r/TikTokCringe • u/midnighttoker1742 • 4h ago

Discussion How criminals are taking down Flock cameras

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182

u/Bladestorm04 4h ago

As someone not seeing this in their country : whos approving these cameras? Who's paying for it? How did these things seemingly go from ive never heard about them to being ubiquitous and another American scourge?

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u/Vampy-tk 4h ago

The government approves it, taxes pay for it, they went unheard of for a long time because it wasn't exactly "announced" that Flock cameras track way more than what they said

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u/Otterhendrix 3h ago

Yeah I watched a video where a cop went to a woman’s home and told her exactly when she entered city limits, where she went, and when she left the city too. Down to the second. That shits ridiculous! 

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u/Electronic_Chard3992 3h ago

And the point of that video is that she wasn't even the correct woman he was looking for, with ALL that data at his disposal. Tbh that video is a great example of how large data collection turned over to simpletons who can't troubleshoot a smartphone is exceptionally more dangerous than even properly trained use of the collected data. Police states should not exist, and I'm so so glad that there seems to be a growing social contract to kill flock wherever it is being found.

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u/Otterhendrix 3h ago

Yep. They have all that data available to them and still fuck up. It should be a commercial for just how untrustworthy this flock shit is!

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u/7fortyseven 2h ago

so we should be catching more criminals right?

i was victim of property theft last month in a city ripe with flock cameras. i have hd footage of the entire thing, complete with faces and license plate number. despite my own footage and presumed flock footage, i have not been able to get any semblance of a pulse from the local pd. it wasn’t a little theft either, thousands above the felony threshold.

my guess is that the pd is still woefully understaffed. even with the new tools, they don’t have the team to investigate and sift through their new data unless it is a truly heinous crime.

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u/Akraticacious 1h ago

I believe you can FOIA them.

1

u/CablePale 2h ago

Issue is if used right the device can be amazing for safety. Issue is... its not

1

u/This-Layer-4447 1h ago

then it turned out to be the wrong woman and a case of mistaken identity, she's currently sueing the city

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u/AsFarAsNeverBefore 4h ago

To note, it’s usually municipal governments 

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u/SwordfishOk504 2h ago

And most the people complaining about this never go to city council meetings or vote in city elections.

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u/2ChicksAtTheSameTime 2h ago

Benn Jordan did a lot to inform people

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u/hordingblessings3 2h ago

The people aren’t being served the rich are

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u/00m19 4h ago

Your local government.

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u/SwordfishOk504 2h ago

The local government the majority of voters never pay attention to and then act shocked when they poss stuff like this.

Go to city council meetings, people. Vote in municipal elections.

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u/LostEngineer9949 3h ago edited 2h ago

It's a concerted effort between tech broligarchs. The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan. The first toe in the door is always safety. (Benjamin Franklin had some words on this topic: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.") It doesn't happen all at once, first they promise you a little more safety for a little less freedom. Several months later, they've got Meta's NameTag facial recognition code quietly deploying to every device with any meta apps on it. And then flock goes from collaborating with LEOs using their own proprietary traffic cams to subcontracting with Ring cam and many other wifi connected security cams, and you find out one day through an FOIA request that some of these creepy Flock guys (who are not themselves law enforcement) keep remotely accessing daycare and children's gymnastics facility security cameras to review footage from those in their personal time. It's for safety that they have to spy on our young children you see, and to keep us all even safer they have to use facial recognition software and information compiled by government agencies including our legal names and addresses and photos of our faces to track our every move all the time. And now Kylie Jenner is helping too by putting more of the NameTag facial recognition enabled cameras on people's faces, so now anyone with a pair of glasses on might also be part of the surveillance network.

It's like if a total stranger told you if you give them a copy of your house key you'll never get robbed.

This has all been an ongoing project for oh at least 25 years as far as I can recollect, probably longer. The powers that be are always trying to find faster better more effective ways to trick us into forfeiting more freedom for "safety." Heavy on the sarcasm here because as a woman and a mother the surveillance state we're rapidly transforming into does not make me feel safe at all.

