No. It is not and to claim otherwise is hyperbole. The key difference is police stopping and/or questioning people en masse without reasonable suspicion is in fact illegal unless under extreme circumstances. Simply noting everyone’s license plate is wholly legal, and more importantly for this conversation, is drastically less intrusive and qualitatively different from a so-called dragnet. You don’t get to just conflate the two scenarios to better fit your personal preferences of what is or is not legal.
Dragnets have been constrained on both fourth and fifth amendment grounds. It's not merely the inconvenience of being stopped and questioned that makes a dragnet illegal, it is also an illegal search.
But Flock isn't searching anybody. You keep calling it a dragnet, or an illegal search, but the courts have repeatedly held that recording images in public needs no warrant or probable case.
Law enforcement is using a third party (Flock) to get around constitutional requirements.
A camera pointed at a public street isn't the same constitutional question as LE searching a persistent database to reconstruct someone's movements. The latter falls into fourth amendment search territory.
Jesus, how many times are you just going to parrot the same replies over and over? No, the putting public facing camera video into a database does not make it a search. The case you cited, Chatrie vs. United States, involved the government demanding that Google hand over private cellphone location data on everyone inside of a geofence boundary. The court decided that forcing Google to hand over geolocation data was akin to forcing Google to hand over email contents, which requires a warrant. You're trying to turn around and interpret this to saying that the plain view doctrine doesn't apply to ALPRs, which record public spaces.
This isn't the case of law enforcement using a third party to get around constitutional requirements. The government could set up their own cameras doing exactly what Flock does, and it would still not violate anyone's constitutional requirements. Because people don't have a right to not be recorded in public, no matter how much you want that to be the case.
> Jesus, how many times are you just going to parrot the same replies over and over
The same amount that you do, dude. You're in every single one of these threads, and despite being proven wrong over and over again you keep being "confused" about how people are against this technology. Even in this thread, you keep responding with the same points based on your equivocation of an individual taking a picture in public and a state law enforcement organization aggregating and tracking individuals who haven't committed crimes.
Try reading some SC cases and actually paying attention to the responses you're getting.
And yet you still start yet another thread insisting that a database makes public facing video cameras a privacy violation.
When have I been "proven wrong over and over again"? The court cases you've cited are all about governments demanding private cell phone location information. You're trying to take decisions that amount to, "the police need a warrant to demand private cellphone location data from telecoms" and make the enormous leap to your imaginary decision, "the police cannot record people in public and search those recordings".
Just because the specific ALPR technology was not being litigated doesn't mean that the law doesn't apply to similar technologies. At issue here is the government being able to monitor and track people in public, not that photographs are ok because individuals can take them at will.
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” Id., at 429 (opinion of Alito, J.). For that reason, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.” Id., at 430.
Edit for your edit: you haven't refuted anything man, you keep trotting out the same arguments in those linked threads:
- The data includes "private movements" which is why it's unconstitutional (the SC said aggregation of public data can impel privacy concerns)
- An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)
- The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)
> The data includes "private movements" which is why it's unconstitutional (the SC said aggregation of public data can impel privacy concerns)
But does it? You keep insisting this is the case, but your attempts to back up this claim are cases with totally different scenarios. Namely demanding that telecoms hand over location information.
> - An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)
The point is to emphasize that the information collected by Flock is in plain view. The plain view doctrine is well established. The police don't need a warrant to observe publicly visible things.
> The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)
The cases you've cited all involved private information being obtained without a warrant. You can't just ignore the fact that a GPS tracker or cell phone location information also reveals private movements, as opposed to public facing camera which only record public activity.
Again, you keep citing decisions without bothering to understand the context behind the. For instance,
"To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment);"
This is about the police planting a GPS tracker on someone's car - that's that "Jones" is referring to here. That case involved the police tracking someone in public and in private.
You're confusing the technology used in Jones with the principle Carpenter cited it for: a person can have a 4A privacy interest in the whole of their physical movements, including movements in public.
And for the second time, you're trying to dodge the distinguishing factor between Jones and Flock. The former tracked movements in public and in private. The latter, only in public. That, and the Jones case involved the police accessing someone's vehicle without a warrant.
You seem to be under the impression that the opinion of the court in the Jones was that everyone's public movements are private and the police need a warrant to track your public movements through and any all means. But that was not the decision of the court. The police and still just follow you, Jones notwithstanding.
You can desire your public movements to be protected by the Fourth amendment all you want, but that does not make it so.
I'm not claiming Jones held that cops need a warrant to visually follow someone on a public street. The point you're avoiding is that Carpenter expressly cited Jones for the proposition that people have a fourth amendment interest in the "whole of" their physical movements, and distinguished ordinary observation from technologically enabled, comprehensive tracking. Just because the camera is in public doesn't make it permissible.
And maybe it wasn't the decision in Jones, but Carpenter specifically cites Alito's concurrence for the proposition that a person has a 4A privacy interest in aggregation of movement data and describes GPS tracking in Jones as raising those privacy concerns.
As I've repeatedly explained, the Carpenter decision was narrowly scoped to cell phone location data. The decision did not do anything to restrict other forms of monitoring. The idea that Carpenter restricts governments' ability to video record public spaces is entirely your own invention.
