Well, when you’re on the clock, you’re an agent of that company. And when you’re installing an indiscriminate mass-surveillance camera, calling the police on someone that’s video recording you is kind of bananas. Perhaps you don’t find that to be an interesting event, but a lot of people who are rightfully angry at the non-consensual deployment of a mass surveillance network disagree.

> It's worse for the technician in this case, because he really was being followed --- that's not unlawful but it's unnerving.

The technician was in public, bearing a company logo, performing an activity in which there is widespread public interest, and identified himself to law enforcement as an agent of Flock Safety. He is entitled to be unnerved but has no reasonable expectation of privacy here.

> it's just some installer dude probably making $65k/year to climb poles and fasten cameras

I find it hard to be persuaded by the salary idea. A hitman who works for $100 is just as bad as one who works for $10,000.

In fact other immoral activities work the opposite, bizarrely (a whore who works for $100 is worse than one who works for $10,000)

The response is stronger because your hairdressers and baristas aren't actively providing a service for surveillance as part of their work. The bar should be higher for a company that's ostensibly being trusted to provide a law enforcement tool that's prone to misuse than for providing beverages or cosmetology.

> It's worse for the technician in this case, because he really was being followed --- that's not unlawful but it's unnerving.

Isn't that exactly what Flock are doing to tens of thousands of people a day? So why the double-standard.

I actually agree it is unnerving, I just don't agree that one should be held to a different standard than the other.

> technicians from Flock

Do they even have their own technicians? I believe there have been Dish Network technicians seen working on and setting up flock cameras and even those technicians are contractors of Dish network.

Guy is not just a technician, he's a technician working for Flock installing surveillance tech to monitor the public. Wrong life choices have consequences like being filmed being complicit in establishing a surveillance regime.

Well then everyone is innocent except CEO's or management lol.

This isn't how world works.

Especially when chances are that this camera installation was the result of local government asking and paying Flock to put it up. I'm not sure why the anger is directed at the company instead of local elected officials, and I understand the plight of the installer who's worried about being labeled as a bad guy for executing public works contracts.

We never see, "Flock (YC S17) Is Hiring an Engineer of Mass Surveillance" on the jobs.

Checks out.

Why do you think you can get legal protection just because the filming lasts longer? AFAIK you can film anyone however long you want as long as you do it exclusively on public property where there's no expectation of privacy and you don't harass them in anyway (maintain a safe distance). Isn't that what happens to celebrities & politicians? AOC doesn't get to complain that the press is following her with cameras everywhere she goes all day long.

flock's business model is recording people. they do not get to complain about being recorded.

I would feel the same way if these people weren't installing a permanent surveillance camera.

I don't think it's fair to cry harassment if you're getting filmed setting up the harassment machine.

If anything, Americans are being too nice to Flock. We're watching the villain and setup of a 1980s dystopian scifi horror, except there's no unlikely hero who can save the world by shooting a single weirdo in a suit on top of a skyscraper.

A really interesting experiment would be to give the public access to all of Flock's data, in real time. I say we try it and see how that goes.

yea it is similar to robot mark zuckerburg who purchased everything near his house to protect privacy, but his app is the biggest privacy nightmares, especially rayban glasses.

That’s literally exactly what Flock does. I can’t find sympathy for the company on this.

Not illegal, and like all the other comments here, isn’t this exactly what Flock does? But they do it indiscriminately to all vehicles at all times?

Flock cameras do the same thing to me so I guess I'd better call the cops.

Not a YouTuber, a local reporter in Atlanta

Yeah! Nobody should be able to track your movements along public roads.

Watching and following everywhere someone drives is stalking? Damn, that's crazy.

Yeah! If you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear!

looks at you suspiciously

Are those… curtains?

This is normal on HN

Totally wild that someone installing a surveillance camera is "concerned about privacy." Only his privacy is important I guess.

Milgram agrees

Too bad somehow the face that ends up out there as the face of surveillance isn’t the CEO of Flock, not their coders, not the YC people who gave them money to do exactly what they’re doing. It’s the lowest of the low in the chain, the guy sitting in the sun to install the cameras on a post.

I don’t understand your point.

> We managed to swing a couple of the county commissioners who were in favor of it before and were not in favor of it after hearing about the constitutional issues as well as the cyber security issues that flock doesn't really care about.

Do you not see the problem here?

Pasco County has a $2.2B annual budget. These county commissioners have the financial resources, organizational access to expertise, and time to focus on these problems.

Do they really need an under-resourced citizen to inform them about the constitutional issues after deployment? And then they just say “Aw shucks, whoopsies, now I see the light.”

I don’t think it’s fair to call this learned helplessness (a lingering belief after the threat has vanished) when we’re facing off against an active, persistent adversarial threat.

Your county commissioners didn’t make a “whoopsies” when they took a deliberate, informed action against your interests.

Furthermore, it’s unsustainable to require citizens to pour significant time and energy into forcing their representatives to faithfully represent them. That quite literally defeats the purpose of a representative governing body.

The real trick, is to stop going to these meetings, and start running against these politicians. Get the forms, stand out in front of your local post office, collect the signatures, and primary them. Run against them. That's the only thing they listen to

French? I was impressed by:

Yellow vests knock out 60% of all speed cameras in France

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46822472

What country?

