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> Why do we treat these cameras like they can do only one thing? Because its useful messaging to disarm the populace. "License plate reader" sounds less alarming than "Internet connected camera" or "Mass surveillance device." Public attitudes vary around a "license plate reader" but will be more uniformly opposed to "Widespread, automated government mass surveillance tracking your every move via camera in real time"

> No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network, but later the manufacturers added that feature. Plenty of people did? That was obviously one of the end goals for cloud connected devices pushing recordings to a remote side for processing and storage. Especially when stuff like facial recognition was implemented server side. I would be highly surprised if this was not pitched in the first internal product meeting. While I give some grace to the regular population on this topic - anyone posting on HN should have trivially seen this outcome as not only likely, but nearly written in stone. Even if all your imagination captured was “secret NSA warrant” it would be one of the first risks you’d imagine for such a product. It was obvious that this was the final outcome even back when Facebook first implemented tagging friends in photos before image recognition got cheap and good enough to go back and time and correlate the social graphs of everyone.

Especially considering Flock's API will give you people not just license plates. The flag for whether the object/person is law enforcement vs not is interesting as well. Love that, very cool for quickly filtering out the streams / geodata that might have an officer's actions recorded. https://docs.flocksafety.com/developer-hub/docs/tracking-obj...

This amounts to an argument against ever using general purpose computing devices to accomplish anything. You could say the same about literally any privately operated device. ‘I don’t know why they call these things cell towers. They do whatever they are programmed to and can be reprogrammed by anyone with access’ Heck the same applies to non electronic things too ‘why do they call it a house? It’s a general purpose structure and could be turned into a shop or a factory or a crack den at any time by anyone with access’

"Autonomous dragnet surveillance cameras" wasn't as popular with the focus groups. > No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network Doorbell cameras were at least for individual security, initially. There's no attempt being made to market Flock as anything but mass surveillance. Surely we all expect them or their successors to be detecting peoples' faces, walking gates, and who-knows-what-else in the near future.