I always think that the best way to get stuff regulated is make those in power feel the risks.<p>So if people started using something like flock to embarrass politicians, business leaders, or newspaper leader writers then suddenly privacy might become a big issue.
I think the person requesting to access the data was doing the right thing and I agree with the judge’s ruling.<p>The fact that they’re gonna shut it down, implies the scale of indiscriminate nature of data capture and the volume of data being captured.<p>These cameras are popping up all over the nation and if people realize how much data is being captured and where that data is going (or who it’s being sold to) and how it’s being used by government and private entities they would be appalled.<p>There’s been exposés about these cameras, everything from AI misidentification of “stolen” (not) vehicles and erroneous arrests and police encounters, to analysis of shopping patterns being sold back to private entities for better ad targeting. It’s wild.
The laws need to be updated. CCTV in public used to be fine because no one was actually watching it unless there was an incident. Now it’s possible to have AI watch every camera and correlate everything everywhere we need new privacy laws to reflect this capability.
I don't mind a local AI on an airgapped security camera network monitoring a camera and issuing an alert to a security guard. The issues are internet connectivity, data retention/mining/sale, and non-local processing (ie handing stuff off to a third party that does who knows what and probably doesn't take security seriously).
Even with that, I do mind.<p>Just as two trivial examples, even though neither affects me personally:<p>The estimated number of heroin users in the UK exceeds the total prison population. The number of class-A drug users in the UK is estimated to be so high that if they actually followed the minimum sentencing guidelines for possession, it would cause a catastrophic economic disaster both from all the people no longer working and also all of the people who suddenly had to build new prisons to hold them. I'm not interested in drugs (and I don't live in the UK, but I assume the UK isn't abnormal in this regard).<p>Another example is road traffic law. Even just speeding offences, I think you probably catch everyone who actually drives in the UK, often enough that after a month the only people left allowed to drive would be people like me who don't even own a car.<p>The entire legal system has to be radically changed with far less punishments for almost everything if you have perfect, or even 30% of the way to perfect, surveillance.
Speeding is a special case, because it's unclear what the lawmakers, road designers, and police intend. When the speed limit is 65 mph, do they actually intend for everyone to go no faster? I don't think so. I think the lawmakers, if driving in traffic, want people to go a bit faster. Same with the police. And I think the road designers design the roads knowing most people will speed.<p>I want to follow the law. But when it comes to speeding, it's hard for me to follow the letter of the law, because all the parties involved in creating and enforcing the law don't want me to follow the letter of the law. So I instead follow the intent of the law, and speed up to 9mph. When Google Maps pops up a "police ahead" warning, I don't slow down at all, because I'm following the intent of the law, and that's what police around where I live enforce. If I'm driving in other areas of the country, I'm less certain what police want, so I'll be more likely to follow the letter of the law.<p>If there was automated strict enforcement of speeding, then it would be clear to me that the letter of the law is the intent, so I would gladly obey the letter of the law. There would certainly need to be a transition period with clear warnings that in the future, the letter of the law will be enforced, instead of the current status of something looser.
> Another example is road traffic law. Even just speeding offences, I think you probably catch everyone who actually drives in the UK, often enough that after a month the only people left allowed to drive would be people like me who don't even own a car.<p>You don't have to strip the driving licenses. You should impose a fine and not an extremely painful one for starters.<p>And then probably within less than a year the whole population will drive properly.<p>I think I'm in favor of indiscriminately fining everyone speeding at every camera, but I realize there is no privacy-preserving way to do it today thus I will be against it.<p>(I'm a driver and car lover who is never speeding)
That's covered by "system has to be radically changed". UK driving licences give you room for 12 "penalty points" worth of mistakes before you risk being banned from the road, of which speeding costs you at least 3: <a href="https://www.gov.uk/penalty-points-endorsements/endorsement-codes-and-penalty-points" rel="nofollow">https://www.gov.uk/penalty-points-endorsements/endorsement-c...</a>
If speeding is not something that happens constantly, then a radar could detect the instances of speeding, and only turn on a camera when a speeding car is nearby. This would keep the majority of passing cars from being recorded, and would record the fewer cars the fewer drivers would be speeding.
