False, he is forcing Flock on EVERYONE

No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled. And no, under the radar agreements with local cops and govts do NOT constitute my permission to be surveilled. If they want to go in with fully informed referendums in each community, then I'd accept it. But that is not Flock's business model.

I might accept it for this specific case. But, in general, just because the majority wants to do something doesn't mean it's legitimate to force everyone to accept it.

If this is what they thought was possible, why write the 4th Amendment?

Unreasonable search and overbearing government was one of the key issues of the American Revolution.

Okay: Just how long would you permit someone to follow you around with a camera, recording everything you do?

The thing about a stranger watching you in public is that eventually you go somewhere else, and they can't watch you anymore. A surveillance organization like Flock, however, is waiting for you wherever you go. In this sense they're much more like a stalker following you around than a stranger who happens to see you.

This analogy bears out in practice: Cops have used Flock data to stalk their exes.¹

[1]: https://www.kwch.com/2022/10/31/kechi-police-lieutenant-arre...

Probably not long. I might also make it clear I'm not a fan, but at the end of the day, they're generally within their rights to record me in public. Sucks, but not much I can do.

> The thing about a stranger watching you in public is that eventually you go somewhere else, and they can't watch you anymore. A surveillance organization like Flock, however, is waiting for you wherever you go. In this sense they're much more like a stalker following you around than a stranger who happens to see you.

I mean, I don't buy this argument, because a stranger can legally follow me to all the same places where Flock is present. I mean, surely if I get into a car and drive away, they can get into a car and follow me. So long as we're both in public roads, they're within their rights to do so?

Granted, if they keep it up long enough, I can probably file charges for stalking. Perhaps the same can be done against Flock? Hell, this would even be a situation where Flock would be useful: proving that someone was following me around all day, thus supporting my bid for a restraining order or something.

> This analogy bears out in practice: Cops have used Flock data to stalk their exes.¹

Indeed, and this is where oversight, strict rules around usage and retention, and effective penalties for violations are needed.

Banning Flock is not the only solution! I mean, I would be in favor of banning Flock specifically (because they've demonstrated a willingness to act in bad faith), but I would not support a ban of ALPRs entirely. They do provide benefits, and coupled with the right rules, can be a net benefit to society.

Being okay with people watching me in public does not imply being okay with someone aggregating the information about my whereabouts 24/7 even though it's "the same" information.

Btw it's a fallacy similar to the one debunked in "what colour are your bits". The context matters, not just the abstract information.

Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.

During the 19th century.

Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.

There are even weirder stuff than companies being considered a "moral person". For example if a person speeds way too much in France (say more than 50 kilometers/hour above the speed limit on the highway, e.g. 180 km/h // 111 mph instead of the 130 km/h // 80 mph)... Well then that person gets arrested. And his driving license is confiscated on the spot. But here's the absolute crazy thing: even if the car belong to someone else, to a company, to a rental company... Doesn't matter: the French state consider that the car itself was complicit in the act. So the car is seized too (for 8 days if it doesn't belong to the person who was driving it and potentially much more if it does belong to the person driving it).

Companies are persons and cars (I'm not even talking about self-driving cars) have rights and obligations. That's the world we live in.

>> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled

> As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces.

You're agreeing that he is forcing flock on people. Legality doesn't make it not-forced. Not needing consent is different from receiving consent.

Again, I'm pretty anti-Flock, but place the blame where it's due and use good logic to support that.

I mean, you're welcome to buy an Apple Vision Pro, but you making poor decisions with your money doesn't make Apple responsible for that.

If you followed me around all day taking photographs of my every move for no other reason than you felt like it, I would very likely have recourse via stalking and harassment laws.

There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.

If I'm interesting enough to get a warrant for surveillance of my activities - fair game. Private investigators operate under a set of reasonable limits and must be licensed in most (all?) states for this reason as well.

It's quite obvious laws have simply not caught up with the state of modern technology that allows for the type of data collection and thus mass-surveillance that is now possible today. If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.

There is a difference, the company is doing it to everyone, technology enables new things to happen and laws don't cover it. Before it was impractical for police to assign everyone a personal stalker but tech has made it practical.

By default if something is new enough it has a pretty good chance of being legal because the law hasn't caught up or considered it in advance.

> There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.

I feel like it's telling that no one has yet taken this logic to court. I think that means that while there may be no difference to you there is a difference according to the law. This gets at your later point.

Speaking of:

> If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.

