I'm in the PNW and they put Flock cameras up in my area recently. Nobody likes them (libs or cons), and we've seen some rather creative approaches to uh...disabling them. One person took a pipe cutter to the mount and spirited the whole unit away, another apparently fired a shotgun slug through it, somebody else looks like they used it to relieve their anger problems with a metal pipe.
Some guy I once met in a bar told me that he liked to mix a 1:1 solution of elmer's glue and water, put it into a spray bottle, set the nozzle to "stream", then squirt it all over the lens of a traffic camera near his house which he found offensive. His logic was that this made more sense than destroying the camera, because he could do it over and over and over: the company operating it would have to send someone out to clean the lens off each time, which would probably cost them more money than the camera was worth.
Is it good for society to disable traffic cameras? Here in Sweden, traffic camera is used exclusively to reduce traffic speed on roads where the maximum speed is too fast for installing traffic bumps, with an expected effect of reducing traffic speed by around 20-30%. They are generally only installed on 60-90km/h roads, around road maintenance/construction sites, and in tunnels. They active when the radar detects speeds of 5km above the maximum. (The reduction in speed happens regardless if the camera is functional or not, since it is primarily a psychological effect).
Sweden also have traffic monitors that monitor highways around cities, border exists and tunnels, and also license plate readers for toll roads and bridges (also often used for parking). Those two generally have a much higher privacy cost than traffic cameras.
When the cameras become a revenue stream for a city it is not a good thing.
Cameras have been installed to fine cars running red lights. The city then reduces the length of the yellow to catch more people and offset the high cost of the cameras. The shortened yellows cause increased crashes and fatalities.
Net-net the track record in the states is not great.
Here in Seattle the traffic cameras are not used to limit speed, but to monitor intersections for red-light violations. The glue-squirting fellow in my anecdote objected to the fact that the for-profit corporation which builds and operates these cameras gets a cut of the revenue from the citations they issue. He felt that it was one thing to enforce the law, and quite another thing to run a profitable business doing it.
That makes more sense. Traffic accidents should not be a profit center, and placing cameras where it makes the most money is unlikely to align with places where it has the biggest impact on reducing fatal accidents. The Vision Zero goal that Sweden has is often cited as a guiding rule for designing the road system, including the use of measures like road bumps and traffic cameras. Giving money from the fines to a for-profit corporation seems fairly obvious that it will create perverse incentives.
> Is it good for society to disable traffic cameras?
Its going to be unpopular but yes i think so. Traffic cameras, besides very few use cases, are completely useless (just like speed limits in general). Plus it's a huge temptation for local authorities to turn it into a cash cow and put it anywhere they please regardless of necessity. Italy is rife with those for example.
Speed cameras help really little with preventing accidents unless we're talking about 200 at 100. Put in cameras that detect tailgating/not maintaining enough distance relative to speed.
The Swedish traffic agency, in combination with the health department, openly publish accident data for every road. Accidents and their outcomes are public data and has been so for a long time. The location of traffic cameras is also public and so is the date when they got installed. Everything is open to the public, and gps applications are allowed to both have the data and warn drivers.
The accident rate from before to after the installation of a camera has an average reduction of around 25% in reducing deaths in traffic. If someone don't believe it they can download the public data themselves and redo the math.
Sweden also do not have traffic cameras on highways, most likely because they are ineffective in reducing deadly outcomes at those speeds. The chance of surviving a frontal collision at 100km/h is highly unlikely, so the cost of installation a camera is better spent on roads with lower maximum speeds where the reduction in average speed actually have an effect on outcomes.
> The accident rate from before to after the installation of a camera has an average reduction of around 25% in reducing deaths in traffic
Try to forbid movement in the area and you can reach 100% reduce in deaths.
Statistics and data doesn't tell you the whole picture and often skewed.
