@CCRhode@lemmy.ml
member since 23 Mar 2024 21:35
comments
- on Cops Are Using Flock to Spy on People for the Crime of Standing Around in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 10 Sep 2026
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on Flock Cameras Can Track Every Car in America. Police Love Them. Citizens Don’t. in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 12 Aug 2026
There’s been like 14 similar cases of this.
I imagine the Flock techs, installing a fleet of cameras for the local fuzz, do training seminars where they encourage exactly this kind of thing (surveilling romantic partners). Still, the fact remains that the fuzz have good reason to know that that in particular is not allowed under any circumstances.
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on Desktops are gonna be screwed by this too. in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 10 Aug 2026
This is a hijacking: True — the reader is damaged by restricted access, but it is also true that the author is damaged.
You post something that you intend to be read by the general public. You don’t control access; the place where you post it does. After age gating mandates, that place will assume the worst — that your content is adult content.
There are three age tiers: adult, young adult, and infants. After age gating mandates, many of your readers in the general public won’t comply by stipulating their ages. The worst-case assumption is that they’re all infants.
When age gating breaks down, there’s a mismatch between default age rating of authors’ content with default age rating of readers. Content that is adult by default won’t reach readers who are infants by default. Much of your content will go unread by much of the general public. One assumes this is age gating’s intentional design — to restrict access to your content.
Yeah, I don’t know what’s going down, so, one of these days I suppose, I’ll get pinched.
I live in a medium-sized town with a dozen Flock cameras, which the police shrouded in garbage bags a couple of weeks ago (to defuse public outrage and ward off vandalism I suppose). Two days ago, the Common Council voted to break the Flock contract. The issue has been unsatisfactorily explained in the news. I mean — what did city government think would happen to the data? Surely they knew it would be kept for awhile and be searched. News makes it sound like they flipped when Flock tried to sell them a five-year traffic-pattern analysis.
The story (above) shines a (feeble) light on what may have gone wrong. It appears that police have been taking license numbers of cars that have been parked in shady locations and running those numbers against cameras all over creation to see whether they get hits in other parts of the country. The last thing local authorities want is an out-of-town authority charging in and following a lead on a suspicious vehicle up to no good in around here. That’s not what they bought the Flock cameras and put them up for. They were misled that the data would remain local for local use. I still don’t get the angst, though.
All I know is that I can’t get a hamburger to go, drive to a city park, eat it, and take a half-hour nap without some plain-clothes cop or vigilante waking me to ask what I’m waiting for.