I think you're doing a subtle motte-and-bailey here. As far as I'm aware, Flock has strict retention policies, numbering in the low single-digit months (Google says 30 days "by default"). There is no "recorded indefinitely" here, which significantly changes the characteristics of the argument here. This is roughly on par with CCTV systems, to the best of my knowledge.

I don't disagree that laws haven't caught up yet, but I also think a lot of the arguments against Flock are rife with hyperbolic arguments like this that do meaningfully misrepresent their model. I think this leads to bad solutioning, as a consequence.

I'd much rather have good solutions here than bad ones, because ALPRs and other "surveillance technologies" do drive improvements in crime clearance rates/outcomes, so they shouldn't be banned--just better controlled/audited/overseen

Read some cases of who's suffering now. Cops (or ICE) can choose a passing vehicle to run a ALPR search on, finding out what states it just passed through. When they consider it "suspicious", said driver gets stopped, searched, and even detained.

Look at how ALPR is being used and whose rights are being violated as a result. Hint: it's not criminals.

I think the suffering/abuse is able to be reasonably controlled through increased/better oversight, more publicly available information, and more strict regulations around the use of the data produced by these devices.

I also think they're able to impart a whole lot of good on their communities. If they contribute to an increase in the number of arrests and convictions for crimes, that might end up being a net good.

I think starting from the assumption that they are net bad, and then telling me I should only look at the negatives is an uncompelling argument.

I need not look further than the testimony of people who used to commit crimes in areas with increased surveillance (i.e., San Francisco), and I see a compelling argument for their upsides. Now I have to weigh the positives and negatives against each other, and it stops being the clear-cut argument you're disingenuously presenting it as.

If you're only reading the stories of the homosexual people in Germany in the 1940s, you're making your judgements on only a fraction of the available information.

This is a really silly thing to say. It’s the “stop hitting yourself” of surveillance bullshit. Come on. Calling them “fixed cameras” so you can ignore the intent in the original comment is middle school shit.

You "come on". I expect reasonable discourse here, not blind acceptance of nonsense arguments just because you happen to agree with their conclusions or premises.

I made it clear at the start I'm not a fan of Flock.

I'm also not a fan of the hyperbolic nonsense people are trying to use to demonize them. It makes it too easy for them to respond in kind, and be right.

Don't give them that out.

> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.

Might I interest you in the concepts of stalking and restraining orders?

I mean, it might be a viable way to push back against them.

The idea that me an individual observing you, and a large, well funded company allied with the US government observing you has no difference, quite frankly, leads me to conclude* you are arguing in bad faith.

You can make an ideological argument that is the case, but not one based on fact and reality.

*edited for spelling

The idea that there's not a scale difference is, quite frankly, bogus.

I don't disagree that quantity has a quality of it's own in some circumstances, but that's not an inherent property of "quantity".

Everyone doing it 24/7 via their cameras and running it through AI analysis and providing it to the cops for $$$ is not.

What if I recruit a few friends around my town to do the same, and we share data and findings? Is that also fine?

What if I pay a bunch of people I don't know to collect this data for me, but do all the analysis myself?

Where do you draw the line? Being able to concretely define a line here is something I've seen privacy proponents be utterly incapable of doing. Yet it's important to do so, because on one end of the spectrum is a set of protected liberties, and on the other is authoritarian dystopia. If you can't define some point at which freedom stops being freedom, you leave the door wide open to the kind of bullshit arguments we see any time "privacy in public" comes up: 100% feels, and 0% logic.

To paraphrase the quote, quantity has a quality of its own.

The central dogma of machine learning. Which Flock and its defenders know very well.

they could instead be limiting flock to private places.

> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.

if you followed me everywhere and took pictures of me everywhwre i went outside from my door in the morning to my door in the evening, id want to get a restraining order on you as a stalker. this is stalking

But again, this is not what Flock is doing.

By this same logic, traffic cameras and CCTV surveillance are "stalking", which doesn't seem accurate?

I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt, but it feels very sea-liony and intentionally disingenuous.

If you can't refrain from immediately strawmanning the argument, I would argue that you are the one with the "deeply unserious position".

Have a little more rigor, please.

They have clearly lost their way. Seems like a fundamental loss of confidence in their ability to produce leading technology, and instead feeling like they must defensively focus on blocking and extracting maximum funds from customers, both with costly "authorized-only" repairs and subscriptions for heated seats.

Sad

(My E39 M5 was one of the last user-repairable BMWs, but it's getting very expensive. On the other hand, it's driving a significant market for regular people designing and building replacement parts, whether 3D-printed, CNC'd, or homemade)

So they do everything they can do get rid of facts.

