▲ 147 points
back
137 comments
Having no expectation of privacy in public used to be a reasonable stance when there was a real time+money cost to extended surveillance, which meant that you still had a moderate amount of privacy unless someone was willing to personally target you and spend significant resources.
You either had to have a cop or a PI tail you, or spend time and effort talking to neighbors and acquaintances collecting information and correlating it, and it was much harder to do so secretly.
Technology has reduced the cost of surveillance by several orders of magnitude, and although the premise is unchanged - that you've never had privacy in public - the practical impact has changed in an extremely disturbing way.
I think we're long overdue to rethink and strengthen privacy protections in public in the US. Technological limits, and policy limits on specific implementations are better than nothing, but it's clear to me that surveillance will continue to get cheaper and thus your effective privacy in public will continue to erode until a culture and legal shift in public privacy expectations. I'm not optimistic about that.
I agree with your historical analysis, and I'm also uncomfortable with the total surveillance, but I'm not sure I buy there exist effective legal solutions. The truth is that everyone carries a camera, that all vehicles have cameras and will to a greater and greater degree be using those cameras all the time. I don't know what kind of limits we can put on the lack of privacy there that aren't incredibly intrusive attempts to control everyone's behavior or stop all technology.
> Having no expectation of privacy in public
People have been getting more risk-averse, as well as nosier over time. Both of these changes increase the push for surveillance. I agree with your intuition that people shouldn't have to worry about being constantly monitored, but if you look at the recent internet pile-on after both the Coldplay concert and tennis match incidents, I am not sure the (voting) public agrees.
>"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
-H. L. Mencken
Break the system. Non-trivial for various reasons but flood the market with low cost microwave imaging devices. I wonder how people would react if Flock camera sized devices that could see through clothes existed at a competitive price point?
Oh lord, think of the children folks. We're going to have to shut it all down.
No expectation of privacy in public is tautological, that’s what public means. Your feelings of embarrassment or paranoia don’t trump my right to observe what’s going on in the public domain.
For a video overview of this stuff:
“Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras”, Benn Jordan [36min, 1.7m views, 9d ago]
I'm wondering if it's possible to make a "reasonable" looking frame (that sits entirely outside the plate, not obstructing or obscuring it) for a license plate that breaks up the shape (with the same colors) to reduce detection success further. Possibly with some IR retroreflector decorations.
I'm currently experimenting with this. It's been hard for me to find a pattern that the ai can't read without making it hard to visually read the plate.
Deflock is a thing. https://discord.gg/2Ug7KC2R
There's a lot of local Flock maps out there. You can also submit your own.
For those who are more inclined to direct protest, you can spraypaint the lenses and/or the solar panels. If you dont want to get caught with spraypaint, use nutella or peanut butter. Its sticky and easily spreadable. Not that I would ever recommend vandalization.
Sure, the EFF and ACLU are going the legal route. That's all they can do.
Why not link to an actual map such as https://deflock.me/ instead of a walled garden that is likely a surveillance and data mining platform?
> Deflock is a thing. https://discord.gg/2Ug7KC2R
Can you describe what this is?
If this is related to your other point about spraypainting lenses, I don't want to accidentally start clicking links for Discords about vandalizing government operations from my home IP address.
I use flock maps (but not this discord -- it smells suspicious to me) so that I can be aware of what streets to avoid traveling on.
Using one surveillance platform to organize against another...
Giving detailed instructions and then saying "but I wouldn't recommend it" is just saying "please do this but don't put me in jail for telling you to do it".
Governments are not stupid and such tactics don't work.
I certainly expect Tesla to use the cameras on their cars for similar purposes if they haven't already. Although I would expect them to distance themselves from it by selling the location data 'in aggregate' to another company that interfaces with law enforcement agencies.
I used to say, "If you're gonna commit crimes, leave your cell phone at home." [1] However, now it's, "If you're gonna commit crimes, leave your cell phone at home at cover your license plates." ... But seriously, just don't commit crimes.
[1] I was a juror on a case years ago, maybe 2010 - some dudes robbed a jewelry store early in the morning. It took the cops about 15 minutes to figure out who did it because the crooks all brought their cell phones, and it was early, so they were the only cell phones in the area at the time. The accused looked shell-shocked during the trial when the cops explained this. Oh yeah, it didn't help that they told all their friends what they had done, and they tried to pawn the jewelry to a former cop.
During the whole Fannie Willis shindig they dredged up decade old (i.e. before any of these people mattered) cell location data reports and introduced them as evidince with less than no fanfare as though they were as standard as googling someone's name. I think that speaks volumes about the kind of tracking we're subject to.
Presumably today the lack of your cell phone following its normal location patterns (i.e. you left the phone at home while you committed the crime) would be a data point, too.
Just throw a SovCit plate on the back of your car. You weren't driving, you were traveling.
Related just yesterday:
AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America
Also,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44561716 ("Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds (sfstandard.com)", 563 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40222649 ("Flock Safety is the biggest player in a city-by-city scramble for surveillance (newsobserver.com)", 143 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41979258 ("License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars (wired.com)", 24 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33994205 ("Flock is Building a New AI-Driven Mass-Surveillance System [pdf] (aclu.org)", 15 comments)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
Benn Jordan did a great video on this.
People on here regularly bash the EU's GDPR, but blocking this kind of corporate-driven police state is a heavy point in its favor.
"Such a system provides even small-town sheriffs access"
Huh? Sheriffs are top law enforcement for a county, not a particular city. There's only one per county, everyone else is a deputy. This seems strange for someone like the ACLU to not know this
Yeah, in Washington state law, sheriffs are called out "the chief executive officer and conservator of the peace of the county."
