It's commercialized stalking. A group of people who physically stood in each park every day photographing children playing and sharing those images between each other would be run out of town so quick. Laws would be invented in a heartbeat to stop this.
I think its entirely reasonable that license plates are recorded on public roads and accessible to police in lawful requests, like tracking stolen vehicles or dangerous suspects.
Your hysterics about photographing children in a park is silly and no one but the most online ideologue would find it at all comparable. Find a better argument if you want to convince other reasonable people who just want to live in safe neighborhoods and don't care much about your verbal word games and stretched analogies
That is just a reversed no-true-scottsman fallacy. If the poster's "hysterics" are a poor argument, please break down why rather than just calling it silly.
It is obvious that many in this community are against wholesale collection of information, public or private, as evidenced by the thousands of posts that state such reservations.
I'm calling out, specifically, that
"A camera capturing an image of a license plate that is openly displayed on a vehicle is not searching for someone's private life. It is recording what anyone standing on the same street could already observe."
... implies that a very absurd and objectionable thing like folks standing around each playground recording children and comparing notes is actually also supported by that defense and that we should consider if that defense is objectionable or not based on what it enables as much as what it is defending.
On this very forum, you can find backlash against geofencing, and here, support for flock cameras? The contradiction is bananas. Automated logging of people in public places is dystopian. You can object with that claim, fine.
> Automated logging of people in public places is dystopian
You went from recording license plates on public roads to logging people in public places.
If someone steals my car, I would want to be able to give police my license plate and have them track down the person very easily by all the cameras on public roads. This is not dystopian. This is what an orderly society should look like.
You're talking about children and random stuff that's completely irrelevant. If you can't or refuse to see that, I can't convince you.
If someone steals my car, I can open an app and find its precise geolocation better than some cameras, and deliver that information to the police of my own choice. (Ideally, the car company would be legally prohibited from sharing that information with any other party.)
"Monitor the movements of everyone in case of the minute chance of car theft and astronomical chance of the police caring" is patently absurd. We probably need cameras in bathrooms too, in case someone passes out and needs medical attention.
> deliver that information to the police of my own choice
Good luck with that.
I've heard plenty of stories of victims of theft and crime literally leading police to the door of their assailant and they can't get any action because this "privacy" movement has made their efforts pretty meaningless.
You're naive and you obviously have no real experience in this regard. It's just sad that you promote policies that help no one but criminals and you're completely unaware.
> You went from recording license plates on public roads to logging people in public places.
No, man, the argument is in the linked article, the one from TFA, the one I quoted. It is about public spaces and recording "what anyone standing on the same street could already observe".
That is insufficiently restrictive of a criterion because it's overly broad, and therefore can lead to absurd situations we'd never expect. Like kid tracking mafias. Any device that records "what anyone on the street observe" becomes awful creepy real quick, and we shouldn't accept that kind of argument ever.
TFA goes on to say that it breaks down at scale, and I'm trying to call out that, no, it is creepy at local scales too, because recording public activity is a bad precedent to set. I don't know how to make it more clear.
> stolen car
Having a use for an overbroad surveillance tech is only a defense for you, not for me and probably not for the courts either. It's not like they only activate it when there's a car stolen. It records all the time.
We've stated our opinions clearly now, I think the back and forth can end.
> On this very forum, you can find backlash against geofencing, and here, support for flock cameras? The contradiction is bananas.
There's more than one person on this forum. Why do you expect consistency? Different people have different opinions. Different people comment on different articles. HN is not a hivemind; don't expect consistency.
I should have stated something weaker: There are legitimate arguements, even on this forum, against geofencing, so entertaining arguments against camera-based always-on tracking shouldn't be automatically out of scope.
Yeah except flock is literally photographing children on playgrounds and inside gyms and showing those photos to random people in exactly the way being described.
> A blog post by Jason Hunyar, a Dunwoody, Georgia resident who learned about Flock accessing the city’s cameras by obtaining Flock access logs via a public records request is called “Why Are Flock Employees Watching Our Children?”
Wow, a surveillance system that's auditable through public records. Sounds pretty good system to me. Of course there are cases of abuse but seems like the worst system besides all the rest.
This is an insane ideological battle. Another technology people talk about is recorders that are trained to identify and triangulate gun shots. The most common sense stuff doesn't pass muster with these groups so theres really no point in debating. Just know that you are in the minority, unfortunately your groups have captured some politicians.
