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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
The Flock saga continues.
A handful of police departments that use Flock have unwittingly leaked details of millions of surveillance targets and a large number of active police investigations around the country because they have failed to redact license plates information in public records releases. Flock responded to this revelation by threatening a site that exposed it and by limiting the information the public can get via public records requests.
Completely unredacted Flock audit logs have been released to the public by numerous police departments and in some cases include details on millions Flock license plate searches made by thousands of police departments from around the country. The data has been turned into a searchable tool on a website called HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which says it has data on more than 2.3 million license plates and tens of millions of Flock searches.
The situation highlights one of the problems with taking a commercial surveillance product and turning it into a searchable, connected database of people’s movements and of the police activity of thousands of departments nationwide. It also highlights the risks associated with relying on each and every law enforcement customer to properly and fully redact identifiable information any time someone requests public records; in this case, single mistakes by individual police departments have exposed potentially sensitive information about surveillance targets and police investigations by other departments around the country.
Archive: http://archive.today/yXLPQ
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I like to think if I was in a position to be working with data like that, that I could ‘accidentally’ forget to redact it one time and trigger a leak like this.
They publicly released that data at that point though through their own failures, fuck Flock for trying to suppress it.
Those sanctimonious FUCKS can go take a long walk off a short pier. Justice will be aggrieved until they all hang publicly.
Those surveillance capitalist fascists can go flock themselves
I’ve love to have private alpr’s in my neighborhood. We’ve had mailbox thefts and people driving around breaking into cars, even had car stolen. These guys are changing their plates regularly, but it would be super cool to at least get a neighborhood wide alert if someone who’s done done shit has rentered our neighborhood. I’m just not keen on giving that data to 3rd parties lock stock and barrel
would be super cool to at least get a neighborhood wide alert if someone who’s done done shit has rentered our neighborhood
So you could do what?
Thw issue youll run into is effectiveness at that small scale, sonyoull be tempted to share data with other systems like that, and eventually you’ll end up creating a different flock.
The idea and motive and intention is great. The (edit: eventual) outcome is always evil.
That’s going to be unpopular to say around here, but the truth is that technology is largely amoral.
While the tech may be amoral, its still implemented and utilized by pricks whose goal is control.
Yup, and its important to communicate that or we risk losing our voice in the general public and look like Luddites
Just FYI, using the term luddite derogatorily may not be as cool as you think it is. They were essentially an instance of organized labor flexing their power and not really “against technological advancement” like the term gets bandied about.
I am aware, but i am using it in a colloquial sense. And you understood my point; which is exactly how the general public that needs to be swayed will interpret it.
You can and should make your point without denigrating labor movements.
Originally the Pedants were a group of trans atheist Linux users from Pedantia, so I won’t use it as a pejorative in this context.
Uhh okay? Language and its use changes. If you want to be effective in getting your point across you need to keep up. The choir in lemmy isn’t who needs to be persuaded.
Feel free to be technically correct, but I would like to see the idea take mass adoption instead.
The problem with surveillance tech is that even if it was initially implemented with the best intentions by good people that aren’t seeking to abuse it, it can change hands.
That is true
Enabling a surveillance state is not amoral.
Your phrasing seems to imply I said it was, but I never said that.
The technology enables the surveillance state. Therefore the technology is not amoral.
