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Flock cameras.

 
 
 
Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it. You won't be speeding in your autonomous EV anyway, and who needs privacy when you're busy staring at windshield ads just to earn a discount on your ride? Actually, come to think of it, why would you even be driving? You won't have a job and your food will be drone-delivered to your door. Speed cameras will soon be quaint devices mentioned briefly by the AI algorithms responsible for remote schooling your kids.
 
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thebeave said:
Wow. Some inspiring dialog and analysis here.

How about a brief description of what they are and a list of the pros and cons?
Click to expand...
Educate yourself
The cameras work by taking a picture of a vehicle when it passes by. From the picture, it collects data about the vehicle such as the license plate number, color, and model. It can even track more subtle characteristics such as the bumper stickers on the car or whether the car has a roof rack. This data is then transferred to the Flock database where it can be accessed by Flock customers such as law enforcement agencies. The data is stored for up to 30 days after the information is first logged.....

While there are undeniably many benefits to police departments that come with this technology, many feel uneasy about constantly being watched without permission. To make matters worse there is no way to opt out of having your vehicle data and location history tracked by Flock. Anyone who drives past their cameras, whether they are a criminal or not, will have their data tracked and stored. This raises serious constitutional questions, including whether police officers should be required to obtain a warrant before accessing Flock’s Data. The Fourth Amendment protects an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy. If the government seeks to intrude on this privacy, they must obtain a warrant supported by probable cause.
Click to expand...
Source: Under Surveillance: Constitutional Concerns Surrounding Flock Cameras (the article is longer)
 
laughing dog said:
thebeave said:
Wow. Some inspiring dialog and analysis here.

How about a brief description of what they are and a list of the pros and cons?
Click to expand...
Educate yourself
The cameras work by taking a picture of a vehicle when it passes by. From the picture, it collects data about the vehicle such as the license plate number, color, and model. It can even track more subtle characteristics such as the bumper stickers on the car or whether the car has a roof rack. This data is then transferred to the Flock database where it can be accessed by Flock customers such as law enforcement agencies. The data is stored for up to 30 days after the information is first logged.....

While there are undeniably many benefits to police departments that come with this technology, many feel uneasy about constantly being watched without permission. To make matters worse there is no way to opt out of having your vehicle data and location history tracked by Flock. Anyone who drives past their cameras, whether they are a criminal or not, will have their data tracked and stored. This raises serious constitutional questions, including whether police officers should be required to obtain a warrant before accessing Flock’s Data. The Fourth Amendment protects an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy. If the government seeks to intrude on this privacy, they must obtain a warrant supported by probable cause.
Click to expand...
Source: Under Surveillance: Constitutional Concerns Surrounding Flock Cameras (the article is longer)
Click to expand...
I know what they are. They've been a hot topic in my area for a while now. That may not be true for others here in other US communities or countries where they are not being used. It is common courtesy when starting a new thread to provide a short summary of a new topic or technology that is not widely known. Based on your curt response to me, it seems you are unfamiliar with issues of courtesy.
 
Yeah. You start a new thread, put a little effort into it. This doesn't even rise to the level of phoning it in.

But for my part, I'm not going to assume evil on the part of law enforcement. It's my opinion that people who do not like automated traffic surveillance are scofflaws who think they are innocent until caught. I'd like to see the roads and highways blanketed with speeding cameras and plate readers. I'm personally tired of the dickery out there. Fine em all. Fill government coffers with cash and give us good law abiding citizens like discounts on our property taxes.
 
thebeave said:
laughing dog said:
thebeave said:
Wow. Some inspiring dialog and analysis here.

How about a brief description of what they are and a list of the pros and cons?
Click to expand...
Educate yourself
The cameras work by taking a picture of a vehicle when it passes by. From the picture, it collects data about the vehicle such as the license plate number, color, and model. It can even track more subtle characteristics such as the bumper stickers on the car or whether the car has a roof rack. This data is then transferred to the Flock database where it can be accessed by Flock customers such as law enforcement agencies. The data is stored for up to 30 days after the information is first logged.....

While there are undeniably many benefits to police departments that come with this technology, many feel uneasy about constantly being watched without permission. To make matters worse there is no way to opt out of having your vehicle data and location history tracked by Flock. Anyone who drives past their cameras, whether they are a criminal or not, will have their data tracked and stored. This raises serious constitutional questions, including whether police officers should be required to obtain a warrant before accessing Flock’s Data. The Fourth Amendment protects an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy. If the government seeks to intrude on this privacy, they must obtain a warrant supported by probable cause.
Click to expand...
Source: Under Surveillance: Constitutional Concerns Surrounding Flock Cameras (the article is longer)
Click to expand...
They've been a hot topic in my area for a while now. That may not be true for others here in other US communities or countries where they are not being used. It is common courtesy when starting a new thread to provide a short summary of a new topic or technology that is not widely known. Based on your curt response to me, it seems you are unfamiliar with issues of courtesy.
Click to expand...
When people ask for a brief description, it is usually indication that they are unfamiliar with the subject. So please model some of that "courtesy" and forgive me. At least I hope you feel better now.
 
