I've thought about doing this, but ironically you'd be sued into oblivion where I'm from. Likely prosecuted by the both the state and city attorney for violating privacy laws already on the books. Yet somehow Flock is deploying cameras everywhere.

My system would have been much more open on purpose. Like the private bittorrent tracker of security cams. You stream footage to the centralized cloud for aggregation, and get access to the full dataset in return. Perhaps with some "ratios" built in to incentivize sharing like you do for seeders vs. leechers on the BT network.

It's a fascinating technical problem - but the legal minefield is crazy even if you're doing it as a form of protest.

I also think the lessons would be lost on the general public. If anything, it would result in laws that made such things only legal for private licensed companies or some such - I'd simply be assisting in furthering regulatory capture.

> Likely prosecuted by the both the state and city attorney for violating privacy laws already on the books.

Recording in places where there is no expectations of privacy is legal, and it would be very useful to establish case law that establishes that scaling up can impugn privacy. I selfishly don't want to be a defendant since I can't afford it, but if I won the lottery jackpot, this is what I'd be working on.