Bullshit. Like cops care about about stolen cars and if they did, that’s not how you catch a car thief.
As the author says, a good car thief throws away the plate. What’s Flock going to do about that?
Raiding chop shops is how you stop car theft.
And why isn’t Flock then designed around such use cases — “stolen car spotted at location X”? Why are they able to retrace any car’s every movement back 90 days (or more)? Why did the forensics done on a stolen Flock camera show it highlighting faces as regions of interest?
Why are they using it to stalk (sometimes not even actual) romantic partners?
https://cybernews.com/privacy/hackers-flock-teardown-encryption-key-secrets/ :
The investigation found that the recovered software explicitly detects people, alongside vehicles, bicycles, and license plates.
Flock Safety insists that its plate readers do not track people, despite a growing number of reports that suggest otherwise.
When the cameras detects a person, the software records their position in the images and how confident it is that it has spotted a human.
Wired extracted the camera’s computer vision models and tested them independently, successfully detecting people, including a selfie of one of its reporters.
Analysis of more than 27,000 short video clips recovered from the device found people in 11 clips, all of them on motorcycles.
The low number of humans in this instance was attributed to the fact that the camera was positioned above a roadway with limited pedestrians.
Just as funds can be placed in escrow, ie NOT given-outright to the other party, in a transaction, until the transaction is fulfilled,
so too could data be kept in escrow, NOT all handed to authoritarian-culture operations, and vehicles identified as stolen then data-mined out from the kept-in-escrow data.
That would prevent stalking ( using Flock ) by officers, of women, for 1 thing…
iow, it could be done in a more trustworthy way, but it isn’t being done in any such way.
And that is a choice.
That is always the default choice of authority, whether “revolutionaries” or incumbents, institutions or dynasties of any kind…
Corruption’s greatest multiplier is conflict-of-interest.
Since that fact is already-known, all it requires of us is that we engineer our civilization to make all authority-responsibility orthogonal to all other, as much as can be done: eradicate conflict-of-interest.
Eradicate “self policing” which never demonstrated integrity in historical timescales ( there have been individuals with outright integrity, but the social-civil default is corruption.
That Roman man who became dictator to fix some problem for Rome, then quit, twice, had excellent integrity, from what i can see… and that is spectacularly rare. )
Only when responsibility comes 1st, accountability 2nd, and authority-to-the-measure-justified-by-the-responsibility-&-accountability 3rd, only then will humankind begin outgrowing feudalism, instead of recreating it endlessly.
Monarchic-feudalism, party-feudalism, oligarchic-feudalism, corporate-feudalism, fascist/militarized-male-narcissism-feudalism, it’s all aiming at the same narcissism-machiavellianism-psychopathy-is-LORD target, and it all ought be outgrown, nowadays, finally.
Accepting that checks-&-balances are requirement throughout civilization, is mature & needed.
There is no other way which can work.
Yes, there is an arms-race between criminal-operations & police-services.
Yes, it is better to have police limiting criminality than it is to have crime-cartels being the only law in one’s region
( ask northern Mexico if they like the cartel-rule paradigm, for contrast, and look at the homicide-rate there, which is horrifying ).
But community-policing is best, when community & police-services are standing together against crime’s mutation of our civilization … but “we can’t afford that” so instead we have militarized “police” becoming more like the ruling-gang??
The “sharks among the community” paradigm that many have written about?
And many push to remove policing, through the “defund the police” movement, with the ACAB-prejudice, and when a city actually did that, in the US, criminality skyrocketed ( Duh! ).
Partial-views won’t ever produce right-answer.
We need to see complete-view, and to be honest-enough to admit that utopia isn’t offered/possible, and further that earning good-result takes work & investment, from ALL sides…
i wonder if any community has the uprightness to do it?
i hope so…
🙏
ACAB, always and forever… (Yes, all of them)
