Yes, San Francisco still has a massive tech scene. Especially during the AI boom in the last few years. It's true that NYC recently eclipsed SF in terms of the raw number of tech workers, but considering the roughly order-of-magnitude difference in population that demonstrates just how tech-heavy SF still is.
I thought Meta's approach to AR was pivoting towards transparent glasses with displays in the vein of Ray Ban Display and Orion (I realize that "VR" is in the title, but almost all the images show AR use cases). Their original vision for AR was to have people walking around with quest headsets in passthrough mode. But that's just too weird for the vast majority of people. I can't imaging walking around in public and ordering coffee with my eyes totally obscured behind a device. I saw a couple co-workers walking around wearing headsets like this when I worked at Reality Labs, but it was obvious to me and all my teammates that vanishingly few people would actually do that in public.
I guess the approach here is to shrink down the VR glasses and make them look more like normal glasses from a distance. But I still don't think I'd wear one of these walking around the mall or airport. Reduction in FOV is also a big negative. I'm not really sure where one would use this device over a Quest or the Ray Ban Display. It occupies this awkward middle point where it's not a transparent glass display, but it's also makes a lot of compromises compared to the rest of the VR line.
The comment session was for an entirely unrelated issue.
> Heider explained that she waited until the public comment period for a different issue, filled out a form to talk, and then got up to deliver a written statement about Flock cameras.
It wasn't that the council disagreed with what Heider said, it's that what she was talking about was unrelated to the meeting.
That doesn't make make it permissible to hijack other meetings. The point remains, she was not removed for simply voicing opposition to Flock cameras. The was arrested and removed for trying to derail an unrelated meeting.
Someone going on the stand to rant about abortion during a meeting on sidewalk codes would similarly get removed.
You can organize a protest in a public space like a park. You can book a space like a library or a church. You can start mailing lists to organize like-minded people.
Many of us on this thread have experience with city councils and are anti-Flock and pro-civil disobedience. We're arguing with you from a point of praticality related to city business meetings. Practicing civil disobedience at a city council meeting is fraught with peril- for example, you're preventing other people from having their topics discussed/voted on. From my perspective, if your goal is to make actual change, getting arrested at a city council meeting speaking on the wrong topic is not a particularly effective method.
I disagree with your assessment. These city councils undoubtedly are aware that Flock/ALPRs are a controversial issue, and in many cases, including this one, they don't allow people to speak on the topic.
I recall watching a meeting, I think it was in Austin? Where on every topic, most people coming up to talk did so because they refused to hear comments on the cameras. Instead, they had to deal with the frustration of constantly sending people off the podium.
The lesson being, if you know people will feel strongly, it should behoove you to schedule time for them to speak properly.
Thanks for being polite and thoughtful and laying out your thinking.
The issue is that city council meetings that schedule open discussion on topics often end up running late into the night (after midnight) and the discussion doesn't achieve much.
I don't thikn we can say with certainty that the chair tabled the discussion with the intent of disallowing people their right to discuss it. That's interpreting subjective intent.
Clearly, the best solution to a discussion taking forever, is for the powerful person to terminate the discussion and declare that the outcome was whatever the powerful person wanted.
An alternative of course is to saw down the Flock cameras. I suspect people like the woman in the article though are trying to find legal ways to be heard—to elicit change.
Is there a legal alternative that you can think of that would be effective?
The point is slightly to prevent a thing from happening, but mostly to provoke a massive government overreaction and make it lose face. Such as in this case where a woman was arrested for speaking her opinion at a city meeting.
This is, like, the most tame example of civil disobedience I could possibly imagine.
Also, your example is obviously off-base. If they said there would be a period to talk about abortion, and someone did, I’d feel the same way.
The council cancelled the comments about flock because they know they’re doing something deeply unpopular. Perhaps they feel guilt or shame, which are appropriate responses. Rather than sitting in said guilt or shame, they felt the need to prioritize their ego. As a very minor and frankly inconsequential protest, one person spoke briefly out of turn.
That’s what happened. I don’t know, the sides seem clear cut to me.
Translation: Those in power are allowed to execute 'illegal' chess moves, (skipping the Flock discussion), but the public can't do the same to try and discuss things that officials want to avoid discussing.
> companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? How are these companies subverting governance?
The US stopped countless wars from starting in the first place due to deterrence. Look at Ukraine to see what happens to a country that isn't part of an alliance like NATO.
Ukraine seems to be what happens when a country willingly gave up their nukes (with US encouragement).
I have no problem if the US navy wants to tool around shipping lanes for the good of global trade. I take issue with everything else.
In the past couple of years, the US has implicitly used the strength of its military to threaten the sovereignty of Greenland, Panama, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba. Abducted a foreign head of state. Started a war. Bombed drug runners and fishermen.
The death toll for the Iraq war is heavily contested, but the numbers are somewhere in the region of 200k to one million dead. All under the guise of WMDs.
