Comment First Flock, then us (Score 2) 42
Of course people should beware. Anyone who has a problem with Flock is surely aware that they are only a fraction of "the problem," though among the more visible.
I'm concerned that some Flock haters might take us down a slippery slope to where you can't have a camera in your house if it looks out onto the street, or that you shouldn't be allowed to record cops, or that I shouldn't be allowed to have a camera attachment on my Manhattan apartment balcony telescope that I normally just use to furiously goon to the good people of NYC who don't close their curtains. (Oops, forget that third example.)
I can't say I'm a fan of Flock but if their rights are infringed in a way that might possibly expand to everyone else, then they will need to be defended.
That said, I have a modest proposal for the law-enforcement-related problems of surveillance vendors. Require non-warrant sharing with LE to be unreliable. For every geo search, remove a random half of the applicable results and replace them with deliberate, randomized false positives, so that LE will know the data shouldn't be taken too seriously on its own. If cops act without confirmation while KNOWING it's _at least_ 50% likely to be wrong, that'll help with the civil suits for false arrests.
