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Parent Post: Dayton, Ohio covers its own 72 Flock cameras with trash bags after data went to ICE
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saarnok
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6/11/2026, 4:27:20 PM
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That's very compelling. What if every search cost a dollar and abusing the system cost $10,000 per incident? It seems the system isn't administered in any real sense of the word, meaning no one is responsible for how it's used or misused. Dunwoody is a small town. Someone needs to explain why a town of less than a hundred thousand should be the locus of tens of millions of searches per year. There's something missing in this information. It's perhaps in some sense reasonable that one cannot realistically view the information in aggregate, but surely the raw number is knowable at the very least. As with any large set of numbers, some "frequent flyer" will make up the bulk of these searches. Again, this shouldn't be tricky to find out. FLOCK specifically seems to be designed to obscure those who access it while providing no protection for the public. What this indicates is not that security of this sort is useless or worse, but that this implementation is in all likelihood an outright scam. There is no logical chain that I can follow which comes to the conclusion that more information leads to criminals being as able to operate as before, and certainly not that criminals are even more able than before. What this indicates from a reasonable perspective is that the system simply is not being used for it's advertised purpose. It simply cannot be the case that criminals prosper due to lack of information and that increasing information does not decrease criminal activity. It just cant. The problem must therefor lay in the law enforcement/justice system itself. I'm obviously not well versed in this issue, so understand my musings are largely speculative. But, it wouldn't be out of character for many jurisdictions to fail to capitalize on using a tool such as this for it's advertised purpose because the criminals caught would too often fall into one particular demographic. Anyway, your case is well made.
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chrisvpnet
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6/11/2026, 5:16:19 PM
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It's a very complicated issue for sure. Another problem that I didn't mention, is that Flock customers are allowed to download their data and keep it indefinitely, available to search without any of Flock's oversight mechanism seeing it. So far, we have only been discussing the data INSIDE the Flock database... but the fact is, many agencies are storing their own data individually, and we have no way of knowing how secure it is or how often they search that data.
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saarnok
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6/11/2026, 7:15:36 PM
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To me it's all about information asymmetry. We can't have a system where "they" have all information and we have what they tell us. Banks cope with information with absolute precision on a scale that absolutely dwarfs FLOCK and do so in a way that is adequately transparent to the average person pretty much all the time. Most tellingly they do NOT presume the people on their end are blameless. They have systems to assess the people working for them on an ongoing basis, and any average teller will simply receive instruction to stay home, which they do until the people who audit their work is done. To conclude for now; it seems this tech is not so much enabling corruption as exposing it. Very few swords cut only one way.
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