Most crimes in Sweden are committed by "refugees" by huge margin, but good luck doing something about it or let alone talk about it publicly. But hey, lets install another camera to have everyone to slow down and exacerbate traffic conditions further down.
Reducing speed by 20-30% at scale results in a very large loss of man-years of lives in the form of sitting in a car. Reduced earning capacity, lost time with their families, waking up earlier and risks to health associated with reduced sleep, less theoretical throughput of roadways, reduced money for education/food/childcare when they accidently go too fast for a moment and are fined, lack of discretion in issuing tickets for bona fide emergencies, people suddenly slowing down before camera causing accidents, etc.
The obvious win in places like the US is that being pulled over is one of the most dangerous thing that ever happens to the common person, as they are exposed to a psychopath with a gun who is trained that the most important thing is to optimize every interaction to maximize his chance of 'making it home to his family' and if a policeman shoots everything that moves (up to and including, falling acorns) because he 'fears for his life' he will largely get away with it. So it is a nice alternative to that.
Honestly, feels like the company is within their right to press charges here? Dude is disabling the equipment that they use to turn revenue, no?
Don't agree with the company, but I don't find a suit here ridiculous. If my job put up cameras, and my form of protest was to deface and disable them, I'd get fired. This isn't a job, it's government, but it's similar in my head. The people with the authority to do something did it.
I don't think this counts as property damage or vandalism because nothing is damaged or vandalized.
Part of putting shit in public is that it now has to interact with the public. If you want your stuff pristine, I would think you should not put it in public.
Maybe the law disagrees with me here, and it probably does because this country bends over backwards for companies, but that's how I see it.
I live in the Bay Area and went to my Nextdoor because I was thinking of seeing if there's much anti-Flock sentiment, and (not surprisingly for Nextdoor), most people seem to think anti-camera people are paranoid, or have something to hide, and wish they were installed in more places to solve the (non-existent) raging crime issues, or speeding, or god knows what.
I shouldn't have expected much more, though, to be fair. There's a reason I don't use nextdoor.
The funny thing is the people calling anti-Flock people "paranoid". Well, I don't believe in dash cams or ringing my house with surveillance cameras and peering at the footage all day and all night. I think _those_ are the paranoid ones. What happened to just living your life and not worrying about everything?
Which is better than Flock's "Transparency" Report. I live in WA, ex-Flock employee, and in my County, half of the agencies with Flock agreements are not on their Transparency portal.
And at the very least - why can't you search the Transparency Portal? You have to try each and every agency name. Let's try https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ ...
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> And at the very least - why can't you search the Transparency Portal? You have to try each and every agency name.
Was it different in the past? It seems like it'd be beneficial to Flock and their customers to make obtaining this information as obtuse as possible, while maintaining the vaguest appearance of "transparency". If they could charge you $10 per search, they probably would.
As an aside - can I ask why you left Flock? I assumed that the people who would've wanted to work there would be fully invested into the idea. What changed your mind?
> As an aside - can I ask why you left Flock? I assumed that the people who would've wanted to work there would be fully invested into the idea. What changed your mind?
The Flock of my recruitment process would be a lot less problematic. There was discussion of the obvious, the surveillance "state". But everything was a high ground of ethics and legality, ideas were supposedly run through groups to discuss "not just whether we could, but whether we should", protecting individuals whose data was collected by Flock but had no safety or LE purpose, retention, sharing controls ...
... the reality was much more "mask off". "Eliminate all crime, using Flock". Very Airbnb'ish. "We know your jurisdiction doesn't allow you to share this data. It's not our job to enforce that on our platform; if you're sharing it, that's not our concern - you'll still have access to all the tools to do so." Sales worked with Agencies who weren't allowed to gather data themselves, weren't directly allowed to partner with Flock for cameras, were asked where they saw or believed they'd most want said cameras, and Flock would aggressively work with businesses, HOAs, other government entities in those areas, and get them onboard, and then go back to the Agency saying "Hey, guess what, we know you're not allowed to collect this, but these customers are, and you're able to share their data."
