As far as I can tell it’s still voluntary. This is their policy. It sounds like if you choose to share photos or video with public safety organizations, that now Flock and hence ICE can access it.
That all said, fuck Flock and I certainly don’t want anything I share (which I never have) to contribute to the profits of a private surveillance company. The solution here appears to be share nothing with public safety at all ever so that contract is worth nothing.
I wonder how they define “Public safety agencies” since other programs refer to “Justice and Public Safety agencies”. Is this difference an oversight or is something being excluded?
It doesn’t matter, nobody would have a cause of action to challenge their interpretation if they decided that it meant any HOA or self-declared neighborhood watch.
In the end they are giving the data that they own to who they choose. The fact that it came from a device that you chose to bolt on the side of your house doesn’t mean anything in this transaction. The data instantly becomes theirs by virtue of the TOS (that you read, right?) that you agreed to when you signed up for the service and you have no say in what someone else does with their data.
These kinds of programs are just whitewashing, it makes it look like there are significant barriers in place to prevent your data from being used to enable a nationwide real-time surveillance network. There are not.
Flock could start charging a subscription fee for access to their video feeds tomorrow and it would be within their rights as owners of that data. The reason that they create these ‘programs’ is because it creates the impression that the user has control of ‘their’ data.
As far as I can tell it’s still voluntary. This is their policy. It sounds like if you choose to share photos or video with public safety organizations, that now Flock and hence ICE can access it.
That all said, fuck Flock and I certainly don’t want anything I share (which I never have) to contribute to the profits of a private surveillance company. The solution here appears to be share nothing with public safety at all ever so that contract is worth nothing.
Nice of them to completely undermine what “public safety” means for the 326,774,980th time.
I wonder how they define “Public safety agencies” since other programs refer to “Justice and Public Safety agencies”. Is this difference an oversight or is something being excluded?
It doesn’t matter, nobody would have a cause of action to challenge their interpretation if they decided that it meant any HOA or self-declared neighborhood watch.
In the end they are giving the data that they own to who they choose. The fact that it came from a device that you chose to bolt on the side of your house doesn’t mean anything in this transaction. The data instantly becomes theirs by virtue of the TOS (that you read, right?) that you agreed to when you signed up for the service and you have no say in what someone else does with their data.
These kinds of programs are just whitewashing, it makes it look like there are significant barriers in place to prevent your data from being used to enable a nationwide real-time surveillance network. There are not.
Flock could start charging a subscription fee for access to their video feeds tomorrow and it would be within their rights as owners of that data. The reason that they create these ‘programs’ is because it creates the impression that the user has control of ‘their’ data.