> I can't imagine that the authors of the Constitution predicted always on, AI enabled facial and license plate recognition on every street corner in America.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety - Ben Frank

Iirc he was a founder

Exactly. Constantly monitoring and aggregating your movements everywhere is basically stalking.

This is an unfortunate thing about a whole lot of legal precedent in the US.

Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.

During the 19th century.

Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.

Companies have plenty of rights in the US.

As the owner of a moral person (a company), I disagree.

There are even weirder stuff than companies being considered a "moral person". For example if a person speeds way too much in France (say more than 50 kilometers/hour above the speed limit on the highway, e.g. 180 km/h // 111 mph instead of the 130 km/h // 80 mph)... Well then that person gets arrested. And his driving license is confiscated on the spot. But here's the absolute crazy thing: even if the car belong to someone else, to a company, to a rental company... Doesn't matter: the French state consider that the car itself was complicit in the act. So the car is seized too (for 8 days if it doesn't belong to the person who was driving it and potentially much more if it does belong to the person driving it).

Companies are persons and cars (I'm not even talking about self-driving cars) have rights and obligations. That's the world we live in.

>There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.

There is a difference, the company is doing it to everyone, technology enables new things to happen and laws don't cover it. Before it was impractical for police to assign everyone a personal stalker but tech has made it practical.

By default if something is new enough it has a pretty good chance of being legal because the law hasn't caught up or considered it in advance.

But Flock doesn't "follow you around"? It's fixed location cameras. If you avoid the locations, you avoid the cameras, and thus the tracking.

> There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.

I feel like it's telling that no one has yet taken this logic to court. I think that means that while there may be no difference to you there is a difference according to the law. This gets at your later point.

Speaking of:

> If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.

I think you're doing a subtle motte-and-bailey here. As far as I'm aware, Flock has strict retention policies, numbering in the low single-digit months (Google says 30 days "by default"). There is no "recorded indefinitely" here, which significantly changes the characteristics of the argument here. This is roughly on par with CCTV systems, to the best of my knowledge.

I don't disagree that laws haven't caught up yet, but I also think a lot of the arguments against Flock are rife with hyperbolic arguments like this that do meaningfully misrepresent their model. I think this leads to bad solutioning, as a consequence.

I'd much rather have good solutions here than bad ones, because ALPRs and other "surveillance technologies" do drive improvements in crime clearance rates/outcomes, so they shouldn't be banned--just better controlled/audited/overseen

I mean, he's not. Police departments and other organizations who buy and install Flock cameras are the ones doing the "forcing".

Again, I'm pretty anti-Flock, but place the blame where it's due and use good logic to support that.

Okay, can you articulate the difference?

I don't disagree that quantity has a quality of it's own in some circumstances, but that's not an inherent property of "quantity".

> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you from a park bench in public and hundreds of thousands of clones of me watching you from every street corner in public is, quite frankly, bogus

To paraphrase the quote, quantity has a quality of its own.

I agree, this is stalking.

But again, this is not what Flock is doing.

By this same logic, traffic cameras and CCTV surveillance are "stalking", which doesn't seem accurate?