I keep an unofficial record of instances where police and similar authorities have abused their access to these types of systems. The list is long. It's almost exclusively men stalking ex-partners or attractive women they don't know, but have seen in public.

What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a high level of internal logging/user-tracking.

So now with Flock and data brokers we have authorities having access to information that was originally held behind a judge's signature. Often with little oversight, and frequently for unofficial, abusive purposes.

This reality also ties back to the discussion about providing the "good guys" encryption backdoors. The reality is that there are no "good guys", everyone exists in shades of grey, and I dare say there are people in forces whom are attracted to the power the role provides, rather than any desire for public service.

In conclusion it's a fundamental design flaw to rely on the operator being a "good guy", and that's before we get into the problem of leaks, bugs, and flaws in the security model, or in this case: complete open access to the public web - laughable, farcical, and horrifying.

And my guess is we only ever find out about some probably very small percentage of the abuses by police, at least in theory having rules and oversight of their use of these systems.

What are the chances that nobody at Flock has ever abused their access?

Cynical-me assumes that if you're the sort of person who'd take a job at a company like Flock, which I and evidently a lot of other people consider morally bankrupt, then you are at least as likely as a typical cop to think that stalking your exes or random attractive people you see - is just a perk of your job, not something that should come with jail time.

> What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a high level of internal logging/user-tracking.

Would not be surprised if these types of abuse serve to obfuscate other abusive uses as well and are thus part of the system operating as it should. Flood the internal logging with all kinds of this "low-level" stuff, hiding the high-level warrantless tracking.

No idea why you're being downvoted, this is all true.

Same was found in Australia when they looked into police access of data [0] [1] [2]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/...

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-15/victoria-police-leap-...

[2] https://www.ccc.qld.gov.au/sites/default/files/Docs/Public-H...