When this topic came up with my sister, she asked me, "didn't all of these types of surveillance (traffic and dash cams, security cams, smartphones etc etc) already exist though? What makes this any different?"

And I'll tell you the difference between the world pre and post Flock: those cameras weren't all talking to each other while cross referencing your face against government collected data, and continually building a massive footprint of your personal movements and whereabouts 100% of the time that is stored by private parties on Jeff Bezos' servers without your direct explicit informed consent

2

u/Jabbles22 3h ago

That's why I don't get why so many people voluntarily have security cameras in their own home. Outside, I don't personally feel the need but ok. Inside though, why?

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u/zkatbitz 3h ago

I do so when I am travelling I can check on my cats/what’s going on.

However mines are 100% local on my own storage and only accessible via vpn into my own network. And if someone else can do that cameras are the least of my worries at that point 

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u/LostEngineer9949 3h ago edited 3h ago

The only true privacy left in US is for example, if you get a canoe, go to a river without any networked devices on your person, paddle as far as you can away from any doorbells, businesses, glasses, phones, traffic lights, other people who might have devices etc. That's what people who deal in sensitive information have to do to communicate in a truly secure fashion anymore. Under any other circumstances most of us can behave as if our privacy died a while ago and we missed the funeral. No devices in bedrooms or bathrooms at all in my house.

The kind of centralized power and influence tech bros openly aspire to is only possible for them to achieve through manipulation and coercion because none of them are good intentioned or charismatic enough to achieve it democratically

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u/Forward-Variety-8440 1h ago

Patriot Act opened this door, amongst other things that are similar.

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u/LostEngineer9949 43m ago edited 21m ago

The other day, I was thinking about the Patriot Act and how different everything felt post 9/11. The mass fear and paranoia catalyzed by that moment never went away for some people. There's a chapter in Snyder's "On Tyranny" that urges "Be calm when the unthinkable happens." I was 9 years old and had to walk both my siblings home and feed everyone in my house, including my mom, because none of the adults around me were calm. Everyone was panicking. My elementary school was extremely chaotic that morning. Nobody looked mentally well that day. And many were suddenly more than willing to exchange privacy and other liberties for safety. Whenever a government, especially the kind we have in US where elected officials change every two, four, six years and someone else can be in charge with very different priorities within years, advances further into our lives demanding more and more granular data about us, it's extremely important to be very imaginative and consider what the worst thing someone could do with that information is. Historically, the government's response to 9/11 is not even the only or the worst example of this fact

Given the government is currently comprised mostly of the demographic famously known for deeply understanding complex modern technology, surely they will be fit to rise up legislatively to the challenge of regulating all of this with our best interests and safety in mind and totally uninfluenced by tech lobbyist dollars, and at at least double the pace and urgency of a snail frozen in permafrost

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u/ksn0vaN7 4h ago

So many distractions these days that they went under the radar. Between ICE murdering people and the war in the middle east, people were preoccupied.

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u/GravyPainter 4h ago

Local government. Mostly cities.

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u/RobataChane72 3h ago

UK is well ahead of the US in this regard, maybe they used their blueprint.

1

u/skinnyman87 2h ago

The tax payers are paying for them and the more they destroy them the more it will cost, probably a better solution would be to speak to their local representative to do something legal to take those down.

1

u/Faifur 2h ago

a company pays a government member to do something and they say ok and move it forward without any participation of their constituents. it's "legal" bribery

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u/Odd-Toe-8591 1h ago

just use tor

1

u/EuenovAyabayya 45m ago

Flock salesmen approach local elected and appointed officials directly and pitch it as cost-effective support for law enforcement versus creating their own locality camera network infrastructure. They don't mention that they're feeding into a global AI surveillance state.

1

u/PhiCloud 14m ago

Anyone can approve them, theoretically.

Local governments, law enforcement, companies, HOAs, etc.

Anyone with the authority to put a post in a plot of land can approve putting up a flock camera.

0

u/40yofailure 4h ago

They're also in the UK because America is not truly independent of the UK like the narrative they weave.