I would love to watch a shorter version of this video that just discussed the deltas between the status quo and Flock, rather than breathlessly reporting the implications of cameras as if they were distinctive to Flock. He'll spend 30 seconds talking about how you can see <i>every</i> activity and <i>every</i> person on the camera --- yeah, that's how cameras work. There are thousands of public IP cameras on the Internet, aimed at intersections, public streets, houses, playgrounds, schools; most of them operated that way deliberately.<p>There <i>are</i> Flock-specific bad things happening here, but you have to dig through the video to get to them, and they're not intuitive. The new Flock "Condor" cameras are apparently auto-PTZ, meaning that when they detect motion, they zoom in on it. That's new! I want to hear more about that, and less about "I had tears in my eyes watching this camera footage of a children's playground", which is something you could have done last week or last year or last decade, or about a mental health police wellness detention somewhere where all the cops were already wearing FOIA-able body cams.<p>If open Flock cameras gave you the Flock search bar, that would be the end of the world. And the possibility that could happen <i>is</i> a good reason to push back on Flock. But that's not what happened here.
Have you ever gone fishing? Did you catch all the fish?<p>Often it is more impactful to address one major/tangible player in a particular space than it would be to "boil the ocean" and ensure that we are capturing every possible player/transgressor. I agree that some of the video was overly breathless, but if that's what wakes people up to the dangers of unsecured cameras/devices then so be it.
Ok, you're the second person to say that, and I think my point is not clear enough. That's on me.<p>This response would make sense if I was saying "why focus on Flock, there are so many other ALPR cameras out there" (also true, but not relevant to my point).<p>But this is a video that is <i>mostly</i> about things that are true of <i>all</i> IP cameras, of the kind that we've had staring out onto public streets for decades, plural decades. People celebrated those cameras, thought they were super neat, built sites indexing them. All of them do most of the same things this video says those Flock cameras did, the tiny minority of Flock cameras you can access publicly.
In my experience, people respond much more strongly to naming a specific company or person. Clearer plan of action than a resigned “This tech is old news.”
If your takeaway from that comment is that ‘tptacek thinks Flock’s tech is old news and he’s resigned about it, I think you’re going to be in for a treat.
Is the plan of action "eliminate all public IP cameras"? That's coherent, I'd get it, but that doesn't seem to be what he's saying at all. He used a Google search to find exposed Flock admin consoles (interesting! say more about that!) but he could just as easily have just searched "open IP cameras"; there's sites that do nothing but index those.
He's pretty open in this video about how Flock is far from alone in this space, and he's just using them as an example because they're so popular and flagrantly abusive.
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