The biggest argument against limits on storing "non-hit" data that the pro-Flock crowd is going to use is that "we need the historical data to find evidence of the whereabouts of criminal suspects".
Counter point police have been able to prosecute crime without being able to defacto track every single person in the US via car and the corrosive effect of having that ability outweighs the gains. Plus on top of all of that they've proven time and time again they can't be trusted to contain themselves or their collegues from rampant abuse to stalk exes, celebrities, etc. just because they can.
>>"Counter point police have been able to prosecute crime without being able to defacto track every single person in the US"
This is not true, and I dont know why everyone believes that. Real-life policing looks nothing like Law and Order. Moreover, post-George Floyd, police have basically had a work stoppage. Real prosecution requires high agency work by the police and they aren't legally required to do that [1], so they don't, and no amount of voting and police union busting is going to help here. You can't require someone to be "stellar" at their jobs.
Having had real egregious crimes happen around me has exposed me to just how much crime you can simply get away with...all the time. The rich get private security and investigators, us plebes get "Sorry no one saw the shooting happen, so we can't do anything now please leave"
Flock has basically turned a high-agency job that police stopped doing, into a db lookup, that in some circumstances they can be forced into doing.
I agree with EFF, record it all and put it all behind a real warrant and a civilian judge with a high bar for approval.
P.S: Before you quote Benjamin Franklin at me, no I don't want a 100% hit rate, I just want a decent shot at crimes being solved by average police work and just even the slightest hint of deterrence.
Half the working class consistently vote for a soft-on-crime party with a rallying cry of defunding the police and an eye towards virtual amnesty for crimes ranging from immigration violations to DUI resulting in deaths to outright murder.
But if you want to find a suspect, shouldn’t you only care about where they are NOW? Not where they were 6 hours ago? How does historical data help apprehend a suspect NOW?
Devil's advocate: they may have changed cars. Someone robs a bank, drives a getaway car, abandons it, gets in another car and drives off. Your first breadcrumb is where the getaway car ended up.
It's probably not within range of an ALPR right now, so you look at where it was driving.
This is why we need, as op is suggesting, governments to tell them something doing the lines of "too bad, that's illegal and won't be permitted as evidence".
And I personally think that in some cases that would actually be a net positive for society. Like a kid disappears or a body is found murdered or a serious crime occurs. Being able to look at who was coming and going to solve serious crimes is probably a good thing.
But for tracking petty crimes and with the abuse of the system with things like officers monitoring their exes, as one example, makes the system far too dangerous for a free society. And because of that if they are going to ever get the public on board with flock then we are going to need to establish certain rights and guarantees.
For me that would be things like warrants with the exceptions in only the most extreme cases like a kidnapping or a murder that literally just happened and immediate response was critical.
Next I would want a reasonable time data was stored then deleted. That is not 2 years that is like maybe a couple weeks or perhaps a little longer. Having the history of when and where everyone goes is a huge privacy risk and should not be stored forever as it is a target.
Next I would want rules that it is only used for certain investigations and crimes. Yes to violent crimes and sexual crimes and crimes against children and obvious things all of society can easily say yes those things are bad. But for most other crimes it should be constitutionally forbidden. Think of how laws and public beliefs change over time. Imagine this years back when being gay was a crime. Or tracking people who go to an abortion clinic.
I could go on for a lot longer about how this type of system is dangerous in so many ways if not governed by very well thought out rules and rights given to the public. It is sad that the operators of these systems don't want to meet in the middle to something that most of the public could get on board with but they obviously know that total surveillance is very valuable data to have on people.
I'm waiting for the day when some advocacy group pops up that argues not having such tracking for your kids is prima facie evidence of neglect. You're already seeing that in many places in the US with regards to allowing kids to be unsupervised in any way for any length of time, even if they are not being anything other than just normal kids playing and learning about the world outside the walls of their home, and police/CPS being called resulting in parents being charged criminally.
> You're already seeing that in many places in the US with regards to allowing kids to be unsupervised in any way for any length of time, even if they are not being anything other than just normal kids playing and learning about the world outside the walls of their home, and police/CPS being called resulting in parents being charged criminally.
Do you have any examples of this? How common is it? What are they charged with? Where in American is it happening?
Thanks for the example. A visit from the CPS and having a case on file is terrible. At least in this case there were no criminal charges and the child was not removed and they have some good pro-bono legal representation.
The good news is that many states has passed laws specifically to make this type of parenting legal.
"Georgia, Florida, and Missouri join eight other states that have adopted Reasonable Childhood Independence' laws.
...
"These bills establish clear exceptions to the statutory definitions of neglect and abuse in state laws, ensuring that parents cannot be penalized for allowing their children to engage in regular activities such as walking to the store, playing outdoors, or staying home alone under reasonable circumstances. State laws will still prohibit clearly harmful neglect or endangerment. However, these “reasonable childhood independence” bills reassure parents that they will not face a significant run-in with law enforcement for permitting their child to pursue healthy, independent activities." [1]
So, it seems there is growing and effective opposition to such a trend.
Yeah, sure. I'll buy a powerstation while I'm at it. Why not? My TV doesn't even fit in my car, so I guess I'll have to buy a bigger car too. Just so I can figure out if the TV connects to any random open AP.
Many ISP-provided routers also include, by default, a completely separate WiFi network (that, as far as I know, is usually separate from your plan bandwidth) for other customers of the ISP to be able to use while they're out and about. It would be trivial for TV manufacturers to enter into agreements with those ISPs authorizing them to connect to those SSIDs.
I had a tech coworker who thought Y2K wasn't really a thing. I started working in tech in the middle of '99 and was dealing with Y2K stuff right out the gate. He started in the industry in 2001, so missed it.
Exactly because vaccines were so successful that people don't remember what it was like without them. Once enough people start dying in large scale measles outbreaks people will start getting vaccinated again.
“The needs of the many are greater than the needs of the few, or the one” - Spock.
While vaccine-injury is a thing and we must improve vaccines, we have also largely benefited from vaccines. Millions of us exist today because our parents were vaccinated against small pox when they were children.
In the dial up days anything that phoned home by default, even to check for updates on start up, was considered spyware because unless you actively browsed somewhere or logged into a remote server it was nobody's business when you were online and what your IP address was. Asking a user if they wanted the app to check for updates or not on install and having an option to disable that in settings was acceptable though. Somehow the argument "We need to log your internet usage because we're so bad at writing software that our application will get you hacked if you don't get every update immediately!" actually worked on us, and that was the beginning of the end.
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