The primary reason they spread disinformation is not to get people to believe the nonsense (which is merely an occasional bonus), it is to get people to give up on finding the truth. Once people have no substantial quantity or quality of truth, they can be entirely manipulated.

This regime is following the standard path to authoritarianism.

Give Trump some gold points for not being a hypocrite like all of his predecessors.

For every constraint I see them creating in the law, I can instantly create a simple workaround, and also see multiple ways it will impair or destroy the ability to create 100% legitimate parts/components/products.

This is an unfortunate example of a too-common political solution:

A new industry arises that unintentionally creates a new capability that some can use to create problems.

So, "let's just create a mandate on the industry that will destroy it or contort it beyond recognition, and provide no funding to support this new requirement!".

I fully understand and fundamentally support the need for government to regulate markets, pollution, product & food safety, and much more, but this simplistic approach is a net negative for society and the economy.

They need to focus on the actual act of "3D printing firearms" not on the precursors.

That due process only exists to the extent the branches of govt are independent, have co-equal power, and can hold and act upon different views of the situation.

When all branches of govt are corrupted or corrupted to serve the executive, as in autocracies, that due process exists only if the executive likes you, or accepts your bribes. That is why there is such a huge push by right-wing parties to take over the levers of power, so they can keep their power even after they would lose at the ballot box.

[0] https://smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment

Consider an average person's 72/min resting heartbeat. That will be (726024365.25=) 37,869,120 heartbeats per year or ~379 million/decade.

Now, add strenuous running or cycling 5 hours/week, maybe a 10mi run, and a bunch of 20-60 minute runs. Call that average 180 beats/minute. That adds ((180-72)30052=) 1,684,800 beats/year, or +16 million per decade.

The average person's 37,869,120 beats/yr divided by the exercising person's 27,349,920 yields a ratio of 1.3846. So, based on heartbeat count alone, the exerciser will live 38% longer.

BUT, this kind of training will dramatically reduce the resting heartbeat. Training far less than this, my resting heartrate declined into the high-40s-low-50s, and has remained consistent for decades of mostly maintenance training. Most recent six month average is 52 beats/min. with far less than 5hr/week training, but let's use that. That means the resting heartrate is 27,349,920 beats/year, plus the added 1,684,800 exercise beats, making it 29,034,720 beats/year or ~290 million beats per decade.

That means the exercising person 'spends' 8,834,400 FEWER* heartbeats per year, or saves 89 million heartbeats per decade.

And that level of workout will probably produce an even significantly lower resting heart rate than the 52 I cited. And for the top endurance athletes in distance running, cycling, nordic skiing, although they might spend 10+ hours/week at threshold or some training zone, so double those extra 'exercsie beats', they also often have resting heartrates in the low 40s/minute, which will yield an even greater lifespan if it is measured in heartbeate.

The difference between the responses and the pictures was illuminating, especially in one study in particular - you'd ask people "how do you store your lunch meat" and they say "in the fridge, in the crisper drawer, in a ziploc bag", and when you asked them to take a picture of it, it was just ripped open and tossed in anywhere.

This apparently horrified the lunch meat people ("But it'll get all crusty and dried out!", to paraphrase), which that study and ones like it are the reason lunch meat comes with disposable containers now, or is resealable, instead of just in a tear-to-open packet. Every time I go grocery shopping it's an interesting experience knowing that specific thing is in a small way a result of some of the work I did a long time ago.

A lot of people are lonely and talking to these things like a significant other. They value roleplay instruction following that creates "immersion." They tell it to be dark and mysterious and call itself a pet name. GPT-4o was apparently their favorite because it was very "steerable." Then it broke the news that people were doing this, some of them falling off the deep end with it, so they had to tone back the steerability a bit with 5, and these users seem to say 5 breaks immersion with more safeguards.

I do wonder if they would accept the mirror explanation for men enjoying porn.

The most commonly taken action does not imply people wanted to do it more, or felt happiest doing it. Unless you optimize profit only.

The perception goes beyond feeling fine sensations in the interface to the instrument/equipment, but literally feeling like it is a part of your body. I've gotten it in both alpine ski racing and sportscar racing. When it is ON, moving a ski or wheel to a particular spot feels the same as when I'd put my foot on a particular rock where running in rough terrain, and often even more part of me than when kicking a soccer ball with my real foot. Both the sensitivity of the feel (feedback) and the precision with which I could execute was just an entire other level, and it is still weird to think of how it was often better feedback & precision than my own foot in a less-skilled situation.