Anti-Surveillance Mapmaker Refuses Flock Safety's Cease and Desist Demand
www.eff.orgFlock Safety’s car-tracking cameras have been spreading across the United States like an invasive species, preying on public safety fears and gobbling up massive amounts of sensitive driver data. The technology not only tracks vehicles by their license plates, but also creates “fingerprints” of each vehicle, including the make, model, color and other distinguishing features.
Through crowdsourcing and open-source research, DeFlock.me aims to “shine a light on the widespread use of ALPR technology, raise awareness about the threats it poses to personal privacy and civil liberties, and empower the public to take action.” While EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance project has identified more than 1,700 agencies using ALPRs, DeFlock has mapped out more than 16,000 individual camera locations, more than a third of which are Flock Safety devices.
Flock Safety’s cease and desist later is just the latest in a long list of groups turning to bogus intellectual property claims to silence their critics.
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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This has to be in Denmark, right?
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On the site, they have a sign you can print out to put on or around the cameras. What sort of laws in my state or jurisdiction should I be looking at? Just want to see the legal implications.
Uh if the cameras are in public, they have no expectation of privacy, right?
Aggregating location data is very different from having a picture taken in public, wouldn’t you agree?
You may have misunderstood my comment. I was joking about Flock being mad at their cameras being tracked, by using one of the arguments for public surveillance.
Ah, gotcha, I thought it was a sincere argument about tracking people’s vehicles.
If it was a person maybe. But these are objects. Objects have no expectation of privacy.
My bad, I thought the original comment was about tracking cars, not the cameras.
Fair enough.
There is a question on the constitutionality of automated surveillance technology, the type of data that is being collected, who has access to them, and how they are using it. Additionally, some other concerns I can think of off the top of my head are:
We appreciate your well thought out and constructive comment, but the one you were replying to was about the cameras themselves not having any expectation of privacy, a reversal of the common excuse from the camera owners that your comment addresses.
Oh, definitely not what I thought or intended. Thanks for the heads up and kind reply. For clarity, I believe those cameras shouldn’t be installed or used, especially under this administration.
Yeah but it’s a corporation. They get more rights than us humans.
Something something land of the free.
I’m so fucking sick of this. We need to outlaw using third party companies to get around constitutional protections. Ending the third party doctrine is just another reason we desperately need a revolution.
Link for the lazy
https://deflock.me/
Thanks, that’s me!
As stated above the companies name is Flock Safety
And the CEO is Garett Langley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/glangley
We recently prevented our city from contracting with flock. They had a city council meeting that was 50:1 opposed.
Target acquired
Luigi time?
Most of the time I don’t worry about assassinations because I mostly avoid doing things that make people want to kill me. It’s a decent philosophy that has served me well for decades.
Everybody say it with me: 🖕
What are the legal implications of hosting this information in a different jurisdiction and are there places where this data would be legally protected?
They don’t even cite the datapoints, my friend. It is a trademark infringement cease-and-desist…
Thing is about trade marks… if the terms can be shown to be in common usage, the mark is struck down. Like Kleenex and Xerox.
So let’s all start talking about privacy invading cameras as being flocking stupid.
Parasite big mad the host is fighting back
Uses US laws in bad faith and nothing will be done about it
that activist is clearly doing something about it by helping make the cameras less effective
Any word on local groups destroying the cameras in question, or is everyone just using the info to change their routes instead?
i think youd need more activists doing such things
But have you thought about the Parasite’s profit?!
This sort of logic is not very cash money of you @umbrella@lemmy.ml
i like to think my logic is more fuck the burgeoise than cash money