I mean you don’t have to go too many layers deep here. A military running on its stomach is a truism known for centuries, and if you wanted to use cyber warfare to attack a military’s food supplies this is one of the few avenues available to you (the other being logistics).
More correct; we’ll spend a trillion dollars giving free things to people too lazy, addicted or mentally unwell to support themselves, but paying for mental hospitals and police is a bridge too far.
I’m utterly baffled what the author is talking about with regards to “toxic” output. While I agree Claude’s prose is a mess right now, he never explains what he’s talking about when he calls it toxic.
I don't know about the author but for me it's actually starting to induce enough stress that it's starting to negatively affect me. I think that qualifies as toxic. I actively feel like I need this gone from my life at this point. It's quite a bit of work to try and engineer it out, so at this point I'd rather put the effort into trying to switch everything to Codex just to get away from it.
Amen, and I feel exactly the same way. Using it feels awful. It feels seriously user-hostile: Its language is almost totally opaque, it takes every opportunity to criticize you and raise objections to what you give it, it virtually never gives you what you want (you have to guide it firmly and with precision) and it never substantively changes its behavior. Even its apologies, to the extent that matters, have to be forced out and are as thin as you can get when they do arrive.
It feels like it looks down on you and as if it's trying to poke holes in whatever you give it. Over time, i.e. using it for hours, it gets draining in the same way being stuck with a very clever, willfully contrary narcissist would be draining. And it's worse than with a human version -- humans eventually get tired and lose focus. But this thing can always keep churning out tokens, and using it is essentially generating irritation and psychic damage on demand.
It's surreal to be talking about a tool in these terms, but here we are. I'm switching to OpenAI myself, trying to coax a normal personality from this is absolutely not worth it.
I know (and understand why) a lot of people cheer the EU’s increasingly vast regulatory environment as being “pro consumer” but I’m really tired of said regulations being inflicted on the rest of the world. If this is what Europeans want for themselves that’s fine. But I no more want their regulations to be the de facto world’s any more than I want China’s.
I absolutely don’t want to imply there’s any one reason that he led us to where we are. This comment isn’t to try to undercut or malign some great data and investigation. But an article on this topic that literally does not include the word union in the entire text is not painting a full picture.
You can fairly point out that unions still exist in Georgia, and that the UK and other European locations have robust worker protections - this isn’t a situation of union work vs. non-union work. But the extent to which unions in California have a stranglehold on the movie industry is absolutely part of the story here.
Given that New Zealand actually changed its laws to prevent unionisation in order to ensure The Hobbit was made there, I think unions are definitely a factor.
I have no idea how strong the unions related to film are in the UK. It varies a lot between industries.
Raise wages, and hence costs, relative to non-union locations (a direct purpose of unions!); implement restrictive work rules; lead occasional strikes.
Having gone to many large furry cons(notoriously brutal on the elevators due to how much floor-to-floor traffic there is compared to other usage) I’ve seen these algos basically completely fail to adapt to unusual patterns. I once spent over half an hour on checkout day, in a hotel with 8 banks, to even have a car stop on our floor at all. Can’t really blame the algo for such a unique situation and at the end of the day a saturated system is a saturated system and nothing can be done to make it fast, but it’s always interesting to witness when a system is completely unable to accommodate a demand like that.
(In the example above we gave up and decided it was cardio time, five laps up and down 14 flights to escape with all our luggage.)
The idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies seems insane to me. Widespread petty crime, lack of shared cultural norms and traditions, lacking of missing social reinforcement of expectations of a society - those are what prevent high trust societies from forming. I consider those things a much worse problem then Flock cameras.
>The idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies seems insane to me.
Only because, I'm betting, that you view street surveillance as something that binds others, but not yourself. I doubt you would make this argument for any other kind of surveillance.
If Microsoft were to record everything you did on your PC, would you consider Windows the "high trust" OS community vs Linux? Of if your employer began surveilling all your devices (including personal ones) to ensure you weren't stealing from the company, would you consider your company one of "high trust"?
I don't deny that surveillance can reduce crime, but the idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies is relatively straightforward
No, we had high trust societies before the shitty surveillance tech. There are quite a few effects that undermine it even and this tech is part of the reason why.
It is part of the problem, not part of a solution.
100% Agree. And I'll go further saying the highest trust societies I've lived in have been medium-size, rural/suburban. Everyone is in the social/economic class, similar traditions/backgrounds, similar church etc...
I don't think surveillance prevents crime. Not having so many poor people prevents crime.
Some people will always be antisocial due to tendencies and possibly mental illness, but having a society that is so rich and yet has so many poor people as the USA will of course create criminals. No amount of cameras will solve that.
I would agree with that, but we probably have different definitions of poor. Destitute? Absolutely. I don’t think anybody is shocked that starving people commit crimes to not die.
However, I have been in plenty of low income high trust areas. In some ways, those were even more high trust.
Economics play a role, but there is a moral and cultural fabric that gets built through repeated interactions overtime. Unfortunately, that fabric is very susceptible to damage.
Eg: there are plenty of towns where you wouldn’t have to lock your car or even your bike, but it only takes a couple thefts for the entire culture to change…
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