In Florida, we just talked to our reps and got them banned from the entire state. It was easy and didn’t require protests at all.

US Citizens have been tamed by “social” and other media propaganda by the people in power. But we got 2A handy to you know, hunt for rabbits and shit

na, we are just more civilized.

Absolutely horrible. They show up on Saturday's yelling at empty buildings. Very rarely does an American protest against a government body change policy. If you want to really do something, show up on a Tuesday morning, stop traffic, flood the phone lines, and the email systems, relentlessly day after day. Americans are far too comfortable to truly protest.

Their problem is they believed their own bullshit and thought they were offering people a good deal that basically amounted to "the government 1984s you more than they already do but your package thief gets arrested, maybe".

Ignoring the fact that that deal is not necessarily good, if they had been slightly scummier, not given two shits about actually reducing petty crimes against the people and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines (which have basically no 4th-8th amendment protections these days) they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny for a very long time and gotten their systems deeply entrenched. The useful idiots would've eaten it right up with the flimsiest of pretexts so long as each segment of useful idiots was peddled to individually.

"The truck we saw carrying 2-tons of waste tires away from your tire shop is not owned by an entity on the state approved list, pay up"

"We saw you leaving home depot with a water heater but you didn't pull a permit, prove it didn't go into your house or pay the fine"

"we saw your 2004 Altima emit a puff of blue leaving a light. Per vehicle code XYZ any vehicle that emmits a visible cloud cannot pass emissions inspection, submit proof of passing withing 30d or your resigstration is revoked"

If they had done that a lot of people would have eaten it up and asked for more. But nope, they believed their own BS and built a system for "real" law enforcement. And of course that leads to a bunch of bad interactions with cops and the public doesn't like that.

Nah, what they should have done is called themselves the UK government and then all of HN would be praising them instead

> anti-recording without policy for use and retention

Not recording on its own, but the linking of data with other cities and making it all searchable by those with access is where it becomes unprecedented mass surveillance.

You’re right that we have to be specific.

> your phone may be recording

They are able to dodge these accusations by just selling voice command logs. “No we don’t record you or sell your audio data” and yet Siri’s AUL reads:

    [PhraseSpotter] Detected wake word “Pepsi” with a score 0.942.

    [com.apple.voiceactivation] Proceeding with full wake. 

So no need to sell the audio, just the unrelated logs of some app that uses the AOP.

Except the Gov can't buy services from corps to do things they are not allowed to do: Pinkerton Act. None of this is legal

To be fair to people, TSA attracts people who live near airports and need jobs, doesn't it?

ICE, yes. At this point you cannot make an argument at all that you are going to join a fair-minded organisation that treats people decently while upholding a lawful function.

People who work for Flock should be considering their futures, but I suspect people who install Flock cameras are more in the TSA bracket: it is a job that will be near them that pays.

Government jobs attract all the wrong people.

I tend to agree that when used correctly, a surveillance system like this could have benefits at a societal level.

The problem is the many stories we already have of misuses of this equipment, showing that people in power are not mentally capable of actually managing a surveillance system like this in a societally beneficial way.

If the use of the system was designated as only being allowed to stop heinous crimes and we had a track record and way to prove this was always the case, then I would be 100% in support. But given it has already proven to not be possible is likely why most people are against it.

I simply don't think Humans are capable of proper use of a system like this.

There is also a large difference between local surveillance (home/business/area CCTV), public surveillance (openly accessible cameras like traffic cams), and dragnet surveillance- I generally trust my local police precincts but don't like the fact that the alphabet soup of federal agencies has warrantless access to track me on the way to and from church or work or Facebook marketplace deals

We could solve even more crimes if the police were allowed to install cameras in everyone's homes.

Sum up the number of kids harmed or murdered by the state (pick the top n dictators in the last 100 years for example).

Sum up the number of kids harmed or murdered by random people (remember that, for example, non-family abductions are 1% of abductions).

Compare.

I guarantee you that an empowered state is worse for child welfare than random criminals.

Oh, yes, "think of the children", nobody has ever explored this angle to push unpopular things before.

"Won't someone think of the children" has become the rally cry of authoritarians.

Except there was literally just a piece a few days back here on HN where a Mom was arrested for letting her kid walk half a mile alone in a gated community with active security patrols. The guardrails you describe aren’t for child safety so much as adult persecution. Surveillance may help solve some crimes, but its goal isn’t safety of the people surveilled as much as protecting the power of those doing the surveilling. Research continues pointing out that cameras don’t do shit to deter crime, and its actual ability to solve crimes is limited to the humans using said tools - and with a longer history of abuses than successes, it’s a fairly safe conclusion that mass surveillance does fuck all to actually protect the populace.

I'm 100% in favor of LPR cameras. Any technology can be abused. The handful of corrupt officers that were caught using the cameras for nefarious reasons shouldn't overshadow the incredible benefit these are.

> Willing to [bet] most of the Flock hate crowd doesn't...

...have a reason at all to worry about LPR cameras tracking their car. Just "something something government."

But you're not working for Flock, are you? We could go on much further until we reach the what Popper called the Tolerance Paradox: "If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

The point is that total surveillance is like the destruction of tolerance or in thie case privacy, and it makes watching the watchmen impossible. There's a point of no return and before that one is reached resistance IS allowed or else you lose everything.