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How rogue officers turned a nationwide camera network into a tool for stalking

Then one day, when she pressed him for answers, her ex told her in a text: He was using Flock.

Like thousands of other law-enforcement agencies across the United States, his police force could follow cars spotted by Flock’s sprawling network of artificial-intelligence roadside cameras, which record passing license plates into a mappable database that officers can search while investigating crime.

Flock had sold its system as a police officer’s dream crime-fighting tool. But the tool had also given the chief, Michael Steffman, the power to silently monitor Bakely’s life. By the time she understood what was happening, Steffman had looked up the tags for her and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times, according to Have I Been Flocked, a website that aggregates police search logs made available through public records.
Click to expand...
 
ZiprHead said:
How rogue officers turned a nationwide camera network into a tool for stalking

Then one day, when she pressed him for answers, her ex told her in a text: He was using Flock.

Like thousands of other law-enforcement agencies across the United States, his police force could follow cars spotted by Flock’s sprawling network of artificial-intelligence roadside cameras, which record passing license plates into a mappable database that officers can search while investigating crime.

Flock had sold its system as a police officer’s dream crime-fighting tool. But the tool had also given the chief, Michael Steffman, the power to silently monitor Bakely’s life. By the time she understood what was happening, Steffman had looked up the tags for her and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times, according to Have I Been Flocked, a website that aggregates police search logs made available through public records.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Along the same lines, gifted article
www.nytimes.com

Police Officer Accused of Tracking Partner Using License Plate Reader

The Milwaukee officer used the technology to run searches on his partner’s plate 124 times, officials said, and he also tracked the person’s ex.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

A Milwaukee police officer was criminally charged on Tuesday after using license plate recognition technology to surveil a person he was dating and the person’s ex for two months last year, the authorities said.

The officer, Josue Ayala, 33, used the technology, from Flock Safety, to track his partner and the person’s ex, according to a criminal complaint made public on Tuesday.

Mr. Ayala ran searches on his partner’s license plate 124 times from March to May 2025, according to the complaint. He did the same action to his partner’s ex 55 times, the authorities said.
Click to expand...
 
When I first saw this thread, I thought Flock cameras was slang in the US that I know nothing about. Like "Six Seven! Hahaha!". Then Last Week Tonight talked about it.

Now I know it is something I know nothing about. But should. The show was deliberate in not showing ways around such methods, but there must be a way.

And to survive, we must learn.
 
Patooka said:
When I first saw this thread, I thought Flock cameras was slang in the US that I know nothing about. Like "Six Seven! Hahaha!". Then Last Week Tonight talked about it.

Now I know it is something I know nothing about. But should. The show was deliberate in not showing ways around such methods, but there must be a way.

And to survive, we must learn.
Click to expand...
LD says that someone in his town stole/took down all the FLOCK cameras.....

There must be ways.

One way is to make sure that you go to every single town council/board/city council meeting and oppose FLOCK and any similar or advanced versions that come --because they certainly are coming.
 
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

There was a time when personal privacy was not really an issue. That was why windows had curtains. It wasn't until the technology to see and hear what was happening behind the curtains became practical that we had to be concerned. The "right to privacy" had to be invented. Then the Supreme Court had to make a rule that privacy only existed in places where you expected it to be private and curtains regained their function. Just don't forget to close them. A conversation at your kitchen table is private, but not in a restaurant or a park bench.

We enjoyed a certain amount of privacy in public places because it simply wasn't possible for the government to keep track of more than a few people at a time. They had to allocate resources where needed most.

One of the issues of Flock cameras is it's not actually a government operation. It's a private(imagine that) corporation who wants to monitor citizens in public and sell the information to the government, and anyone else willing to pay for it. With a Flock camera it's possible to know who is meeting someone at the No-Tell Motel, seeing a divorce lawyer, or parked outside an abortion clinic. All the kinds of things people might not want others to know about.

In this day, we are on camera most of the time we are outside our house. Nearly every business has some kind of surveillance of their parking lot and the adjoining street. In my city, a fifteen year old boy was beaten to death in the street. Private cameras caught the murderer's movements in the hours following, including him putting the body in a dumpster and disposing of other evidence in other dumpsters. It wasn't continuous, but if you have enough pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, you can figure out what the picture is. The difference is the police had to have a good reason to access the data. It was a targeted investigation based on reasonable suspicion.

Flock cameras and the collected data is based on nothing more that "because we can".
 
There seems to be growing skepticism/suspicion re: surveillance of citizenry via FLOCK cameras, with multiple municipalities reporting theft or dysaing of the cameras. I was talking with someone who mentioned we should not worry: they would be replaced by drones which are much harder to disable. I know from friends in the area that the sky was full of drones during the ICE occupation of Minneapolis.
 
Some of those places where the public has spoken against flock cameras are simply getting same cameras from a different company. BOLO for Axon cameras doing the same thing. I'm also opposed to them, corporations shouldn't be able to track the movements of citizens or sell the data.
 
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