So the device should require very specific license plates to scan for—not the current dragnet. The software should only "ping" when there is a confident match with said license plate(s)—and merely log which license plate, time stamp a single photo, and note the confidence level of it being a match.

The frame buffer should be the only place (a frame of) video is ever stored at all (excepting the high-confidence match indicated above).

The only issue remaining would be whether we trust the device/software to have complied (and not have a backdoor) and of course there needs to be a legal warrant for every license plate uploaded (and it should expire fairly frequently, likely requiring a new warrant to continue canning for the plate).

They are advertised as locally owned and data locally controlled. However when asked what the data can be used for was not given a direct answer.

I asked since the public purchased these cameras can we use the data to determine how many people attended a festival or other city event.

Not any identifiable information just general like how many people traveled to our community to attend the 4th of July fireworks show or local outdoor concert night.

Silence. Nope as the city we cannot access or use any of the data and instead trust that these will be used for law enforcement and safety.

Upon questioning how they would be used and who would be accessing the data found the answers to be quite generalized.

My two cents is if we are going to have flock cameras or not … law enforcement and the company need to be more transparent on what data is stored, how it is accessed, who can access, how it links to other cameras in other communities, how is misuse identified, what access do federal agencies have to this data (do they have to ask the local community first or can they just login with some super user account and pull data etc)

I get the sense that if Flock were to be transparent about how these truly function less communities would be willing to purchase .. but I could be wrong.

The deputy then used the woman’s travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth.

That sentence does make this less of a win tbh, given that with it, it's just an actual example of the technology doing the job it is supposed to do.

Like this, it's almost a trojan horse of something pretending to be PR for A, but actually being effective PR for B.

Flock cameras are a result of not enforcing existing laws. Judges are too lenient on offenders, repeat offenders are all too common, and so you have a reduction in the degree of trust in what should be a high trust society.

When there is not trust and too many people don't behave, you either start punishing offenders properly and potentially more harshly to disincentivise other would-be offenders, or you get Flock cameras.

You think only about the Flock cameras and their innate problems, but refuse to actually deal with _why_ Flock cameras are needed at all. Think a little.

No doubt erratic behavior gets me logged by that security team, if not escalated to local police, who may come to check up on me themselves later. Nobody knows what's happening with this footage. What their putting a wrapper in their pocket may look like in low res video.

Mass surveillance thru cameras and movement logging isn't so active but I 100% understand people who take action against the cameras. It's just as in a person's face every single day, in more and more places, and you don't know who is on the other end or what they're looking for or what you are doing may appear as.

The idea that law enforcement tapping into existing law enforcement knowledge constitutes as a search of "persons, houses, papers, and effects" does not logically follow for me. It is a search of law enforcements own property.

Flock CEO Garretty Langley — who we’ll be interviewing on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt — has called for a “compromise” between privacy and safety

Don't be fooled. Flock's CEO has stated multiple times that the purpose of his company is to intimidate people into thinking they will be caught if they commit any crime, in order for him to achieve a crime-free world. The only way to make people think they will always be caught, is if people believe their every movement is tracked everywhere they go. Intimidation via zero privacy. It's literally the surveillance part of Nineteen Eighty Four.

The fact that these aims are impossible (some criminals don't mind going to jail, many are stupid/hubristic, a criminal can spraypaint a camera, etc) should also indicate how disconnected the guy is from reality. He's called people who non-violently protest the cameras terrorists. He's backpedaling now so that he can convince enough people to let him continue installing cameras and doing the same things Flock did before.

Flock keeps hurting people and only tries to do the right thing after so much outrage that it hurts its sales. This is not a company anyone should trust.

I don't think we can backtrack at this point but at least it should be heavily regulated and restricted (i.e. only run queries if there's a court order, etc).

The USA is right now in an equilibrium where crime is relatively low. Only a few years ago, we saw that it can... fluctuate. I grew up in Russia in the 90ies so let's put it like that, I would already be open to all kinds of ways to fight crime, if I were in a different one. Most people won't go quite as far as me, but after a couple years in a different equilibrium, even some of the ardent privacy fighters will start coming around, especially if it affects them personally. At El Salvador level of disorder, apparently "put everyone with a tattoo in cages" starts to sound like a great plan to most people.

Now consider how Flock affects this equilibrium. What is the realistic, actual risk to non-criminals from the government? UK has mass surveillance, I mean it's not ideal, but how much of a dystopia is it? And the UK, as far as I understand, doesn't have nearly as many existing legal protections, nor does it have the culture of flipping the government a bird (consider e.g. covid lockdown compliance and enforcement).

On the other hand, to me it appears that surveillance is a relatively cheap and effective way to prevent crime. Aside from being good, that also reduces demand for other solutions that have been tried around the world, and the kinds of candidates who would run on crime/disorder agenda.