Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock, a network of AI cameras used by ICE, feds, and police

1_rick said:
Flocks aren't gonna stop that at all.
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Won't do jack. Drug use especially since how is Flock going to determine if someone is on drugs? Speeding is another story, but anyone who wants to speed has ways to avoid getting caught. Especially in NJ where speeding is impossible, but it doesn't stop people from cutting others off and driving away at 45 Mph in a 25 Mph road. The only way Flock can determine if someone is speeding is if with one camera was caught at certain time and another camera with another time and calculated the speed to be faster than what's posted. Even then, it's an indirect method to determine speed.
 
And then you have to actually enforce the laws with meaningful punishment.
 
Nobu said:
And then you have to actually enforce the laws with meaningful punishment.
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Meaningful punishment is nice way of saying we'll ruin your lives. American judicial system loves to punish people, because it makes them far more money this way, which is the same reason we put Flock cameras. Not because we expect any meaningful change, but meaningful revenue. When a police car gets behind me I panic, not because I know I'm doing wrong because I don't know if I am. Was I going too fast? Is my taillight out? Did I not make a complete stop? Police don't need a good reason to give a ticket and ruin someone's day.

Want people to not speed and abuse drugs? Create high speed trains and a free healthcare system so we can try to correct people. I drove upstate NY the other day and I saw more Police than ever on the roads. They're not doing this for our safety but because towns are having a money sad that our elected officials aren't getting enough money to pay themselves. When cars got safer so people don't die in car accidents, it got people worried there won't be enough organs to donate. Put high speed trains and people won't have to drive fast to get to their destination, because they won't drive. I guarantee you towns would get upset over the lack of drivers to give tickets.
 
High speed trains that nobody can afford aren't going to stop people from abusing drugs and driving like their life has no worth, either. It's a nice thing to aspire to, but not a solution.
 
Nobu said:
High speed trains that nobody can afford aren't going to stop people from abusing drugs and driving like their life has no worth, either. It's a nice thing to aspire to, but not a solution.
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Can't afford? Wouldn't this be public transportation or is daddy Musk making these trains? Speaking of Police, it seems there's a reason why I saw so many when driving. At this rate is it the people or the police committing more crimes? It was in Connecticut but it had to extend to NY.


Ex Florida Cop thinks Flock is a 'Hot Chick' database. He maybe onto something.


Another Florida officer accused of using AI Flock cameras to track ex-wife 717 times.


Speaking of doing things illegal, it seems people figured out that Halloween is the perfect night to De-Flock. God bless them.
 
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Public transit isn't magically free to build and operate. You have to pay for it, one way or another.

Edit: the local trains in Japan are pretty inexpensive to ride, 200-350 yen. But the Shinkansen is 11k to 15k yen.
 
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Ididar said:
These cops act like somehow it is impossible to do their job without the ability to track citizens all day, every day. Somehow, the only way to catch criminals now is via machine-learning and cameras. I guess tracking down leads and questioning people takes time away from writing tickets and spying on their ex-gf.
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What's hilarious is that the officer is admitting that Flock does more than just track license plates. Also, finding missing people and rapists only works if you're actively looking for them. There's no officer that's going to sit down and look for missing children and rapists 717 times like they do with their ex lovers. Sitting at the side of a road looking to give speeding tickets does not catch rapists. There's no money to be made finding missing people and rapists. Flocks job is to generate revenue by giving tickets and nothing more.
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DukenukemX said:
What's hilarious is that the officer is admitting that Flock does more than just track license plates. Also, finding missing people and rapists only works if you're actively looking for them. There's no officer that's going to sit down and look for missing children and rapists 717 times like they do with their ex lovers. Sitting at the side of a road looking to give speeding tickets does not catch rapists. There's no money to be made finding missing people and rapists. Flocks job is to generate revenue by giving tickets and nothing more.
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Agreed. If they said that the only way to use the cameras was to input the picture of a missing child and have it do facial recognition 24/7 until it spotted the kid then people would be far more supportive. If it had no other use than finding missing children and there was no way to input any other photos then people wouldn't feel like their privacy was being invaded. Want to input a picture? Well first you have to registered the kid as missing in the FBI database and only then would it give you a case number that you enter into the software. Then you can input the picture and do a search. It wouldn't pay any attention to the millions of adults and only be possible to look for kids in an official database.

But, as noted by many, that wouldn't generate revenue and it wouldn't serve the surveillance state so they'd never limit the capability like that. A small town doesn't have the number of missing kids to warrant the expense of setting up the cameras when it generates no revenue for them so the amount of money Flock or Axon would make would be limited. Can't limit it to the worst crimes. Have to focus it on generating revenue to justify the expense and then when people complain point to the missing kids you're not actually looking for.
 
TheOne&OnlyZeke said:
Time to get rid of all amazon stuff I think
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Past time. Never understand why some people pay money to surveil themselves! Get a CCTV camera, burglar alarm and a gun if you are so afraid for your life!
Stolen Amazon package? Just tell them it was stolen! They don't care about your photo evidence. They're making too much money with AWS to contest your claim.
 
