Maybe Flock gets bought by another company and "oops, the terms changed". Maybe all contract renewals will have commercial use in the language.

Once the cameras are there, the heavy lifting (from Flock's side) has been done.

How is this a reasonable compromise?

I don't want surveillance cameras at all, but a neutral position might sound something like "sure, put up cameras everywhere, and once you get a warrant or probable cause (sigh), you can punch in the plate number and police will get notified when they see that car."

Now, obviously it's a surveillance state that's ripe for abuse and relies on trust in government and process, but at _least_ it's predicated on some level of suspicion.

"Record and catalog every piece of movement all these cameras see, store it for a long time, hand it over to whatever person with access to the system feels like searching it, send huge amounts of data secretly in response to National Security Letters, and while we're at it, just |tee the whole feed to the CIA. Maybe tracking everyone all the time will come in handy some day!" just seems _batshit insane_. It's not even in the REALM of possibly-constitutional from where I sit.

And yet the judge in the Norfolk, VA case said "well, this technology COULD represent a 4th amendment violation in the future, but 200 cameras in our town isn't so bad". What???

I have no idea what this means. It seems to me the extreme "yes, please surveil me" position cedes the technology to the authoritarians.

They describe it as a "motion activated camera" but I think it's pretty clear they're just recording 24x7 (but probably not uploading! most of the time!)

I'm guessing some on-device logic does the "motion capture" logic. What software then decides an "object of interest" and decides how to hash it? Are the still frame(s)/video sent to a server for analysis, or is that done on-device?

We know they store and catalog vehicles based on license plates and other bits of metadata. But what is uploaded, where does the processing happen, what is actually stored, etc?

Obviously it's a camera so it's trivial to turn it into a facial recognition camera, but does the on-camera software need to be updated for this to happen, or can it just be done server-side? Are they already retaining stills and videos of people on purpose (rather than just incidentally), but not _yet_ cataloging it (officially?)

Anyway. I'm curious what the public answer to all of these questions is, and then, obviously, I'm curious what's _actually_ happening behind the scenes. We know what can happen, but there are a lot of things we don't know for sure.

Where things start coming into balance a bit more is among the Nextdoor paranoia crowd.

Where I work, this wouldn't fly.

> Flock Safety acknowledged the issue in March, stating some California agencies “had their camera networks inadvertently accessible to out-of-state law enforcement agencies for a period of time,” according to a company statement. The company said it was “impossible to determine a specific cause” for the data breach.

Of course, until the revenue knob needs a little tweak, and they start hashing the human data....

My logic was that I didn't want to spend $400+ on a TS4 for my WORK computer, just to get a faster ethernet for the lulz. I was happy to spend $25 for bragging rights.

Of course, now that I've spent that same $25-30 4 times, it's beginning to feel like less of a bargain.

Plugable 2.5G USB-C to ethernet adapter (bought November 2025), SABRENT USB C to 2.5Gbps ethernet adapter (bought October 2024), UGREEN USB C 2.5G ethernet adapter (also October 2024). In my experience they immediately fall on their face in a speedtest and drop to a couple hundred Mbps, experience packet loss, etc. This is testing across a few modern Apple Silicon Macs.

I now have a WavLink WL-NWU341G 5Gbps dongle with the RTL-8157 that seems to work well, but I've only run a couple of tests-- I am away from my home setup and don't have wired ethernet run to all the rooms where I'm living.

If you do some Googling, there's some good information out there about it, but when I bought the bad ones, I couldn't find any information corroborating my experience.

However, I think you might be correct about transit systems, where the blocked doors might re-open a small amount before quickly attempting to re-close, to keep the train on schedule and prevent this behavior.