The flock discourse is slowly climbing the ladder to real discussion. We're at the "mostly intelligent people who are casually interested in the topic being confidently wrong about it" phase (and I know I'm going to get very angry replies accusing me of being one, hah caught you thinking about it!)> log every trip
> This system tracks the whole of everyone's movements, every day
Funny, because current lawsuits over flock have hinged on the point that they DO NOT have total coverage of roads. Author seems to be talking about Long Island, which is an unusual case, and flock might have total coverage there. But special places need special laws, and an edge case isn't the model for the whole world!
> The Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that the government may not track the whole of a person's movements without a warrant.
No, that court case established that the government needs a warrant to get, specifically, historical cellphone pings from a 3rd party (the cellphone companies).
And overly-emotional language to fool the more credulous:
> It is called Flock for a reason. We are sheep only if we let this happen
Oh please, it's named flock because it's perched on a pole, like a bird, not a sheep.
> feed a national database searched by 59 outside agencies nobody in this town chose
> 0: Opt-in or opt-out decisions the Town made about any of this sharing, in its own words
Well why not? It seems like a lot of the flock discussion takes a bizarre twist where people go "It's useless to try to limit it, we need to ban it outright". Like okay? Do we ban the police when one goes rogue? (I guess that's kind of a bad question to ask, given that "defund the police" was trending a few years ago)
8/3/2026
at
6:29:43 AM
Bad faith argument, borderline flaggable. But I’ll bite. Do you not see any issue with mass surveillance of people’s movements?I’m an American living in Turkey at the moment. My airbnb host tells me that as a white collar software guy, he personally knows a large fraction of people who have been detained in prison for 1,2 or 3 months for having parties or fake traffic violations.
Of course i don’t love the ever-tightening shackles of algorithmic pricing, which is already well in place for insurance, finance and banking.
But the situation in Turkey reminds me that we are only one “national emergency” away from your freedoms being ripped from us with zero recourse. The chilling effect here is real.
The casually interested, confidently wrong argument can be summed up pretty easily. There is a risk v reward calculation with mass surveillance. What’s the reward? I don’t know the details, but apparently police love the tech because it makes catching bad guys easier. What’s the risk? Unfathomably and Immeasurably high, in ways that we won’t always get to know, or find out years later.
Any refutation of said high risk argument should be something like “relax, guy!” The corporations and state authorities are never gonna use their surveillance of innocents in ways that have any real consequences.
by zenapollo
8/3/2026
at
4:16:03 PM
> Bad faith argument, borderline flaggableDo what you have to do. shrug But when it doesn't have any effect, consider that maybe your bar for "bad faith argument" includes large swaths of completely legitimate differing opinions.
by phendrenad2
8/3/2026
at
1:27:19 AM
>No, that court case established that the government needs a warrant to get, specifically, historical cellphone pings from a 3rd party (the cellphone companies).Flock is gathering far, far more intrusive data than "cellphone pings" including hoovering up bluetooth signals and other identifying information. The court may not have ruled on it yet, but it is absurd to think that the courts would think that the government needs a warrant to collect cellphone pings but doesn't need a warrant to collect far more blanket data, including facial recognition on a mass scale. Hopefully we will get a ruling on this sooner rather than later.
>Well why not? It seems like a lot of the flock discussion takes a bizarre twist where people go "It's useless to try to limit it, we need to ban it outright". Like okay? Do we ban the police when one goes rogue? (I guess that's kind of a bad question to ask, given that "defund the police" was trending a few years ago)
This is a bizarre take. Police are a necessary component for running a society. Blanket surveillance is not. This is self-evidently true because society still functioned before the recent past when they introduced blanket surveillance. Equating, or even comparing, a core and necessary function of society, like policing, with a new and completely optional and unnecessary blanket surveillance system is absurd (and that's the polite term).
by StanislavPetrov