Man flocked hundreds of times after filing complaint against Police department. The deputy which his lawsuit is about is the one doing most of the searching. He was arrested May 4th and then released with no charges.

flock surveillance not doing anything wrong.jpg
 
Cameras don't prevent crime, and they don't solve crime either. Investigators do (solve crime, not prevent it). When they are doing their job, anyway. Cameras just make that job easier...sometimes.
 
Nicklebon said:
Please explain how being filmed outside your home is in any way a violation of the 4th amendment. Do you actually know what it says? Allow me:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

You have ZERO expectation of privacy outside your home. Anyone can film you or photograph you outside your home and does not need your consent to do so.

Also and yet again, if want to control your data stop putting it in places you don't control. Grow up and stop blaming others because they've made it convenient for you to make your data theirs. Read that last part again and understand it.
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What you have to keep in mind is that the constitution was written from the perspective of people in the 18th century. They factored in as many things as they could for the 1700's, but it has to be interpreted from the perspective of the types of concepts that the founders intended, not necessarily the literal interpretation of the written word, especially when it comes to technology that didn't exist in the 1700's and fundamentally changes the reality on the ground.

When the courts established the concept of "no expectation of privacy in public", mass surveillance was not possible. It was very labor intensive to create a surveillance state like that of the Soviet Union's KGB. Because of this, we did not need literal rules surrounding this because that level of mass surveillance of all people all the time.

The difference is that before someone could at great expense and/or time follow you around whenever you left your home, but now with tens of thousands of cameras that identify your vehicle and face located everywhere you are almost guaranteed to have minute by minute tracking of your location. That completely changes the game.

We have already seen some limitations to the concept of no privacy in a public place. For instance look at Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967) and more recently Chatrie vs. United States 609 U.S. ___ (2026). In the Katz case the Supreme Court ruled that the use of a listening device in a public phone booth violated the plaintiffs privacy, and in the Chatrie case it was ruled that law enforcement acquiring an individuals cell phone location data constitutes a search under the 4th amendment.

Yes, the 4th amendment specifically addresses "persons, houses, papers, and effects" but it doesn't take much of an argument to show that if if you are surveilled 24/7 whenever you leave your home and you can't go anywhere or do anything without having your location tracked that this starts trampling on those protected items, especially if it gets to the point where you can't even interract with your "persons, houses, papers, and effects" without being surveilled.

The advent of AI driven universal tracking completely changes the equation from where it was even just 5 years ago, and the courts just haven't caught up up yet, because the legal process is a notoriously slow one. It took decades of bugs existing before we got the Katz ruling, and it took decades of cellphone location data existing before we got the Chatrie ruling, but those were both relatively minor compared to AI enabled universal tracking. I - for one - hope this makes its way through the system much more quickly, because uncontrolled use of this technology is very chilling in a supposedly free society.

I could see some sort of a compromise solution being reached. Maybe AI backed surveillance cameras are allowed, but they have to be designed in such a way that they can only search for people on a predetermined list of wanted individuals, and if there is not a match, the data is dropped without ever being written to non-volatile storage. There would have to be strict controls on how a person and their vehicle are added to the list though. I propose the requirement of a judicial warrant. This could result in a fair balance between using the technology to find criminals trying to evade the law, without mass surveilling everyone everywhere all the time.
 
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Zarathustra[H] said:
The advent of AI driven universal tracking completely changes the equation from where it was even just 5 years ago, and the courts just haven't caught up up yet, because the legal process is a notoriously slow one. It took decades of bugs existing before we got the Katz ruling, and it took decades of cellphone location data existing before we got the Chatrie ruling, but those were both relatively minor compared to AI enabled universal tracking. I - for one - hope this makes its way through the system much more quickly, because uncontrolled use of this technology is very chilling in a supposedly free society.
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It's not that the courts haven't caught up but the courts don't wanna interfere. One thing I learned recently is that in NY state they have speed cameras in school zones that if caught speeding will automatically send you a speeding ticket. Kingston NY made $700k in one month because of this. Thinking of the children is very profitable. The thing I wondered is who gets the ticket, the driver or the car owner? The car owner gets it and you can't fight the ticket. They don't care who's driving the car. The camera became the judge, jury, and executioner. The reason Flock cameras are getting a pass is because it can also promise great revenue, and nobody was questioning the speed cameras.

If you had to go through proper channels to give out tickets through cameras then the court system will get overloaded and everything would fall apart. They depend on these cameras getting around the legal system.
I could see some sort of a compromise solution being reached. Maybe AI backed surveillance cameras are allowed, but they have to be designed in such a way that they can only search for people on a predetermined list of wanted individuals, and if there is not a match, the data is dropped without ever being written to non-volatile storage. There would have to be strict controls on how a person and their vehicle are added to the list though. I propose the requirement of a judicial warrant. This could result in a fair balance between using the technology to find criminals trying to evade the law, without mass surveilling everyone everywhere all the time.
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No compromise, just remove them. As the current administration has proven in that you can't trust the government to have such power over it's people. There is no way to know if this system can be used to blackmail you. Imagine if you cheated on your lover or you happen to go to the red light district or brokeback mountain? Questionable acts but not something the government needs to know. If you happen to run for office or trying to get a position in a company then someone could use this info against you. Using this technology to blackmail someone is a very real thing.
 
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