Turns out »it’s on a public road« stops being a magic privacy waiver when police can reconstruct a month of your movements with a few clicks. Flock sold dragnet surveillance as a camera network, and a federal judge finally called it what it is: indiscriminate mass surveillance.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
631 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
88763 readers
2360 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
And with enough data, you can morph it into any answer you want.
I made a video that is tangentially related to this a week and a half ago. There isn't a ton of reporting on it, but Flock is losing a ton of cash thanks to local privacy movements.
Just in September they lost 100+ contracts. They've lost almost 400 since June, in 36 US states.
Seeing the response is the first thing that's given me a flicker of hope since the Patriot Act passed.
It’s encouraging, but annoyingly, most startups operate at losses for years. Unless they lose venture funding or more of the rest of the 6000 contracts, that’s not going to stop them.
That's great, but the mass surveillance definition also fits Google, Meta, and so much of the internet.
The ALPR data is being collected and stored constantly. Does it only become mass surveillance if law enforcement searches it.? That is the next thing to consider IMO.
I think we need stronger legal protections against searching our data, even when we put it into the custody of others.
For example, I would like to have security cameras that record to the cloud, but all the big NVR providers will cough up data to law enforcement upon request. That means that a Ring/Nest camera is effectively a police camera.
But that's bullshit, because the best place to store security camera storage is somewhere other than the property you are surveilling, but I still want my goddamned privacy at home!
So I can either run Chinese network security nightmare cameras whose operators are outside of my jurisdiction, or I can run standard RTSP to my own cloud VPS and hope that it's harder for the police to get their hands on that footage since I am the NVR operator and can encrypt my footage at rest.
The VPS option I chose is also the most expensive option, and it wasn't easy to set up.
What'd you choose?
the constitution restricts the governments ability to conduct unreasonable searches, not people like google or facebook.
This is good news, and gotdamn I'll take my wins where I can get 'em, but just to clarify, its a victory with caveats:
- A warrant or probable cause is enough to use ALPRs
- A subsequent Oklahoma legislative discussion over this matter did not put forth outlining repercussions for violating this new restriction.
- And likely most difficult of all, the 30-day history was what considered it a search. All Flock would need to do is decrease the history to a few days, which is still just as useful for most investigations, for it to not be considered a search. After writing this out, I learnt Flock already had plans to reduce to a 7-day window.
So again, this is a good thing despite these flaws. I'd rather have some limits than none at all, but keep pursuing this. The fight has always been about whether this tech should be allowed or not, not whether or not you need to look suspicious. I can't help but feel that until a large case at the supreme court happens, our best route is still via legislative endeavors. While its scummy that politicians are only now addressing it when they're around an election time, it's still gaining traction nonetheless.
We have a thing in the constitution about this. It's called"unreasonable searches and seizures". But cops don't care about that.
Americans will never stand up for their own privacy because the vast majority of them thinks they're talking about OTHER people - not them.
Even now, just like with the out of control law enforcement, they think somehow those cameras aren't looking at THEM.
Actually, you're kinda wrong.
There's not a ton of reporting on it, but Flock has lost 100+ contracts, just in September. They've lost 400ish since June. This has been across 36 US states.
People are standing up, we're just not hearing about it because the vast majority are doing so via the boring, pedestrian democratic process. And to be fair, I didn't know this either until I did research for a video I made about the Flock buyout a week ago.
This is also a good reminder that, while you have zero political power nationally, you have a ton of power locally if you're willing to attend city council meetings and speak.
"I have nothing to hide"
-Clueless morons
Change is a slow process. We have a system to follow to reverse all this but it doesn't happen overnight. We don't want violence or property damage.
No one thinks cameras aren't looking at them. It seems you are out of touch with real Americans and only get your information from social media.
So by extension the entire surveillance state apparatus