> Sure some creeps will use them and with that in mind Apple has the possible ability to solve that privacy issue as they are a privacy company (all pics and vids taken thru APple glasses faces not in your network are randomize/anonymized).
This is it's own distopian nightmare. No one exists in the world but those you've asserted you've met. What if you meet someone who was in the background of a picture from childhood? Can you never take your pictures from apple?
If you have an iPhone open the camera app and look under "People & Pets," to see that Apple already has those in your network and their pic matched up. As well if you are taking pic or video of people and they are smiling for the camera that's an indication your more likely with them then not.
Have you ever gone fishing? Did you catch all the fish?
Often it is more impactful to address one major/tangible player in a particular space than it would be to "boil the ocean" and ensure that we are capturing every possible player/transgressor. I agree that some of the video was overly breathless, but if that's what wakes people up to the dangers of unsecured cameras/devices then so be it.
Ok, you're the second person to say that, and I think my point is not clear enough. That's on me.
This response would make sense if I was saying "why focus on Flock, there are so many other ALPR cameras out there" (also true, but not relevant to my point).
But this is a video that is mostly about things that are true of all IP cameras, of the kind that we've had staring out onto public streets for decades, plural decades. People celebrated those cameras, thought they were super neat, built sites indexing them. All of them do most of the same things this video says those Flock cameras did, the tiny minority of Flock cameras you can access publicly.
That people consolidated their business atop VMware's hypervisor, got screwed by Broadcom, and as a result are moving everything to Nutanix (from whom they need to buy the hypervisor, the compute stack, the storage stack, etc.) is insane to me.
Most don't even consider the amounts as getting screwed, just enough change that on the next refresh cycle it was worth switching to a different provider. For a lot of these places it was just 10-15 years ago they went from 0 VMs to 80%+ VMs so they aren't worried about needing to move around, just the quality of the support contract etc.
Its a data gathering system. it takes pictures of everything that goes past it so that IF something happens, cops can search back through the system to see if/when a suspect went past that sensor. This sort of thing should be turned off regardless. I don't want my movements recorded and tracked all the time in the off chance someone might do something later. This ICE situation is the perfect example of why these actively passive systems are a threat.
In my home county they've arrested car thieves and recovered vehicles due to real-time Flock hits. It is not simply for forensic purposes.
If it was a bad idea it shouldn't have been installed in the first place. Turning it off now because a few loud people assumed things that weren't true (ICE using the system) is idiotic.
It shouldn't have been installed in the first place, but in real life, sometimes people need a concrete example to realize something others figured out from principles.
The article said University of Washington researchers released a report Oct. 21 showing federal immigration agencies like ICE and Border Patrol had accessed the data of at least 18 Washington cities, often without their police departments’ knowing.
What they have, thankfully, is a concrete example of there being such a thing as an uncivil authority, not a concrete example of their mistake leading to irreparable harm.
Ok, and a real-time-only (as in it literally, physically has no onboard or networked storage and only generates data exactly when it hits a plate that's already flagged, or is false/doesn't match the car and the system to flag a plate requires a warrant) flock system would face vastly less opposition than the fishing-expedition-enabler that currently exists. Yet somehow that's never on the table.
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