LazyMans

"Some were small, single-operator outfits. Others were larger, operating dozens of vehicles."

Arn't there hundreds of thousands of owner-operators? I don't doubt high costs drive some people out of business, but this seems insignificant to report on. An engine failure could bankrupt a poorly run operator too. What are the typical numbers?

Many, hyper local as well as NPU level. They're quite powerful meetings.

Yes. An individual with a lack of regard for the process trying to talk about flock in a slot allocated for a separate topic. People don't just get to make up their own rules in these meetings. When people do this, it destroys their credibility, the credibility of whatever they are trying to speak on, and is disrespectful to all the people in attendance.

Exactly. We have an individual that started doing this constantly in our local neighborhood meetings. It makes the entire meeting so dreadful attendance began to drop off. Fortunately we finally acted and threatened to bar and trespass them if they didn't stop. Complete lack of respect for the process and others.

The irony of this quote, is it's about a communities right to fund their own defense when the greater powers (London at the time, federal gov't now) will not provide what is needed. It's about a community having the power and holding that power. The flock business model is precisely this. Those who pay for the cameras decide how it is used. Your participation in local government will have greater and faster impact in the use of your local ALPR technology than the federal government will have for a long time.

The smaller cameras can serve two product lines. Not at the same time though. One is live video, one is alpr. You will see what looks like falcons aimed at areas with no cars for this reason. Btw, all of this is on their website

You can retrieve images with FOIA. You’re not going to see good images with faces.

Some research done by others has uncovered a good bit of how they’re designed to function. They’re aimed to get a good look at plates.

The same cameras can be sold for purely video functionality. Those would be aimed differently. Like at the entrance to a store, etc. Whatever the customer wanted.

This is why the courts have not ruled it a violation. It’s not following you. Not literally taking precise measurements of your position. It’s not even you, nor could it be proven you are even driving in the majority of cases. It’s an image of the rear of a car. Only while passing a stationary point.

What is to be decided, is how many single points does it take to be considered “precise” measurement. If I put a camera every 500ft of roadway, is it tracking how? Probably. Still not your though, it’s a car. Is a car an extension of you? Do your rights extend to the car?

In case law, even though a phone is not you, it’s considered an extension of you. A car is not. A phones location data continues even when in the privacy of your home, or in a private building. A church, a hospital, whatever.

That is why cellular gps data requires a warrant.

Dispersed points on a map, with a timestamp, and image of the rear of a car are not the same.

The general public are not lawyers and will not always understand all the terms across the multi-page terms of service. For all intents and purposes. The customers “own” it. For a SaaS company. What this looks like legally is “licensing” of data to Flock from the customer. Terms like that are needed to properly and defensibly “handle” footage and assets. Manage storage, retrieve and serve the content, etc.

The ToS is negotiable. As it usually is when talking large sums of money. You can retrieve this with a FOIA request and see how they tend to be unique to each city. Some customers like to define the relationship differently or make additional restrictions for data handling.

I really just want to point out that layman terms and contract law are two different things.

I wouldn’t care if anonymized data is being used,I would care if I’m told I control sharing but it turns out I don’t. It’s not clear to me Flock did anything wrong. It sounds like that department inadvertently shared with a federal agency because it wasn’t obvious to them they were doing so. (Federal agencies are clearly marked as such now, product complies with state law to prevent accidental sharing)

I think it’s a problem to not clarify what “track” means. Usually people are referring to and afraid of a system tracking their location, building a profile, facial recognition, etc. Yes the camera can recognize what a person is vs another object and if PTZ, will follow them. No it doesn’t do all that other stuff.

That wasn't the CEO, and "lie" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. A non-product person (CISO) was being asked if a specific feature exists and they believed it did not. Should they have said something along the lines of, "as far as I know, no" yes, they should have. It's a mistake, not a lie. Lie would require intentionally having knowledge of it and trying to obscure that fact.

I think the biggest change I like to see is locking out users on suspicious activity, instead of waiting for police departments to police their own.

In comparison to what? Buyers usually want this to be lower. Historically quite low still.

When humans are involved, it's a given there will be abuse. There always has been and always will be abuse of power, in every single part of society where power can exist. The question becomes what can be done about it? If policing continues to rely more on digital tooling for tasks, there is now a trail of evidence. We should expect tools like this, and really anything digital to have strong tracking of actions performed.

Wether or not an agency takes action on internal or external reports of abuse is a local agency issue it seems.