The Flock saga continues.
A handful of police departments that use Flock have unwittingly leaked details of millions of surveillance targets and a large number of active police investigations around the country because they have failed to redact license plates information in public records releases. Flock responded to this revelation by threatening a site that exposed it and by limiting the information the public can get via public records requests.
Completely unredacted Flock audit logs have been released to the public by numerous police departments and in some cases include details on millions Flock license plate searches made by thousands of police departments from around the country. The data has been turned into a searchable tool on a website called HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which says it has data on more than 2.3 million license plates and tens of millions of Flock searches.
The situation highlights one of the problems with taking a commercial surveillance product and turning it into a searchable, connected database of people’s movements and of the police activity of thousands of departments nationwide. It also highlights the risks associated with relying on each and every law enforcement customer to properly and fully redact identifiable information any time someone requests public records; in this case, single mistakes by individual police departments have exposed potentially sensitive information about surveillance targets and police investigations by other departments around the country.
Archive: http://archive.today/yXLPQ
While the tech may be amoral, its still implemented and utilized by pricks whose goal is control.
The real conundrum is: once you have unique identifiers on vehicles - which pretty much all countries with cars have - where’s the line? Do you require people to visually read the plates and write them down on paper? Who is allowed to keep databases of the information? How do you prevent people from keeping their own private databases? How do you prevent someone from creating a dash-cam app that does GPS/time coded databasing of all plate numbers it observes while driving? If a neighborhood HOA wants to network all their dash (and fixed location) apr-cam information into a central database, when does it become too much to allow? And how do you possibly enforce overstepping of the limits?
Scenario: A HOA has fixed cam automatic plate reader information and video evidence that proves XM3 5D9 was out smashin’ mailboxes on Friday night. The HOA president is cruising downtown Saturday morning and finds XM3 5D9 parked on the street, using his dash mounted apr software, calls the cops (in a vain attempt) to have them come arrest the mailbox smashers who were recorded in close-up 4K high def night vision doing the deed from the window of their car. This feels close to the over-stepping limit, but what if there were no cameras or software involved and the same XM3 5D9 plate ID was used by the same people to make the same accusation of the same mailbox smashers, this time based on telephoto chemical film pictures?
This also ignores the fact that the person in the car the second time XM3 5D9 was spotted is not necessarily the same person in the car the first. So one could easily false accuse.
Oh, that’s what the photos / videos are for… but, sure, circumstantial evidence is super basis for harassment of the innocent.
Yup, and its important to communicate that or we risk losing our voice in the general public and look like Luddites
Just FYI, using the term luddite derogatorily may not be as cool as you think it is. They were essentially an instance of organized labor flexing their power and not really “against technological advancement” like the term gets bandied about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
I am aware, but i am using it in a colloquial sense. And you understood my point; which is exactly how the general public that needs to be swayed will interpret it.
You can and should make your point without denigrating labor movements.
Originally the Pedants were a group of trans atheist Linux users from Pedantia, so I won’t use it as a pejorative in this context.
Uhh okay? Language and its use changes. If you want to be effective in getting your point across you need to keep up. The choir in lemmy isn’t who needs to be persuaded.
Feel free to be technically correct, but I would like to see the idea take mass adoption instead.
Despite the memes, also typically not the best kind of correct.
Before someone says it.