alt Hacker NewsThere is a weird fetish with Flock right now. Privacy advocates have been screaming at the public for 25 years now and suddenly the public cares and is obsessed with this one very specific company.
Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7.
I mean, cool, stop Flock, but don't stop there. Flock is very much not the final boss in this fight. The cynic in me says we will all get bored once Flock is off the radar though.
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I don't think it's a "weird fetish." It's just most of the things privacy advocates have been warning about - PRISM, warrantless metadata requests, tech companies handing over data - are all largely invisible.
A camera pointing at your child's playground or gymnastics class is much more salient.
>Nevermind license plate readers have been collecting your data for decades. Nevermind you literally carry a tracking device on your person, likely 24/7.
While the above is a difference in scale, the various "credit bureaus" have been doing this stuff for much, much longer.[0][1][2]
That's not to excuse the use of ALPRs and tracking on mobile devices. It's all really creepy and collection and trade in such should have strong negative incentives (company breaking fines, loss of corporate charter, jail time, etc.).
In the meantime, one has to deal with at least some of this stuff unless you're willing to go live in a leanto in the woods.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#History
It’s easier to consider responses or solutions to specific problems, rather than to solve for a broad, general principle. You can see this in many areas of life. Solving for general principles requires group effort (usually); you can get buy-in from individuals if you csn focus them on specific cases or subsets. So the Floxk fetish is reasonable at this point, IMO.
There’s also nothing inherently wrong with carrying sensors in your pocket. The “wrong” is in the providers/manufacturers exploiting the position they put themselves in. Managing data is hard, and most people don’t want to do the necessary work most of the time, so the providers/manufacturers offer to do that for their users/customers. However, they also exploit their csretaker position by tresting the data like they own it too, and extracting profit.
If the solutions to the Flock problems could be framed such that other providers/manufacturers had to build systems that were “local first” or “private by default” (as in pre-internet home computing plus explicit, finegrained shsring consents), then it would also be fine to carry sensors. I want my fitness tracker and GPS. I just don’t want the data it generates used to build advertising profiles on me such that ads (and government mass surveillance dragnets) can follow my every other move.