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by ericmay·1d ago·view on hn ↗
I don't really care too much one way or the other about these cameras, and generally think it's probably bad to have more surveillance but could you help me understand what exactly is "unconstitutional" or even nefarious with these cameras provided they are bought and installed on property that is owned by the installer or an entity such as the government which presumably has legal justification for installing them?

I'm genuinely asking since I'm a bit out of touch with this latest controversy, but how are they any different than a dash cam, doorbell camera, or my alley camera, for example such that they deserve special consideration?

6 comments
It's the database query, not the physical cameras. In the pre-digital age where privacy was considered in constitutional law, tracking people's and vehicle's movements was horrendously expensive - you'd need multiple detectives doing things by hand per person of interest. This meant that it was reserved for when the government already had pretty strong reason to believe in some sort of wrongdoing. Even with a personal, non-internet-connected doorbell camera, the police would need to identify what cameras exist for a location and contact the owners in order for the footage to do anything.

With automated license plate readers, they can simply collect everything with a reasonably affordable network of cameras, then query the database when they want to find a particular pattern of activity. The police have already detained people for frequent border-crossing between marijuana-legal and illegal states. This gets exacerbated by granularity and extensiveness - imagine an anti-choice state pointing cameras at every maternity care parking lot in the state and tracking who visits them for cross-referencing with visits to pro-choice states.

And with the existence of parallel construction, there's no reasonable way short of dismantling the ALPR system to avoid abuse against the citizenry.

Please correct my understanding if this is not the case... so the issue isn't the cameras themselves it's that you believe (and I am sympathetic toward) that they are easily searchable without a warrant and so it's something akin to a 4th Amendment violation? Less so to do with surveillance state which we might consider a separate issue? I mention that just because the surveillance state with just cameras could include consumer cameras, drones, highway traffic cams, the damn automated plate reader and tracking camera that gave me a $100+ ticket in London for driving through a congestion zone and... those bast.... and... (jk - well sort of it, I mean it is part of the group here)

I'm not sure I'm on board with the efficiency argument but those are always interesting ones.

The privacy violation is that the database exists, full stop. I don't think a warrant requirement would be a meaningful barrier, since the data is already part of the camera network operators' database and all sorts of informal or backdoor agreements would easily happen.

Like, all a warrant requirement does is make it so that the police have to talk to a judge before making the searched data part of the evidence against you. It would do nothing to stop the police from fabricating some other pretext to lawfully stop and investigate you - say, parking a police cruiser at the border into the state and whenever the ALPR in that car hits a list of vehicles, stop them for going 0.1 MPH over the limit and the officer says they smell weed.

> The privacy violation is that the database exists, full stop.

Is that because the government has access to the database? Aside from that I'm not really sure what the difference is between Flock in this case and something like a doorbell camera.

It's nefarious and privacy-violating when the database exists, government involvement just exacerbates things because private companies aren't allowed to send armed goons to your house and break down your door.
So my understanding was incorrect, you're against any recording including personal use, traffic cameras, security cameras on private property (for example at a jewelry store)?
I'm not sure why you're ignoring the central point I'm making about scale. One guy having a camera pointing out of his doorbell is different from Amazon being able to do whatever they want with the footage from something like one in five US homes. Systems are more than the sum of their isolated parts.
I mean, yeah? I dont understand your lack of perceived separation. It’s seems pretty plain that there is no interconnected network of doorbell cameras that anyone can use to track someone across every possibly doorbell camera that filmed them[1]. A doorbell camera is for an individual to see what’s happening immediately on their property.

A flock camera is connected to every other flock camera, ever, period. It’d be bad enough if a whole town were tracking the movements of all of their citizens constantly and storing that data forever to be searchable without a warrant (because of the extremely obvious flashing abuse vector that has been shown to be taken advantage of multiple times- give the old google a search for police officers stalking exes and their partners via flock, or flock employee spying on children’s gymnastics gym)

BUT, it’s not even just that! You can track people everywhere that there are flock cameras if you are a part of the flock network! So you can stalk people everywhere in the country with 0 oversight. It is an insanely massive privacy issue.

It’s universal persisted tracking of literally everyone’s movements 24/7 everywhere there is a flock camera, persisted presumably forever, and currently accessible to an extremely large amount of people without any authorization or judicial check required. (Many would go to comment on the police demographic being unstable and/or uniquely situated to abuse this, but arguments about that may or may not be moot to you depending on your opinion of the police)

I feel like it’s plainly clear that any doorbell camera does not do that. Even if most doorbell cams are cloud enabled, I’d imagine it’s significantly harder to subpoena a doorbell company for “every camera you have on exactly this street that could’ve done this thing”, and infinitely more so to force them to give you all of their data history and continue to do so forever. Flock just does that as their business.