That didn't sit well with me - there was nothing actively illegal Flock were doing, but they were openly helping Agencies flout the spirit of laws constraining them while staying within the letter (in the above examples, HOAs and others would often get deeply subsidized, at least, installations, knowing that Flock would be able to get a bigger contract with an Agency that would otherwise have no over very limited means of working with them).
These things, coupled with Garrett's "vision" that, he emphasized repeatedly, was his literal vision, "Eliminate all crime with Flock", were too much (and I think lead to some of their even more troublesome initiatives now, like "Have AI look for potential suspicious vehicle movements, even without a reported incident, and have it alert officers to go investigate in realtime", with talk of that being extended to conversations and audio).
I live in a county where the county seat is <15k people (<40k in the entire county). There are two camera locations listed on deflock - four cameras total, since they face both directions. In the past month, I’ve discovered an additionally six locations (twelve cameras), all of which show signs of having been very recently installed.
I went to add them to Deflock, but their process requires an OSM account. I wasn’t able to do that on the side of the road, and haven’t gotten back to it yet.
About 40k new cameras each year from what I have seen.
If you find yourself with some time, there is now a DeFlock app that helps with mapping. It also includes locations where people suspect there might be a camera, though that is limited to about a third of the states so far.
I don't understand if flock deployment in Lowe/Home Depot is because margins are so low it is the only way to survive, or margins so high that they can afford such a program just to eek out a tiny bit more sales from the collected consumer info.
Either way it doesn't make sense to me why hardware stores are the biggest private use case.
Neither. It’s because Home Depot/Lowes loses billions of dollars a year due to theft, both organized and petty. Just like they have security cameras in the store, they have security cameras in the parking lot.
There are a lot of Flock supporters out there. In my neighborhood, homeowners can volunteer to put Flock cameras on their property, and a number of people are doing this.
It's like having a Ring doorbell and sharing the feed with the police, which is also pretty popular in some areas. If you trust your local police to ethically fight crime, why not help them out?
I feel worrying about security cameras is primordial mammal fear of being tracked and eaten. Like fear of vaccine poisoning, a vestige of long ago threats.
The wealthy live different than you and me. A friends friends wife works at the facebook head quarters. Zuckerberg has a armed security escort when he walks between buildings. They're traveling around San Francisco, New York, London the same way you or I would travel around Mogadishu.
The reality is these guys are scared of us. And that's behind inane airport security, militarization of police, the ICE raids.
Years and years ago read a heretic economist that comment that highly unequal societies spend huge amount of money on security. Enough it has negative effects on their economy. This is really not a good thing for the rest of us.
And yet they drive away in their GM/Ford/Nissan/Tesla/Any car/truck with its connected media unit and telemetry gathering infotainment systems and think “This is fine”.
Hey it's a start. Get people together who don't like Flock cameras and tell them about pulling the modem out of their vehicle and you'll get some bites.
Is local jamming or removing their antennas a viable strategy? Seems like it could be easier to just make them unable to phone home, rather than trying to surgically rip out the bundle of hardware and software responsible for it while leaving everything else intact.
Vehicles differ. Disconnecting the antenna is easiest in some. Removing a fuse is sufficient in some. Disconnecting the relevant module is not surgical in some. Some nag if the antenna is disconnected.
People are probably unaware of the telemetry on their vehicle.
But this is a good point, people get upset when government is perceived to screw them over and not upset enough when the private sector does it. In practice, the private sector screws over the public quite a bit.
Might be logical. The government can throw me in jail, steal my stuff (aka civil
forfeiture), or (as we found out recently) tear gas my kids all without any penalty. In some situations, the government decides they are allowed to kill you.
Companies at least risk significant consequences if they start tear gassing children. For the most part the worst they can do is screw you out of some money, which is not great, but obviously better than imprisonment and the like.
