This is what’s been confusing me about this whole situation. They’ve been tracking vehicle movements with ANPR cameras, the movements of your phone from its Bluetooth and wifi transmissions, and your movements with facial recognition for years now. Flock just stapled “AI” on to it and marketed it harder.
It’s great to see communities finally speaking up about these issues, but it’s going to take a lot of work to undo it all. In the meantime, if you have people around you that you can trust, maybe pool your vehicles and phones to increase the noise in their data.
People like the EFF have been fighting these surveillance cameras that track plates for years and years. Flock specifically got notoriety because people started getting grabbed off the street and shipped off to camps or foreign Gulags and we learned Flock was providing the tracking data to do it. Families have been ripped apart and people have died in a reasonable connection with Flock.
I guess what I should have said was that I’m confused as to why more people weren’t up in arms before now. I’m not actually confused, as you say, the harm has now been made obvious when it could be ignored before, but I am frustrated. My biggest concern is that Flock will act as a lightening rod for people’s anger and eventually be removed, leaving the rest of the system intact. It feels very much like a sacrificial move to get people to ignore the underlying problem, whilst exposing themselves if they take action, and allowing those in favour of tracking to say “see it’s just those violent extremists who don’t like being tracked, you’re not like that, so you have nothing to fear, right?” The public pushback needs to be widened, somehow, to encompass all forms of tracking like this.
This is what’s been confusing me about this whole situation. They’ve been tracking vehicle movements with ANPR cameras, the movements of your phone from its Bluetooth and wifi transmissions, and your movements with facial recognition for years now. Flock just stapled “AI” on to it and marketed it harder.
It’s great to see communities finally speaking up about these issues, but it’s going to take a lot of work to undo it all. In the meantime, if you have people around you that you can trust, maybe pool your vehicles and phones to increase the noise in their data.
People like the EFF have been fighting these surveillance cameras that track plates for years and years. Flock specifically got notoriety because people started getting grabbed off the street and shipped off to camps or foreign Gulags and we learned Flock was providing the tracking data to do it. Families have been ripped apart and people have died in a reasonable connection with Flock.
I guess what I should have said was that I’m confused as to why more people weren’t up in arms before now. I’m not actually confused, as you say, the harm has now been made obvious when it could be ignored before, but I am frustrated. My biggest concern is that Flock will act as a lightening rod for people’s anger and eventually be removed, leaving the rest of the system intact. It feels very much like a sacrificial move to get people to ignore the underlying problem, whilst exposing themselves if they take action, and allowing those in favour of tracking to say “see it’s just those violent extremists who don’t like being tracked, you’re not like that, so you have nothing to fear, right?” The public pushback needs to be widened, somehow, to encompass all forms of tracking like this.