Second Amendment. And now let’s assume that a political party comes to power, and this party is totally against the concept of an armed citizenry, and citizenry with a big angry mouth withal.
Can you see where having all sorts of information about this loudmouth shooter — his driving habits, his frequency of gun purchases and visits to the gun range, for example — may give said political party and its apparatchiks all they need to label him a “danger to society”, even though he quite clearly isn’t?
The problem with this fucking Flocking A.I. setup is that the data can be used for all sorts of un-Constitutional (and illegal in other ways) activities.
So well done, you, for getting rid of this excrescense in the public sphere.
Let’s hope that a whole lot of other people come to their senses, as you have done.
I’ve said this before but i’ll reiterate it – the only place a flock camera makes sense is outside of every polling place, with the optionally placement outside the SSA offices, state offices that administer social services, and DMVs. In a word, all the places where grifters do their thing with the government.
Hear, hear.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Just as equality was the Twentieth Century myth, Privacy is THE myth of the Twenty-First Century.
> If you want to protect your premises, staff and stock by putting cameras inside your store,
Even outside the store–covering the parking lot and the immediate part of the street in front of the store.
The problem with Flock ISN’T that it’s cameras, it’s that it’s converting–on the fly, constantly–the images from that camera into actionable data in a private company’s data lake that certain people can query at any time with little or no legitimate reason.
But a private company–gun store, licquor store, your basic stop-&-rob, had cameras where it could record the cars and the license plates it could THEN turn those–and only those–over to the authorities.
In store cameras often are not enough to identify the individual. Sometimes they even need to call in expert witnesses when they’ve caught the guy because the defense claims it’s not him. Being able to get the make and model of the car, and a license plate helps the police find they people faster.
But the key is to do it without–as you note–creating a database of EVERYONE who visited the gun store.
You do not have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” when in public. But we should have a reasonable expectation that the government–through a private corporation–isn’t cataloging our every move.
Flock You news. While many cities in Arizona are seeing the light about Flock camera abuses, the city of TEMPE, having heard the cries of the pissed-off citizens, announced that they are shutting off the Flock cameras in their college town. That was last week. All weekend long, they promised that they were done with spying on the citizens.
Not so fast, mi Hermano!
Yesterday, they announced that they were going to sign on with another equally obnoxious spy company, because the potential revenue stream is just too lucrative to pass up.
If a politician tells you that the sky is blue, do yourself a favor and go outside to look for yourself!
The real problem with FLOCK is that it permits the State to do – by buying information from a private entity – what it could not constitutionally do itself. If the State placed little trackers on everyone’s car, and attempted to keep track of us via some sort of sensors, we’d be up in arms, and rightfully so (aside from more than a few cucks; see Franklin’s warning about security and liberty). And it would be likely unconstitutional – see the recent cases on geofence warrants. But FLOCK is a private company, who gathers information from public sources, who then sells that information to the State. The State could not gather that same information by itself without a warrant. And it could not legally put up the kind of dragnet that FLOCK has done.
Now if FLOCK decided that it would not release the information gathered to anyone other than the person being tracked, or after the service of an appropriate warrant, I’d be fine with it. But that’s not a viable business model, and thus that’s not what they’re doing. Their business model is as an adjunct to law enforcement, to permit law enforcement to have very wide-spread eyes and surveillance capabilities they otherwise could not legally use or realistically afford.
A potential simple legal solution is to bring a motion to suppress, arguing that FLOCK is itself an agent of the state and is effectively operating a real-time geofence warrant and general surveillance absent judicial supervision. After all, its business model is to market its information to the State. I expect that very argument is currently being crafted, if not already argued, and is percolating through the system as we speak.
We tolerate other invasions of our privacy, equally egregious, because we get real personalized benefits from it. Our cell phones and computers track us every bit as completely, perhaps more, but we get real immediate benefits direct to us from them. We get online purchasing, wireless convenience, contact with others, news, entertainment, etc. Those are all discrete benefits, and we know we pay for them in part by giving up snippets of our lives and privacy. Giving up more than snippets to the State for a general sense of well-being is not at all the same thing, particularly when we KNOW – absolutely KNOW – the State will abuse that power. They ALWAYS do. It’s the nature of the beast. We have an exclusionary rule PRECISELY because the State – particularly the police – have never respected the constitutional limits imposed on them unless they were forced to do so. Police too often see the Constitution and its limits on governmental action as a restriction to be gotten around rather than a limitation to be respected.
where is the database housed for Flock cameras? where are their corporate offices? It would be a shame if they were doxxed as the left likes to do and then some unfortunate accidents were to occur at those locations.