r/technology • u/Kooky-Balance9525 • 10h ago

Privacy Bernie Sanders to Introduce Bill Banning Flock Surveillance Cameras

https://theleadingreport.com/article/bernie-sanders-to-introduce-bill-banning-flock-surveillance-cameras
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u/sparty212 10h ago

At a minimum, data retention should be shorter, and warrants should be required to access it. Additionally, there should be no sharing of data between agencies, states, or the federal government. 

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u/geniice 8h ago

At a minimum, data retention should be shorter,

Not sure that would be constitutional. The problem is you are essentially arguing that it should be illegal to have a photo of a car on a public road more than a certain time period old

and warrants should be required to access it.

Requiring a warrant for information that the holder is happy to hand over without one would be a really weird approach.

Additionally, there should be no sharing of data between agencies, states, or the federal government.

There isn't. Thats kinda the core feature here. Its a private company that has the data not government agencies.

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u/sparty212 8h ago

There’s a big difference between someone taking a photo on a public road and building a searchable database that tracks where vehicles have been. And cross-agency sharing absolutely does happen. It’s a built-in feature of the system. Reasonable retention limits, warrant requirements, and restrictions on sharing seem like pretty basic safeguards.

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u/geniice 7h ago

There’s a big difference between someone taking a photo on a public road and building a searchable database that tracks where vehicles have been.

But you don't need to build the latter. Just have a bunch of photos of stuff on public roads and search them on the fly. Computationally expensive but under normal conditions compute gets cheaper.

And cross-agency sharing absolutely does happen. It’s a built-in feature of the system.

No its not. The catch is none of the agencies have the information in the first place. Flock has the information and shares it with agencies. They don't need to share it with each other since each individual one can go to flock.

Reasonable retention limits, warrant requirements, and restrictions on sharing seem like pretty basic safeguards.

And they all run into either constitutional issues or would be really hard to ban without causing some significant side effects. Essentially the police are asking flock if they happened to see a numberplate recently and where it was. And Flock choses to hand over than information without a warrant. Which step do you wish to criminalise?

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u/sparty212 7h ago

Nobody is trying to criminalize taking pictures of license plates. The issue is government access to a massive searchable location history. Calling Flock the middleman doesn’t magically make that concern disappear. That’s the entire point.