> Even just speeding offences, I think you probably catch everyone who actually drives in the UK,<p>So we have a fucktonne of speed cameras allover the place: <a href="https://www.speedcameramap.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.speedcameramap.co.uk/</a> (you need to zoom in there are so fucking many)<p>But we have less redlight cameras than the US. we also have hatching cameras (yellow hatched boxes mean no stopping, usually at junctions) we <i>also</i> have bus lane cameras, where if you drive in a buslane you get a fine.<p>For the Speed cameras, they are normally put there based on evidence of road deaths linked to speeding. I dont <i>like</i> speed cameras, but they do serve a purpose.<p>When you get a speeding ticket, if its your first offence, you can take a speed awareness course, and you won't get points on your license. otherwise its three points and a £100 fine. The points age out after 3 years. the maximum you can normally get is 12 points on your license.<p>Its only in extreme cases do you get a ban, or license revoked.<p>The reason why people are still able to drive are numerous:<p>1) its been a gradual evolution.<p>2) we have fairly robust training for drivers (theory, comprehensive real world test)<p>3) Evidence based placement. Its not like they just shove these things where poor people live (or in the US where the city has zoned living for people with more melanin than others). If there are higher than average road crashes, the road is re-made to make it safer, speed limits dropped, traffic calming put in place, then speed cameras.<p>4) You are expected to follow the traffic rules<p>5) the traffic rules are actually pretty sensible.
> So we have a fucktonne of speed cameras allover the place: <a href="https://www.speedcameramap.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.speedcameramap.co.uk/</a> (you need to zoom in there are so fucking many)<p>Doesn't seem that many compared to what I was describing. At the scale of a country, "a lot" != "a high %".<p>Your point 3 is the biggest divergence between them.<p>Point 5 is only kinda true, the failure mode is weird: there's good reasons why the speed limit isn't enforced until you're significantly over it, but that in turn means it has to be set lower than physics and reaction times dictate, which in turn means people push back against them. 20 zones knowing people will do 25, chosen because if they were 30 zones people would do 35 and 35 is too fast, that kind of thing.<p>People who know that, let themselves go a bit over the limit; but a bit over means they get caught some of the time because of the same small occasional variations that are the reason why the speed limit isn't enforced at x+1 mph in the first place.
> we also have hatching cameras (yellow hatched boxes mean no stopping, usually at junctions)<p>Weirdly I've never encountered these in the US (only red light cameras) and do we ever need them. I'm generally opposed to government associated cameras due to concerns about turnkey authoritarianism but if we have to have cameras at intersections they could at least curb the awful self centered behavior.
I was a bit unclear. I agree, I don't want the government using AI to identify all violations of the law. That sounds like a very straightforward dystopia.<p>What I don't mind is private companies using AI analysis to support their security guards. I object to any sharing of the data with third parties though. It should be illegal for the data to leave their internal network and it should be illegal to retain it for more than a few days.<p>I don't care if grocery store loss prevention has eyes on every aisle. My concern is data warehousing and subsequent misuse.
Determining where the cameras are placed and what to alert on are also important and unresolved issues.<p>Simply getting alerts from a camera can cause people to believe that the area is a high-crime area, when it's merely a consequence of having a camera there.<p>Poor people are more like to be in public areas than rich pedophiles who can buy an island or ranch so they and their friends can enjoy wonderful secrets out of the eye of any Flock camera.<p>If the camera alerts on AI facial recognition for wanted criminals, and facial recognition causes disproportionally higher false alerts for people of south Asian heritage than of Anglo-Norman heritage, then systemic racism is built into the system, which we should all mind.
And the government needs to be restricted from buying data it wouldn’t be permitted to collect itself.
No. <i>Everyone</i> should be restricted from buying (or better: collecting) it, otherwise you just created the business model for evil corp that does the job and collects your tax dollar to do the same thing.
Yep, ban collection and pruchase of such data for everyone. Exceptions usually mean private companies hop in to offer the "service".<p>I think the current insane development are surveilance capitalists, trying to rush their panopticon to solidify their power. Guess that means no reasoable privacy law for the US, even under hypothetical president newsom.
