I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.
Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.
Archive: http://archive.today/IWMKe
The idea that you’re somehow not entitled to privacy based on the publicity of a space has got to be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns used to strip privacy against the will of people.
Fuck you, I want to take a walk and generally travel freely without being tracked by some fucking “Flock” or Ring camera, or uploaded unblurred to some randos Instagram where Meta and Clearview will train facial recognition and generative AI, or having my entire life story and biometric data collected at some airport.
Take me back to the thousands of years humanity existed without obscenely invasive tech.
It’s the “common sense” part of the laws.
A honest person has right to live without being tracked. You shouldn’t care how they’ll do it and you shouldn’t care if they go out of business.
And of course you shouldn’t fear to be public about it and demand answers, LOL, the most notable for me personally part about today’s politics is that in English-speaking countries that fear seems to have become a thing. Well, because any protest that’s more than a demonstration is becoming dangerous and costly.
While literal legalism always helps tyranny.
It’s not much different from USSR in the 70s and 80s, “yeah, you can have all your rights, a defendant and all, and correspondence and you won’t be tortured for submitting a complaint, and Soviet laws will be followed to the letter, but good luck, prove you’re not a camel”.
Since USSR and western nations no longer exist in the same time period, it’s easy to discard even the thought that the latter are gradually becoming similar to the former in some regards, and might even overshoot it.
Anyway, I live in Russia, here things are for the last few months at the point where I can get jailed for writing even this, just because. LOL again.