It’s been interesting to see this vitriol towards Flock increase over the past couple of months or so.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483052
Ironically most of the people reading this are doing so on an always connected phone with a fused battery, that they can't trust, because they don't control it. It also has significantly more capabilities that a flock camera, and they likely pay for it too.
That's not ironic, that's _hey, look over there!_
false equivalence.
It's called choice. Maybe a dumb choice, but a choice!
In the USA, is it really that easy to find the home address of a business owner?
The EU briefly had a similar registry but that got shut down quickly.
Land records are public in most US locales. You can type in almost any residential address on homes.com and it will show you who owned it when and with what loan terms.
Basically yes. There are a large number of public repositories of data that can dox a persons address. Like property tax rolls, company filings etc. some of these are actually required by Europe (https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-co..., which I do not appreciate)
Not really, it looks like this guy originally registered the business at his personal residence which is not really common. Kinda surprised if he still lives there considering how FLOCK has expanded.
The article is very one sided, implying without evidence that Flock is for recreational tracking of individuals. With San Francisco SFPD’s ALPR cameras at least, this would be an abuse of the cameras according to the policy linked from https://transparency.flocksafety.com/san-francisco-ca-pd. Here are the Authorized purposes:
Locate stolen, wanted, and or other vehicles that are the subject of investigation
To apprehend wanted persons subject to arrest warrants or who are otherwise lawfully sought by law enforcement.
To locate victims, witnesses, suspects, missing children, adults, and/or elderly individuals, including in response to Amber Alerts and Silver Alerts and others associated with a law enforcement investigation.
To assist with criminal investigations initiated by local, state and regional public safety departments by identifying vehicles associated with targets of criminal investigations.
Counter-terrorism: Identify potential threats to critical infrastructure sites.
For other law enforcement purposes as authorized by law: Investigations of major crimes.
Which of these uses do people not like? Or which other policies are people concerned with in other jurisdictions?
The unwarranted mass surveillance and dragnet part. We have a thing called the fourth Constitutional amendment here in the United States. We also have the first amendment, which the Supreme Court has ruled in the past must not be subject to a "chilling effect".
The Flock camera system, and any dragnet surveillance system, is a direct chilling effect to the rights to freedom of speech, freedom from religious persecution and freedom of assembly.
The inalienable aspect of these rights means that literally no example or rationalization you can provide would justify impacting those rights for even a single individual or group.
161 people in LA were stopped for bad data using flock cameras. The contract with them is canceled but the damn things are still up giving data to DHS probably.
Not on the list, but documented:
* Live monitoring of teenagers in gyms for sales purposes,
* Multiple counts of stalking by LEOs,
* Instances of unsecured access,
* Multiple erroneous plate matching directly leading to "swatting" of women and children on day to day shopping trips.
Non-cloudflare link that basically says the same thing: https://mstdn.social/@stux/117186158784673388
Why is cloudflare a problem?
Cloudflare doesn't reliably let me through.
Because they slow down and often block access to websites, particularly for people that try to avoid being fingerprinted or otherwise tracked. Pretty evil behavior.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Don't listen to these hecklers, you have every right to your privacy, and should demand it. Anonymity is paramount if people want to be able to talk without repercussions. Gaslighting, heckling and other forms of harassment are to convince you to self censor. Don't take the bait. Ignore them.
> Because they slow down and often block access to websites, particularly for people that try to avoid being fingerprinted or otherwise tracked. Pretty evil behavior.
Bots and scrapers and hackers also try and avoid being tracked, which is by far a bigger problem for them and most websites than the 15 of us using tons of antifingerprinting techniques. Evil? No, that's silly.
It is very challenging to distinguish individuals interested in privacy from bots acting maliciously or with reckless indifference. If you devise a way to do this more effectively than Cloudflare, you should start a business to sell this as a service.
Sure, I am practicing understanding for the tyranny around me everyday when I wake up, as a meditation exercise.
Answers like yours kill the little remaining faith I have in people.
This same argument has been used to defend sloppily implemented CAPTCHAS destroying accessibility since what, 20 years.
My employer is a small business that has an e-commerce website that is attacked by fraudsters trying to validate stolen credit cards or obtain customer information hundreds of times per day. Operations like CloudFlare are the only way to foil these actors. Just trusting you is not a viable strategy.