doxxing is about pseudonymous internet accounts, not people who are very public with their real name and lobbying the government.

this is whitepages reverse lookup

if he was just a guy chatting on the internet about cameras, sure, it would be doxxing, but he isnt. paparazzi have existed sonce forever

Question for me is "Will something you can do free now, be suspicious in the future?" Like voting, or taking your kids to a private school, or going to an EFF meeting?

As long as you feel fine having the government know absolutely everything you do, then keep supporting surveillance. I personally have nothing to fear, but I hate the idea that I am being surveilled by a private company.

I would typically agree with the statement, but I have a lot of trouble giving a flying shit about the people literally selling Doxxing-As-A-Service getting doxxed in return.

Do you believe anyone with a surveillance camera should have the owners name and address published if in any way a “public” area is recorded?

I suppose we can start with all Blink, Ring and Nest Cams. Then we will continue with dash cam owners.

My money would be on Axon. They at least have a claim to the "hold police accountable" angle with bodycams and less-lethal weapons. Compared with Flock's "we'll watch you and what're you gonna do about it"

This is still a useful first step. Once “flock” becomes eponymous and a toxic political football, it can be applied to all future companies who do the same thing.

The word “Flock” is quickly becoming toxic, in the future we’ll be able to use it as a shorthand for all companies of this type. e.g. if I call something a cleanex everyone knows what I’m talking about regardless of whether Cleanex the company actually made the item being referred to. Similarly we’ll be able to just say “flock camera” and everyone will know what it is regardless of who makes the camera.

> they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.

What would be legalized? You realize that recording people in public is already legal, right? I'm puzzled where people are getting the idea that Flock is doing something illegal.

Exactly my thoughts. Flock has been brazen on so many things, that second-movers with a modicum of political savvy can come assuage all the major Flock-FUD, while in fact being significantly worse.

>they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.

Or they'll be legalized piecemeal and you'll get sneered at by the useful idiots for opposing each incremental step based on principal.

Legislation guardrails around surveillance technology are a necessary component to defend against future corporate surveillance apparatus establishment and operation, as this surveillance could take many forms (video, audio, geolocation, RF signatures, etc). Flock and Axon today, whatever unsavory folks come along in the future.

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes

Guardrails because we cannot trust the human.

We do not need Flock in this current iteration of society.

In utopia, we would also not need Flock.

Privacy should be a human right.

i have a RIGHT to privacy, and so does everyone on American soil. end of argument.

Recent WIRED[1] article goes in depth on this exact problem:

> Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for “any offense,” exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and “do a workup on the top three individuals.” The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software.

> A “workup,” in Flock’s terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department’s records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts.

This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi, and it's going to be a whack-a-mole game dealing with all the baby Flocks that spring up if Flock itself can be shut down.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/

They aren't just tracking license plates though. They're tracking people - let me explain. Their 'ALPR' cameras (purposefully misleading to call them ALPR btw) capture the footage and send it off to their servers where it's retained - building a long-term historical location history on every vehicle. Advanced analysis is performed on the data to provide features to their customers such as the ability to search for vehicles based on a description of its characteristics (no plate needed), real-time route prediction, location heatmaps, and identifying vehicles that travel together (convoy search). Here's the important part - data is also ingested into another service they run called 'Nova', which is essentially a people search tool that connects the vehicles they capture directly to people and their PII. Access to their platforms (Flock OS, Nova, etc.) is sold via a subscription to law enforcement where they can perform searches for individuals or vehicle whereabouts for any reason, without a warrant, and practically no oversight or regulations.