Meh.<p>If the government is only restricted from <i>buying</i> the data, then they'll just have someone else buy it. Palantir is not the government. So they can buy the real time feed, analyze it in real time, and give the real time results of that analysis to the government without issue.<p>Restricting the government from buying that data does nothing. If you want to stop the government taking advantage of the data, then you would have to outlaw the collection of the data altogether. So that the initial collection of the data by anyone, is illegal.<p>Personally, I don't think that's gonna happen. There's way too many people making way too much money telling the government who hangs out with who, who cheats with who, and so on and so forth.
It was not fine then -- what we have now is simply even worse. We do not need to make concessions to our oligarchs: none of this is OK.
> the scale of indiscriminate nature of data capture and the volume of data being captured<p>It took a lot of naivete, to put it gently, and head-in-sand attitude to believe otherwise. Flock had everything in place to collect a treasure trove of data but they would decide not to do it? Out of principle? Or even if we take the very charitable interpretation that they don't do it today, but also that they'll never cave in to the pressure to do it in the future?
> Everett Mayor Cassie Franklin said the city disagrees with the ruling and is concerned about who could obtain the footage. “We were very disappointed,” Franklin said. “That means perpetrators of crime, people who are maybe engaged in domestic abuse or stalkers, they can request footage and that could cause a lot of harm.”<p>These people are fooling themselves if they think that keeping the cameras but not allowing the public to see the data will stop domestic abuse or stalkers. We've already seen these cameras used to stalk people and it wasn't random members of the public doing it, it was police officers. As long as this data is being collected it will be abused. If not by the public, then by police, or by Flock employees, or by hackers. The only way to protect people is to not gather the data at all. Anyone who keeps these cameras doesn't actually care about the public's safety.
I might be good with legal guarantees, meaning jail time for those involved, that the only place images on these devices went was local to the municipality collecting them and that they were only accessed for very well defined reasons by very specific people.<p>The core issues are that aggregation and exfiltration of this data means that privacy is dead and the AI world allows analysis for almost no cost. We need an idea in our laws that puts back the limited scope that technology has removed. If the police have to expend one person's worth of time to listen to a wiretap then it really isn't possible to get out of control. We need that level of cost associated with ALPR and all surveillance so that the abuse of these systems doesn't get out of control. Make it appropriately hard and it won't be a problem.
There is another looming threat of modern day surveilance: previously hidden correlations.<p>The data you found benign sharing in the past might allow unpleasant conclusions in the future <i>and might not even come from you personally</i>. Think about what toys you bought for your kids, or in what college milieu your worldview developed.
"Using metadata to find Paul Revere", a what-if of the American revolution.<p><a href="https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/" rel="nofollow">https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...</a>
Then the feds come in with a national security law and bypass all those state/local protections and slurp it all up into an AI-powered Palantir database, the very existence of which is classified. Suddenly you’re the victim of parallel construction and don’t even know it.<p>The database CANNOT EXIST SAFELY. Why don’t people who “might be okay with this IF…” understand that?<p>Collect the data and it WILL be misused, eventually, with 100% certainty. Has nobody read Snowden’s book? They even have a name for intel agents casually spying on their partners/crushes.<p>The law does not apply to everyone equally. The intelligence agencies get to break any laws they want without consequences, by longstanding tradition (remember 007’s “license to kill” or the CIA’s famous heart attack gun?). There are NO legal safeguards that can prevent abuse, no matter how you word them, because there will always be some animals who are “more equal than others” to whom they do not apply (“national security carve-out”, “LEO exception”, etc).<p>Sadly, those to whom they do not apply are now coordinating with the new wannabe SturmAbteilung in what are called “fusion centers”.
This is a good article about some of the legal particulars. <a href="https://www.heraldnet.com/2026/02/24/snohomish-county-judge-rules-flock-camera-footage-is-public-record/" rel="nofollow">https://www.heraldnet.com/2026/02/24/snohomish-county-judge-...</a><p>The defense of the photos not being government business until accessed seems shaky. That the physical camera installations were purposeful intentions to conduct government business in those areas is a reasonable line; this doesn't set precedent for Google's information becoming public records because the police might do a google search, to use an extreme example.<p>The proposed legislative amendment that would exclude Flock footage from public records (which would make this judgment moot) makes sense in the light of red light cameras already being excluded by the same legislators. However, I'd like to see a more incisive law covering both that would compel a reasonable amount of public insight into the footage.
