Police are bounded by evidentiary laws and warrant requirements, all of which legitimately do stand up in court. Flock is not.
So no, actually Flock itself is the problem. If Flock were willing to sign some consent decree that its data can only be accessed by police with a valid judicial warrant, for example, they probably could've headed off this entire mess.
But instead they called people "terroristic" for pushing back. Completely braindead move from the CEO.
The police have SWAT teams, guns, and jails, Flock does not. So I think the state security apparatus is a part of the problem, because if they don't like you and have access to surveillance technology, the outcomes can be far more severe than if Facebook doesn't like you, or the CEO of Flock doesn't like you.
People, broadly speaking, are totally fine with police having guns and jails.
Flock in absence of police is not that bad except for the whole "now we have no police" problem. Having police in the absence of Flock is totally fine, we've done it since forever.
I don't know. Since the advent of cameras we've caught a lot of cops beating the hell out of citizens. It probably happened a lot more before cameras. And then you'd catch a charge for resisting instead of the payout today.
Let's play this out: Cops don't exist. On video, you catch a person beating the hell out of a citizen.
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Welp, sucks to get the shit beaten out of you, better luck next time.
I don't understand your point
You responded "I don't know, sometimes cameras catch cops beating people up" to the statement: "It is better to have cops than cameras."
If you have no cops, the cameras don't mean anything. It is now de facto legal for big people to beat up smaller people. Your cameras mean nothing. You can now film yourself getting beaten up every single day forever, and congrats, there's nothing to be done about it because there's no apparatus of the state to physically protect you.
I'm responding to the idea that police in the absence of flock is totally fine.
It is empirically the case that societies have been perfectly capable of thriving while having police...
If you understood my comment to mean "police are perfect", then I must've been unclear. That's not my position and not a position I'm interested in defending or discussing.
You did it! You burned the strawman! Gold star!
I’m not sure people think that way, or even understand the details. But they see lots of stories about police officers misusing the system.
I think people understand "rich tech CEO putting cameras everywhere offers no assurances of people's privacy and legal rights, instead opts to call them terrorists" perfectly well
The fundamental issue is that Flock doesn't care about people's privacy or rights. That washes out in a variety of ways including CEOs' statements, product-level security controls (thus creating the horror stories), and lack of legal commitments to protections.
I would personally be in favor of a fairly widespread camera network that had significant legal protections built in. Flock has demonstrated – in every possible way – they cannot possibly be the providers of such a system.