Like any large organization, there is a mixture of good and bad outcomes.
Ukraine was home to many nuclear and rocket scientists so presumably they could have reverse engineered them if they wanted and got a big head start in it.
But yeah thats only if they wanted to try and spend the money to support a nuclear program. As they sat they were unreliable at best case.
That's false. Please stop spreading Russian propaganda. Not only Ukraine was able to control and maintaining them, in fact, Ukrainian companies manufactured nuke ICBMs, and then serviced them in Russia long after the collapse of the USSR. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KB_Pivdenne
Seattle is one of the wealthiest metros in the country, with expansive social programs. It's the last place where you can try and blame crime on deprivation.
You don't need a warrant to record people in public. You keep throwing around the term "surveil" as though this is a singular activity. Do the police need a warrant to search your house or car? Yes. Do they need a warrant to get Google to hand over your Gmail contents? Yes?
Do they need a warrant to photograph the exterior of your house? No. Do they need a warrant to photograph you in public? No
You keep missing that these aren't singular photographs. This isn't the 70s: these are persistent systems that aggregate video and photographs of everyone, tracking their movements over time. That is enough to make this constitutionally distinct from a cop taking a single picture of your house.
And? These are still videos of people in public. This information is in plain view. You keep insisting that if you aggregate public information it somehow becomes private information, but that's not true unless the Supreme Court makes some new precedence-setting decision.
That precedence-setting decision would be Carpenter v US [1], which established that being in public does not automatically eliminate all fourth amendment protection, and the comprehensive nature of government surveillance can matter constitutionally.
Carpenter v. United States was about the government accessing telecommunications data. This is not public information, location data also tracks people's movements on private property. Just like the other case you cited, Chatrie v. United States, this is a situation wholly removed from public facing video cameras.
Carpenter was not about who owned the data or the technology being used but rather the government reconstructing a person's movements over time, including movements occurring in public.
The fact that the data is owned by a private company or that some of it is considered private by the individual doesn't matter: it's about tracking individuals over time.
> Carpenter was not about who owned the data or the technology being used but rather the government reconstructing a person's movements over time, including movements occurring in public.
...and including movements occurring in private.
> The fact that the data is owned by a private company or that some of it is considered private by the individual doesn't matter: it's about tracking individuals over time.
More importantly, tracking their private movements over time, not just their public movements. You're hand waving away an important part of the case. And the decision does not extend to ALPR readers, from what I can tell.
> The Supreme Court's ruling in Carpenter was narrow and did not otherwise change the third-party doctrine related to other business records that might incidentally reveal location information, nor did it overrule prior decisions concerning conventional surveillance techniques and tools such as security cameras.
Trying to interpret Carter v. US as prohibiting public security cameras is a very big leap
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”
This would still be an issue even if they weren't recorded in private spaces. At issue here is the reconstruction of data, regardless of if it happened in public or private spaces.
Picking out one quote doesn't change the fact that the ruling in Carpenter was narrow, limited to cell phone location information. You're just wrong about the scope of Carpenter, and unwilling to accept that fact.
You're focused on the narrowness of the final ruling and not the vast legal reasoning that led to it.
Carpenter's reasoning concerning comprehensive records of an individual's movements (regardless of private or public) are relevant when LE uses aggregated Flock data to reconstruct a person's movements over an extended period.
Except the narrowness of the final ruling is exactly what makes it not impact the legality of Flock. It doesn't matter whether you think the courts decision should be extended to cameras - your opinion doesn't decide the law, the court's opinion does.
Except what I'm discussing is why the court went with that decision and how that reasoning applies to modern technology like Flock cameras. Your original argument was that cameras are in public and location data is private and includes private data, and the distinction is that you have no expectation of privacy in public. The court doesn't agree, and they've explicitly pointed out that 4A still applies when someone is being monitored and tracked in public.
> The court doesn't agree, and they've explicitly pointed out that 4A still applies when someone is being monitored and tracked in public.
Only when that tracking is done via cell phone location information. The Carpenter decision did not apply this to all forms of public monitoring. You keep ignoring the fact that the decision was narrowly scoped to cell phone location data, and continue to erroneously claim that it applied to public tracking in general.
The ones making the laws are your elected officials. If you want a city to pass a law prohibiting changing the traffic light timings, then go campaign for a candidate that has that on their platform.
>If you want a city to pass a law prohibiting changing the traffic light timings, then go campaign for a candidate that has that on their platform.
people love saying this as if its some sort of gotcha.
ive been campaigning for candidates i believe in since ive been able to vote, which is over 40 years now. additionally, i voice my opinion locally and online (hi).
That's why we have an independent judiciary. What's the alternative to fixing this with laws/lawsuits? Do we riot when "the police and governments break laws"?
which is something that only happens after abuse occurs, is costly (time and money), presents a risk of retaliation, and offers no guarantee of being made whole.