URL is 404'ing. Another article..<p>> Cameras that automatically capture images of vehicle license plates are being turned off by police in jurisdictions across Washington state, in part after a court ruled the public has a right to access data generated by the technology.<p><a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2025/washington-state-cities-turn-off-license-plate-reader-cameras-amid-ruling-on-data-access/" rel="nofollow">https://www.geekwire.com/2025/washington-state-cities-turn-o...</a>
Awesome. I think I'll put in an open records request for the cameras down the street in my little Wisconsin town. See what happens
Funny I was thinking of doing that in my little Wisconsin town too. Howdy sorta neighborish HN user.
Wonder if we should coordinate doing it simultaneously in like 10,000 cities and towns?
Somewhat related discussion on Redmond Washington & Flock cameras: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45879101">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45879101</a>
The link is broken. Here is a working one. <a href="https://www.king5.com/article/news/community/facing-race/washington-immigration/everett-shuts-down-flock-cameras-judge-rules-footage-public-record/281-53d8693e-77a4-42ad-86e4-3426a30d25ae" rel="nofollow">https://www.king5.com/article/news/community/facing-race/was...</a>
*Flock (YC S17)<p><a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety</a>
Does them removing it simply because it’s public record imply that they were up to no good?
They're not removing cameras.<p>> For now, Everett’s Flock camera network remains offline, as the debate over transparency, privacy and public safety continues in the Legislature. The bill in Olympia that would put guidelines on Flock's data has passed in the Senate.
Well if they had nothing to hide... /s
> “We were very disappointed,” Franklin said. “That means perpetrators of crime, people who are maybe engaged in domestic abuse or stalkers, they can request footage and that could cause a lot of harm.”<p>No concern over the dozens (or hundreds?) of cases of police or government employees themselves doing exactly what they’re afraid of here. Strange.
While I agree with the risks of DA/stalkers getting that data, this data is not known for being well protected against LoveInt. Quite the opposite it is usually sold on grey markets.
Or for what can already be purchased from a data broker on the open market.
"The masses/general populace are the enemy" - once you understand that this is the fundamental belief at the root of the elites behaviour, everything will make sense. Flock cameras and AI surveillance is designed to reign in 'the enemy'.
The above link 404's for me, but <a href="https://www.wltx.com/article/news/nation-world/281-53d8693e-77a4-42ad-86e4-3426a30d25ae" rel="nofollow">https://www.wltx.com/article/news/nation-world/281-53d8693e-...</a> works.
This appears to be an informative link;<p><a href="https://www.everettpost.com/local-news/everett-temporarily-suspends-license-plate-cameras/" rel="nofollow">https://www.everettpost.com/local-news/everett-temporarily-s...</a>
According to the article, the Flock cameras are still in place but are "offline".<p>Why does that not convince me?
I am less worried about Flock ALPR (which are aimed in the direction of traffic flow to read rear number plates) as I am about the THOUSANDS of facial recognition cameras installed in the last year in all four directions at nearly every intersection in southern Nevada and many many cities in southern California (LA notably excepted). These are mounted above the stoplights and aimed <i>against</i> traffic at stoplights to read faces.<p>I mention these locales specifically only because I have directly observed them. I would be surprised if this isn’t also happening in many other US metro areas, given how eagerly DHS/TSA/CBP/ICE are mass collecting facial geometries at every available opportunity.
Anyone can tell, why were those cameras installed in first place? Some company just said "lol for the fun" or what? Who paid for them?
A mix of public (city councils) and private (think HOAs that then donated access/equipment to the city) contracted with Flock in the past few years.
The questions of exactly who, when, and why, are very muddy especially with the HOAs who operate rather privately.
The fact that they shut it down to avoid it becoming public record proves that light is still the best disinfectant against vermin.
Great now let’s follow suit in all 50 states.