Speak for yourself. I don't mind this type of surveillance personally.

happytoexplain 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you force surveillance on 10 people and even one of them doesn't consent, that's still a net bad. And this situation is probably closer to the inverse of those numbers, or at the very least 50/50.

And this isn't even to mention the criminal negligence of Flock, and the evils they have already enabled, as committed both by Flock employees and by government.

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IncreasePosts an hour ago | parent [-]

Is surveillance special in that it needs total buy in from society, or else it's bad? Is any other aspect of governance held to that standard?

	▲	bigyabai an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Surveillance isn't populist. The Patriot Act, for instance, is not representative of what taxpayers want to spend money on.

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infinite_spin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's hard to gauge the sincerity of these beliefs, and even harder to tell if you've actually tested these beliefs against the reality of mass surveillance, especially when it's been used to arrest and stalk innocent people.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/georgia-cops-keep-get...

https://cambridgeanalytica.org/surveillance-privacy/police-f...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/the-cop-investigating-a...

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IncreasePosts an hour ago | parent [-]

Well, we need laws and oversight to stop these actions. Do you realize that people use phones to stalk innocent people? And yet you probably have a phone. Why is that?

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happytoexplain an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This is like the "why drive if it's so dangerous" fallacy. We trade cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward. Cars and phones are highly valuable to normal people. Virtually all people do not experience immediate, constant, concrete benefits from public camera surveillance. And this is not even to mention that Flock cameras are more abused than phones (although scale makes that subjective, it's kind of apples-to-oranges right now).

Analogies are distracting. They are rhetorical junk food. Make an argument directly supporting Flock cameras - don't just say "it's like phones".

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ceejayoz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Well, we need laws and oversight to stop these actions.

Do you think this hasn't been tried?

We have laws on stalking. We've tried to rein in cops.

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bigyabai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

We have laws and oversight surrounding phone surveillance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception

Just like you say, it still gets abused both within and outside the government (eg. Salt Typhoon) because surveillance inherently threatens society.

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IncreasePosts an hour ago | parent [-]

Shouldn't we get rid of phones then?

	▲	bigyabai 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		More to your point, shouldn't we arrest anyone without a phone? It's unfair that criminals can opt-out of surveillance, while Senators and CEOs cannot.

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VTimofeenko 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's your right, but the problem is that cameras are in public and some people do mind this.

	▲	phoghed 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I believe they mean they don’t mind if others are surveilled against their will

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ARandomerDude 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's because you haven't thought it through. "We only want info on the bad people" might not alarm you personally until any government entity changes the definition of bad and now you're a "bad guy".

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veec_cas_tant an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There are all sorts of powers we afford law enforcement that could be abused; I hardly think cameras would be at the top of the list of concerns, honestly. NYC has had thousands upon thousands of cameras for quite a while without much fanfare, along with other major top cities worldwide.

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IncreasePosts 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, I have thought it through. Is this how you view the world? "Smart people agree with me and thoughtless people disagree with me"

	▲	happytoexplain 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There is no implication of that in the parent post. This is uncharitable to the point of trolling. Edit: Actually, it's such an extreme misconstrual that I'm wondering if you thought you were replying to a different post?

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xyzsparetimexyz 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

While such a surveillance system appears to (kinda) work in China, do you really trust American companies and the American police system to implement it at anywhere close to that level of competency?

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SoftTalker 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not the cameras I mind per-se. They have legitmately been used to solve some crimes that might have gone unsolved otherwise.

But the problem is the cameras are pervasive. It's not like a red light camera, or a speed zone camera, or a toll road camera, that has a specific purpose in a specific location. And it's the building of a database, and correlation of data from point to point, and the potential abuse. We have documented cases of cops abusing Flock data to stalk exes, And history proves that any time you collect data about a group of people, it will eventually if not immediately be abused.

You can propose all the warrants and anonymizing and other restrictions that you might like to control who looks at the data and when, but at the end of the day it's all about trusting those in power who have control of the data, and that's not a good thing to do. The government does not (or should not) have the right to track the public to this degree as they go about their daily personal business.

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righthand an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Neither do the pedophiles in positions of power that want to watch you and your children.

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applfanboysbgon 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Would you care to elaborate on why you don't mind individuals being stalked by employees with zero oversight or accountability, and why you don't mind protestors being monitored by the government? Since those are both part of "this type of surveillance", and are a pretty fucking crazy thing to state you're okay with with no argument for them. Do you perhaps lack the imagination to consider how this would affect your life if a government that did not agree with your political views came into power sometime in the future and were to use "this type of surveillance" against you?