>What's the alternative to fixing this with laws/lawsuits?
not doing mass surveillance means we don't need legislation about it.
>Do we riot when "the police and governments break laws"?
But Flock isn't searching anybody. You keep calling it a dragnet, or an illegal search, but the courts have repeatedly held that recording images in public needs no warrant or probable case.
Law enforcement is using a third party (Flock) to get around constitutional requirements.
A camera pointed at a public street isn't the same constitutional question as LE searching a persistent database to reconstruct someone's movements. The latter falls into fourth amendment search territory.
Jesus, how many times are you just going to parrot the same replies over and over? No, the putting public facing camera video into a database does not make it a search. The case you cited, Chatrie vs. United States, involved the government demanding that Google hand over private cellphone location data on everyone inside of a geofence boundary. The court decided that forcing Google to hand over geolocation data was akin to forcing Google to hand over email contents, which requires a warrant. You're trying to turn around and interpret this to saying that the plain view doctrine doesn't apply to ALPRs, which record public spaces.
This isn't the case of law enforcement using a third party to get around constitutional requirements. The government could set up their own cameras doing exactly what Flock does, and it would still not violate anyone's constitutional requirements. Because people don't have a right to not be recorded in public, no matter how much you want that to be the case.
> Jesus, how many times are you just going to parrot the same replies over and over
The same amount that you do, dude. You're in every single one of these threads, and despite being proven wrong over and over again you keep being "confused" about how people are against this technology. Even in this thread, you keep responding with the same points based on your equivocation of an individual taking a picture in public and a state law enforcement organization aggregating and tracking individuals who haven't committed crimes.
Try reading some SC cases and actually paying attention to the responses you're getting.
And yet you still start yet another thread insisting that a database makes public facing video cameras a privacy violation.
When have I been "proven wrong over and over again"? The court cases you've cited are all about governments demanding private cell phone location information. You're trying to take decisions that amount to, "the police need a warrant to demand private cellphone location data from telecoms" and make the enormous leap to your imaginary decision, "the police cannot record people in public and search those recordings".
Just because the specific ALPR technology was not being litigated doesn't mean that the law doesn't apply to similar technologies. At issue here is the government being able to monitor and track people in public, not that photographs are ok because individuals can take them at will.
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” Id., at 429 (opinion of Alito, J.). For that reason, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.” Id., at 430.
Edit for your edit: you haven't refuted anything man, you keep trotting out the same arguments in those linked threads:
- The data includes "private movements" which is why it's unconstitutional (the SC said aggregation of public data can impel privacy concerns)
- An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)
- The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)
> The data includes "private movements" which is why it's unconstitutional (the SC said aggregation of public data can impel privacy concerns)
But does it? You keep insisting this is the case, but your attempts to back up this claim are cases with totally different scenarios. Namely demanding that telecoms hand over location information.
> - An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)
The point is to emphasize that the information collected by Flock is in plain view. The plain view doctrine is well established. The police don't need a warrant to observe publicly visible things.
> The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)
The cases you've cited all involved private information being obtained without a warrant. You can't just ignore the fact that a GPS tracker or cell phone location information also reveals private movements, as opposed to public facing camera which only record public activity.
Again, you keep citing decisions without bothering to understand the context behind the. For instance,
"To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment);"
This is about the police planting a GPS tracker on someone's car - that's that "Jones" is referring to here. That case involved the police tracking someone in public and in private.
You're confusing the technology used in Jones with the principle Carpenter cited it for: a person can have a 4A privacy interest in the whole of their physical movements, including movements in public.
And for the second time, you're trying to dodge the distinguishing factor between Jones and Flock. The former tracked movements in public and in private. The latter, only in public. That, and the Jones case involved the police accessing someone's vehicle without a warrant.
You seem to be under the impression that the opinion of the court in the Jones was that everyone's public movements are private and the police need a warrant to track your public movements through and any all means. But that was not the decision of the court. The police and still just follow you, Jones notwithstanding.
You can desire your public movements to be protected by the Fourth amendment all you want, but that does not make it so.
I'm not claiming Jones held that cops need a warrant to visually follow someone on a public street. The point you're avoiding is that Carpenter expressly cited Jones for the proposition that people have a fourth amendment interest in the "whole of" their physical movements, and distinguished ordinary observation from technologically enabled, comprehensive tracking. Just because the camera is in public doesn't make it permissible.
And maybe it wasn't the decision in Jones, but Carpenter specifically cites Alito's concurrence for the proposition that a person has a 4A privacy interest in aggregation of movement data and describes GPS tracking in Jones as raising those privacy concerns.
As I've repeatedly explained, the Carpenter decision was narrowly scoped to cell phone location data. The decision did not do anything to restrict other forms of monitoring. The idea that Carpenter restricts governments' ability to video record public spaces is entirely your own invention.
reply