> The privacy violation is that the database exists, full stop.

Is that because the government has access to the database? Aside from that I'm not really sure what the difference is between Flock in this case and something like a doorbell camera.

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ThrustVectoring 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's nefarious and privacy-violating when the database exists, government involvement just exacerbates things because private companies aren't allowed to send armed goons to your house and break down your door.

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ericmay 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

So my understanding was incorrect, you're against any recording including personal use, traffic cameras, security cameras on private property (for example at a jewelry store)?

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ThrustVectoring 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

I'm not sure why you're ignoring the central point I'm making about scale. One guy having a camera pointing out of his doorbell is different from Amazon being able to do whatever they want with the footage from something like one in five US homes. Systems are more than the sum of their isolated parts.

	▲	ericmay 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I was trying to understand where your opposition was - the operator of the device, the number of devices, or perhaps who and how information was accessed. Maybe I should've been more direct. In your view, what is the appropriate usage for camera devices in public spaces?

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starkrights 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, yeah? I dont understand your lack of perceived separation. It’s seems pretty plain that there is no interconnected network of doorbell cameras that anyone can use to track someone across every possibly doorbell camera that filmed them[1]. A doorbell camera is for an individual to see what’s happening immediately on their property.

A flock camera is connected to every other flock camera, ever, period. It’d be bad enough if a whole town were tracking the movements of all of their citizens constantly and storing that data forever to be searchable without a warrant (because of the extremely obvious flashing abuse vector that has been shown to be taken advantage of multiple times- give the old google a search for police officers stalking exes and their partners via flock, or flock employee spying on children’s gymnastics gym)

BUT, it’s not even just that! You can track people everywhere that there are flock cameras if you are a part of the flock network! So you can stalk people everywhere in the country with 0 oversight. It is an insanely massive privacy issue.

It’s universal persisted tracking of literally everyone’s movements 24/7 everywhere there is a flock camera, persisted presumably forever, and currently accessible to an extremely large amount of people without any authorization or judicial check required. (Many would go to comment on the police demographic being unstable and/or uniquely situated to abuse this, but arguments about that may or may not be moot to you depending on your opinion of the police)

I feel like it’s plainly clear that any doorbell camera does not do that. Even if most doorbell cams are cloud enabled, I’d imagine it’s significantly harder to subpoena a doorbell company for “every camera you have on exactly this street that could’ve done this thing”, and infinitely more so to force them to give you all of their data history and continue to do so forever. Flock just does that as their business.

Doorbell cameras are also not particularly capable of tracking you on every major travel route you take, as they’re primarily on, well, residential doors. Maybe some businesses have them? But they certainly aren’t able to resolve every license plate that travels through a segment of highway. Not to mention that they just don’t do that at present at all anyways, even in the places they’re installed- they just record motion, and sometimes use AI to point out “a car drove by” or “a person walked up to the door.” Not “license plate XYZ1234 drove through highway 12 at 8:34 pm”.

I feel like your statement just kinda ignores all of this and is saying “well yeah, but besides all the mass movement tracking and data storage and correlation, it’s basically like a doorbell camera because they both record people/cars and store them somehow, right?”

Which, I mean yeah I guess? But the “besides” part is kind of entirely the massive problem.

[1] well, not yet.

	▲	ericmay 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> It’s seems pretty plain that there is no interconnected network of doorbell cameras that anyone can use to track someone across every possibly doorbell camera that filmed them That doesn't seem clear to me at all. It may not be one interconnected network but if a crime occurs say, at 100 Main Street the police can see doorbell cameras, identify the model, and ask the home owner for the tape and if necessary get a warrant. It's certainly not as easy to obtain the data but it's certainly possible to achieve the same goal. Look, I'm not trying to defend Flock here or anything, just trying to understand what the specific concern is whether that is hyper-efficient tracking, a privacy violation, a constitutional violation, or maybe even something different altogether.