Because doing something evil and then lying about it isn't any better than doing something evil and being honest.
Everyone with even a quarter of a brain can recognize that the extreme data collection is a ticking time bomb. This WILL be leaked. This WILL be used to deny people's rights. This WILL lead to financial loss for people.
They have been collecting data since 2014, with some car manufacturers as early as 2010. Also, average age of vehicle isn’t a good metric when a lot of vehicles in the US are registered but never driven.
The statistics I linked were Average Age of Automobiles and Trucks in Operation in the United States. The title said in operation not registered. The sources suggested market research not registration records.
How many vehicles are registered but never driven? According to what source?
The statistics said the average age of light vehicles was 12.8 years. The average age of passenger cars was 14.5 years. And Consumer Reports said 32 of 44 brands offered some form of wireless data connection in 2018.[1] This implied 12 brands or more offered vehicles without wireless data connections.
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
I do think that's an important distinction though; if I have a camera and record a public space, that's not an issue. If the government sets up a bunch of cameras, that's an issue, whether or not it's ICE, the FBI, or someone else using the cameras. I can't imagine the government will set up cameras and do non-scary things with it.
No need to imagine. There are several cases already of these buffoons in law enforcement doing scary things. The Institute for Justice (IJ) is one of the organizations taking these cases on and who also has suggestions for how to go about combating this stuff. I’m sure most here are also familiar with Louis Rossmann; he’s also been beating the drum on this stuff locally and in Colorado.
Same ones who probably will develop fast homomorphic encryption and distribute it to the entire world, completely oblivious to the eventual heat death of the universe.
We aren't at the point where it's unavoidable though. Even if we assume that its impossible to dodge random onstar/sirius bloatware crap that probably tracks you, you can definitely still buy a car that doesn't have a 5g wireless modem, 360-degree webcam coverage, mandatory automatic software updates, and ass-warming seats locked behind DRM that forces you to have an online account linked to your credit card.
Lot of new motorcycles don't. Although sadly many new ones now have bluetooth and smart phone connectivity which even if not used can be used as an identifier.
Not the right point to take away. The useful observation is that visibility is key to people understanding how their rights are being violated. Unfortunately this lesson is mostly useful to bad actors. If you're going to install surveillance cameras, don't make them look like surveillance cameras (unless they're part of a theft deterrent system).
This seems like an unsupported assumption. Lots of people like them. Anyone who wants policing to be effective and cares about crime / public safety would like them to have the best tools.
That seems like the general mantra that's currently being adapted to justify all sorts of power grabs and expansions of surveillance all over the world. "We would really rather not do this, honestly! But the crisis is just too pressing, and has been left unaddressed for too long. You all just couldn't behave, and now we're going to have to do it the painful way. This is just what is needed, it's the natural outcome."
But surely, it's not the entire world that's suddenly experiencing these waves of perceived crises, right? The statistics to justify tough-on-crime enforcement are useful for the proponents, but it's not the statistics that prompted them to act. They have their own reasons, and some marketable justifications just happened to be lying around. If they weren't there, they would find some other numbers or some other category of criminals that must be urgently pursued, anything to justify the power grabs. Reducing crime won't stop them.
makes sense… like NYPD has 11 billion dollar budget and NYC is the safest place on the planet Earth, we just need the same model in the entire USA and we good. Local/State taxes should be raised to something reasonable like 25-30% - it is public safety after all :)
It hasnt been ignored or denied. What's happening is some people's minds are detaching from reality, and it's our duty to snap them out of their delusion.
The reality, which might I remind everyone does not care about their opinion, is this: crime has been trending down for decades. Police budgets have been increasing for decades. Many police departments are over funded.
The fallacy here is that giving police access to more tools makes policing better.
It doesn't. Simply giving the police more stuff doesn't garuantee they will be more effective. They might be LESS effective, if they, say, have a culture of abusing their tools.
Flock cameras, America's bipartisan issue?