But hopefully we'll have some choice. I would welcome this an most tech to prevent crime in my neighborhood. And you can live in a completely "free" neighborhood where criminals are free from reasonable technology measures to prevent crime.
So I totally disagree with your arguments on nearly all points, but the fact that no companies prioritize security of data means that this footage WILL get released at some point, which in my opinion overrides ever single argument you made.
There should not be any system that allows a person to be continuously tracked at all times short of as a consequence of criminal activity with a judge signing off on it.
Your hysterics about photographing children in a park is silly and no one but the most online ideologue would find it at all comparable. Find a better argument if you want to convince other reasonable people who just want to live in safe neighborhoods and don't care much about your verbal word games and stretched analogies
> Find a better argument
That is just a reversed no-true-scottsman fallacy. If the poster's "hysterics" are a poor argument, please break down why rather than just calling it silly.
It is obvious that many in this community are against wholesale collection of information, public or private, as evidenced by the thousands of posts that state such reservations.
I'm calling out, specifically, that "A camera capturing an image of a license plate that is openly displayed on a vehicle is not searching for someone's private life. It is recording what anyone standing on the same street could already observe."
... implies that a very absurd and objectionable thing like folks standing around each playground recording children and comparing notes is actually also supported by that defense and that we should consider if that defense is objectionable or not based on what it enables as much as what it is defending.
On this very forum, you can find backlash against geofencing, and here, support for flock cameras? The contradiction is bananas. Automated logging of people in public places is dystopian. You can object with that claim, fine.
You went from recording license plates on public roads to logging people in public places.
If someone steals my car, I would want to be able to give police my license plate and have them track down the person very easily by all the cameras on public roads. This is not dystopian. This is what an orderly society should look like.
You're talking about children and random stuff that's completely irrelevant. If you can't or refuse to see that, I can't convince you.
"Monitor the movements of everyone in case of the minute chance of car theft and astronomical chance of the police caring" is patently absurd. We probably need cameras in bathrooms too, in case someone passes out and needs medical attention.
Good luck with that.
I've heard plenty of stories of victims of theft and crime literally leading police to the door of their assailant and they can't get any action because this "privacy" movement has made their efforts pretty meaningless.
You're naive and you obviously have no real experience in this regard. It's just sad that you promote policies that help no one but criminals and you're completely unaware.
No, man, the argument is in the linked article, the one from TFA, the one I quoted. It is about public spaces and recording "what anyone standing on the same street could already observe".
That is insufficiently restrictive of a criterion because it's overly broad, and therefore can lead to absurd situations we'd never expect. Like kid tracking mafias. Any device that records "what anyone on the street observe" becomes awful creepy real quick, and we shouldn't accept that kind of argument ever.
TFA goes on to say that it breaks down at scale, and I'm trying to call out that, no, it is creepy at local scales too, because recording public activity is a bad precedent to set. I don't know how to make it more clear.
> stolen car
Having a use for an overbroad surveillance tech is only a defense for you, not for me and probably not for the courts either. It's not like they only activate it when there's a car stolen. It records all the time.
We've stated our opinions clearly now, I think the back and forth can end.
There's more than one person on this forum. Why do you expect consistency? Different people have different opinions. Different people comment on different articles. HN is not a hivemind; don't expect consistency.
I should have stated something weaker: There are legitimate arguements, even on this forum, against geofencing, so entertaining arguments against camera-based always-on tracking shouldn't be automatically out of scope.
But sure, "word games". Sure.
Do you actually believe this?
Wow, a surveillance system that's auditable through public records. Sounds pretty good system to me. Of course there are cases of abuse but seems like the worst system besides all the rest.
This is an insane ideological battle. Another technology people talk about is recorders that are trained to identify and triangulate gun shots. The most common sense stuff doesn't pass muster with these groups so theres really no point in debating. Just know that you are in the minority, unfortunately your groups have captured some politicians.
But hopefully we'll have some choice. I would welcome this an most tech to prevent crime in my neighborhood. And you can live in a completely "free" neighborhood where criminals are free from reasonable technology measures to prevent crime.
(which... we should, if we have the data to do it, why not actually enforce traffic laws?)
There should not be any system that allows a person to be continuously tracked at all times short of as a consequence of criminal activity with a judge signing off on it.
It's so basic that a 3rd grader gets it.