The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
As it is, you can assume that at the very least, every time your vehicle has passed one of the >100k Flock cameras, there's a database entry and a photo that will never, ever be deleted. Your full travel history from this point forward is available for a nominal fee, and without any regard for your privacy.
Furthermore, do you realize that you're free to photograph people in public and sell those images, no permission required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia
People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
Similar to "free speech", it is not as simple as that. Harassment and stalking among other things. I dare you to try hanging around a school with a DSLR taking pictures of kids in the playground and defend yourself with "But I'm in public!"
Without going into the list of misdemeanors, generally the point is intent.
If you take a picture, or ten, ostensibly of Times Square, no one cares. You can't piece together a person's day.
The application of computing@scale (processing, storage, pattern recognition) changes the outcomes significantly. The hard to piece together day of the everyperson suddenly becomes a trivial query away.
Whether that should be legal or not is quite rightly up for debate.
Yes, I'm aware of what "expectation of privacy" means. I've been a photographer for ~25 years.
> People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
This isn't about recording in public - it's about building a comprehensive dataset containing the movement and association history of the entire US population. Not only is that without a warrant, it's being collected prior to any accusation being made.
Maybe this needs to be restricted in some capacity, then.
Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
Then we would start putting cameras in bathrooms? Or start closing public bathrooms? Nobody wants to go into a bathroom and get murdered. We as a society are not going to just accept a high bathroom murder rate. Culture will adapt to reality, one way or another.
If you're so scared of your own shadow you'd tie a noose around your own neck and hand the other end to those in power in exchange for an illusion of safety, I won't stand in your way.
Build that cage around yourself and hope the jailer will be benevolent. Just don't drag others down with you. Some of us have decided to learn from history.
That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false.
Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
We do still need deep societal focus, but that's mostly around things like further getting lead out of homes and pipes.
First Seattle.
Then it's: what about small towns?
Now we suddenly have an additional requirement of matching stats from a different country.
Narrower and narrower the scope gets, before you admit that you're thinking about this the wrong way.
You didn't think these cities actually own these Flock cameras, did you?
They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse.
An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
Obviously in other places, no.
