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  • 16 Posts
  • 1.13K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Did you read the article provided?

    Even a police officer cannot just follow someone around all day every day, without reasonable articulable suspicion. They would also be guilty of harassment and/or criminal stalking.

    Again, it’s not that a camera is recording that’s the problem. It’s the infrastructure behind those cameras that aggregate all the data into a single database which requires no cause to search. Anyone with a badge/title can track anyone throughout the whole country, with no probable cause, no warrant, and no oversight. They don’t even have to say why they’re searching the system.

    An ex partner fleeing an abusive boyfriend/girlfriend that happens to be a police officer (or that has a police officer buddy) can and will be hunted down by that ex, and nobody will know until it’s too late. This system directly puts people in danger.


    at least 50 documented cases across the United States in which law enforcement officers have been charged with or accused of misusing AI-powered automated license plate reader systems to conduct unauthorized surveillance of intimate partners, ex-partners, or women they wanted to meet. In 26 of those cases, prosecutors and investigators concluded that officers used the technology specifically to spy on wives, girlfriends, former partners, their exes’ new partners, or women they sought to approach.


    These systems also get used by government agencies (on both sides of the spectrum) to track anyone that disagrees with their political stance, fishing for ways to harass, jail, or run them out of town/state. Governments given this type of power stop being democracies and become dictatorships; because anyone that could or would challenge them get hunted down.


    I see nothing wrong with what you’re doing in public being available to law enforcement.

    It wouldn’t be a problem if every person with access to this system was 100% honest and just; but thats simply not the reality of the world. There are ALWAYS people that will abuse these types of tools for evil purposes. That’s why we have a court system instead of just making every police officer ‘judge, jury, and executioner’.

    Flock removes the court system and puts all the power in every single officers hands. That is NOT a good thing.

    ‘Every police officer has good intentions’ is a fantasy. If you can’t see that, you’ve spent way too much time inside.


  • Flock effectively follows you around like a stalker.

    If I was to follow you around all day, recording everything you do (even if I just stay in public spaces), I would be guilty of harassment and potentially criminal stalking. Flock does the same thing, just via a network of cameras instead of literally following you in person.

    There are tons of public cameras, but they’re owned by seprate individuals/companies. You’d be required to get permission from each ones owner to collect their footage, which in itself provides saftey against stalkers. The owners of that footage are in no way obligated to provide it and will likely refuse without being given a good reason. They may even still refuse until provided with a court order. That oversight, from both the footage owners and the courts that order it to be handed over, protects people from unlawful harassment, particularly stalkers.

    The fact that Flock provides anyone with a badge/title the ability to freely search a massive database for every public location a person has been, what they were wearing, how they walk, what bluetooth devices they had, their mode of transport (plus every detail about it Flock can extract), facial recognition data, and more - is terrifying. 0 oversight: no warrant, no reasonable suspicion, no evidence of a crime; just following you around hoping to catch you doing something they don’t like (regardless of whether it’s illegal activity or not).


    If you haven’t yet, you should really read that article I posted above.

    A single search query recruits that entire network as a passive tracking apparatus. An officer who sets a specific plate on a “hot list” receives an automatic alert whenever that vehicle appears anywhere in the system — across city limits, across state lines, across jurisdictions the officer has no authority in. The abuser does not need to be present. The cameras do the watching for him.




  • HR departments get flooded with AI generated applications by the truckload making automating rejections the only viable way to keep up

    That goes both ways. Employers have been auto rejecting applicants for years, so applicants have shifted to automating applications.

    Why should someone looking for a job take the time to craft an application, when it gets rejected without a person ever actually looking at it.


    Last time I went job hunting (2yrs ago), I got a response from less than 1% of the jobs I applied to.












  • Drones are an effective tool on an open battle field; but they operate under wildly different conditions. Wide open spaces and short contacts (find target, ram to explode. They don’t have to loiter and maintain that contact).

    A pepper spray equipped drone in a school??? Tight enclosed spaces with halls and doorways (that are usually closed) you’ve got to navigate. Quad copters are loud, and that’d be amplified by that enclosed space. Without sufficient distance to keep out of reach they’d be an easy target to take down by the assailant. To use the spray, you’d have to get near, deploy it, and escape before being struck down; giving the spray to the assailant to harvest and use.

    AND they’ve only got 8min of flight time.




  • ‘I’m not the problem, everyone else is’. 🤦

    I tried to carve out a space where those people and other rougher edges were not drowning out niche communities and hobbies and where people who choose to use the platform to harass others were also out of sight, out of mind.

    All he had to do was make his own instance, where he can defederate from/block whoever he likes. Let users decide if they want to be a part of it.

    Good intentions don’t justify bad actions, and abusing the trust instilled in you as a developer of a popular tool is rarely taken lightly.

    Imposing your own personal opinionated blacklists on other peoples platforms without their knowledge and consent was never going to go well, no matter what your intentions are. ESPECIALLY in the fediverse; a system built to prevent exactly that behaviour.


    The DDOS code however…

    Frankly that should be considered criminal. This dev should be facing jail time for that alone.