Doorbell cameras are also not particularly capable of tracking you on every major travel route you take, as they’re primarily on, well, residential doors. Maybe some businesses have them? But they certainly aren’t able to resolve every license plate that travels through a segment of highway. Not to mention that they just don’t do that at present at all anyways, even in the places they’re installed- they just record motion, and sometimes use AI to point out “a car drove by” or “a person walked up to the door.” Not “license plate XYZ1234 drove through highway 12 at 8:34 pm”.

I feel like your statement just kinda ignores all of this and is saying “well yeah, but besides all the mass movement tracking and data storage and correlation, it’s basically like a doorbell camera because they both record people/cars and store them somehow, right?”

Which, I mean yeah I guess? But the “besides” part is kind of entirely the massive problem.

[1] well, not yet.

> It’s seems pretty plain that there is no interconnected network of doorbell cameras that anyone can use to track someone across every possibly doorbell camera that filmed them

That doesn't seem clear to me at all. It may not be one interconnected network but if a crime occurs say, at 100 Main Street the police can see doorbell cameras, identify the model, and ask the home owner for the tape and if necessary get a warrant. It's certainly not as easy to obtain the data but it's certainly possible to achieve the same goal.

Look, I'm not trying to defend Flock here or anything, just trying to understand what the specific concern is whether that is hyper-efficient tracking, a privacy violation, a constitutional violation, or maybe even something different altogether.

> certainly possible to achieve the same goal.

The barrier to entry is infinitely lower with flock than through that process though, and the scope of data collection is infinitely wider. If a police chief wants to stalk their ex or their boyfriend, they login to their floxk and search <my ex girlfriends license plate>, and acquire their entire travel history for the entirety of the time flock has existed, through highways, through non residential thoroughfares, etc.

If they want to do that via ring doorbells, they have to go ask every single person in a neighborhood to hand that over under the pretense of a law enforcement operation. And, again, those doorbells are not covering highways or large residential thoroughfares, and they’re not connected enough, nor equipped with the technology to automatically read and store license plate data forever. The LEO would have to go through every single doorbell, manually document every single car/plate that passes through, and cross reference their own markings of location-to-timestamp documentation to determine whatever path the person they wanted to track. I think it’s obvious that this is an arduous task- one that could absolutely be undertaken to pursue serious crime! But one that would be pretty damned hard to abuse due to the work involved. And also, again, is only residential!! Because ring doorbells are not posted on the side of every major interstate highway and city main road!!!

Flock automates every ounce of that completely, and with an insanely larger scope! It’s not hard to imagine that a police officer going around asking every owner of a doorbell cam for their footage would generate some hubub amongst the community about “what is this for?”, and if the what-for was invalid, generate some backlash!

Instead, a person with access to flock faces absolutely 0 friction tracking anyone, (basically) anywhere at any time in the last X years since flock has existed, **and not just residentially**! I want to point out that your own point, “police can ask the home owner”, is restricted to a very specific locale, places with doorbell cameras! These things are being installed with such frequency on so many major thoroughfares that is possible to track far, far beyond “someone left home / someone came home”, or “someone was infront of these houses or in this neighborhood.” That is an extremely significant difference.

I do want to say, I respect your inquisivity, and your willingness to ask and explore the issue. My genuine apologies for the dismissiveness present in some of my remarks. That’s not really the spirit of HN discussion, and I apologize for that.

There's also the matter of police accessing this massive data trove "for personal purposes, including tracking romantic partners, relatives or acquaintances."

https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...

It’s an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, which is loosely supported by Supreme Court precent in Carpenter and Jones. See my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359826

Edit: To be more clear, the issue courts have considered is warrantless searches of ALPR databases (and whether that evidence should be excluded), not whether it’s constitutional to put up cameras.

More recently, there's also United States v. Chatrie, which was a 6-3 decision that searching Google's location history data is covered by the Fourth Amendment

See: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-applauds-important-...

See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf

The constitution forbids unreasonable search and seizure. Tracking people's movements without specific reason the believe that they are a criminal has generally been regarded, at least by the public, as a classic example of government overreach.
I can only assume this question is disingenuous.

"What is so wrong with having your house burn down? It's just a chemical process that happens all the time."

That's a bad assumption and incorrect in this case. Instead of assuming you should just ask. I also did my best to communicate that I was genuinely interested in learning more about what was the crux of the issue.
They are not unconstitutional. There is no right to privacy in public. There's endless confusion online, but legally, public means "not private."
The Supreme Court has ruled that police must get a warrant to place a tracker on your car even if your car is always in public.

https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/victory-federal-...