Additionally, they're the only law enforcement officer directly accountable to the people, since they're elected. This isn't true of literally any other law enforcement at any level (local to fed).
A sheriff would typically have an office in the county seat, and that county seat could be a small town. This is what the sentence is referring to.
It's an American English idiom -- "small town" as a synonym for remote rural areas. Not incredibly common but not unusual. It shows up as a tag in TMDB (movie database) and Goodreads, and I believe there's at least one romance novel using the term.
More of turn of phrase than a statement of belief on where sheriffs work I’d say. Calling in a vague wild west vibe.
> Huh? Sheriffs are top law enforcement for a county, not a particular city. There's only one per county, everyone else is a deputy. This seems strange for someone like the ACLU to not know this
A “small-town sheriff” is a common idiom describing the sheriff of a county whose seat is a small town, rather than big city. It is a common phrase in American English.
This seems strange that someone commenting on HN that has enough concern for American society to have an opinion about what the ACLU should not know this.
Once again I am struck by how tech makes the world smaller. We're back to a small village or tribal camp where everyone knows your business all the time. It appears the last 50-100 years were a golden age of privacy and an aberration, not the norm.
"everyone knows your business all the time"
Not everyone. Only the people with access to the surveillance data. This asymmetry is a big problem.
> We're back to a small village or tribal camp where everyone knows your business all the time.
I would be much less concerned about the issue if it were limited to the equivalent of a small village. The problem is that it's not.
At least you could always leave the small village. Can't really do that anymore.
I will argue that it was heavily decentralized, but there was never a golden era when the village didn't know what you were up to. Even if someone was well known in the mafia and street goons weren't talking, there were detectives writing down who you were talking to, and putting it all together, and saving it in a filing cabinet.
Anything you've read about and was appalled by in dystopian literature is already here, and not in some distant future.
Wait, you mean if I go for a nice morning drive, I'm going to get harassed by people in Modern Safety Vehicles trying to run my MGB off the road?
I continue to believe that privacy in public spaces is not a civil liberty and we should not be treating it as such. You have the right to be secure in your home or in private spaces, but it is your obligation to ensure that you have made an effort to preserve that privacy. Once you are in public, there should be no expectation that anything that another person could see or otherwise observe is not subject to public exposure.
We should not be expending effort trying to regulate the state's ability to observe and record any publicly observable thing. When the state takes action to deliberately make public or otherwise observe things that are reasonably private, then we can activate the right to be free of searches and seizures without probably cause.
The one area that I do feel affects this particular debate is whether it should be legal to conceal your vehicle's identity, so long as it is not being done for fraudulent or criminal purposes. Here I think the fact that your car's identity is being observed and recorded is sufficient cause to make it reasonable to mask or alter your license place or other identifying aspects of your car.
> We should not be expending effort trying to regulate the state's ability to observe and record any publicly observable thing.
But then what can we do? Are we supposed to just never leave our homes? If we can't regulate the power of the state to minimize the harm it can cause, then all is lost.
Also, Flock isn't just a "power of the state" sort of thing. It's a private company and is often used by private entities.
There was a time, when I sincerely thought ACLU was there to protect civil liberties.
These days, I don’t know. Certainly an instrument of a particular party. Plus, owned by various special interest groups beyond that.
Fighting this kind of surveillance is definitely protecting civil liberties. And if you don't like the ACLU, the IJ is also fighting: https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/ https://www.plateprivacy.com/
How does the ACLU count to ten? 1, 3, 4, 5…
Seriously, though - they’re 100% correct on this one. Flock cameras are abhorrent, and I’m honestly aghast that people aren’t up in arms.
Remember that you are not being tracked, the vehicle is, because the vehicle is the dangerous thing.
The baseline expectation of anyone operating heavy machinery in public should be that it is tracked for safety and accountability. This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
I understand for many people, their movements and their vehicle's movements are 1:1, so it can feel like tracking their vehicle is tracking them. If you care about privacy, travel without the heavy machinery. Walk, bike, transit. If your region does not allow you to do this, direct your privacy-related energy towards making that possible, rather than reducing accountability for drivers.
Edit: I wonder how the commenters below feel about tracking jets, probably similar to how I feel about tracking their cars.
That's a whole lotta words for "it's ok because it's happening to people who do a thing I don't like"
And then you justify it by lying to us?
> This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
Taxes was priority #1. This is a matter of public record. Being able to ascribe ownership as needed in edge case circumstances as a second order goal. Tracking was never really a priority because it was never really possible to do at scale before.
>Walk, bike, transit.
Ah, yes, the bus and subway with their always on 4k cameras that are being fed into god knows what software and algorithms which are then populating god knows what databases.
> We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
We have been putting license plates on vehicles for decades with the intent of tracking their individual movements down to the minute? And here I thought it was for identifying their owners.
It's not just license plates.
> Turn Partial Details Into Leads Start with a vague description and surface real evidence from LPR and video.
> Search With Natural Language Just type what you’re looking for, like “man in blue shirt and cowboy hat,” and get visual matches instantly.
While I sort of agree with the premise, Flock is a camera system - I can't opt out of being recorded by the camera. By walking, I'm only opting out of being easily catalogued by default. It's not a reach for Flock to add a "men with black hoodies" mechanism alongside the existing "BMW with plate ABC-1234" mechanism.
I dont't recall this being anywhere in the documentation or terms of the licensing of a vehicle. Did I miss that part?