Been using them for years. The price is reasonable too. It’s the only way I found to block ads everywhere on iOS (except the YT app, Mullvad’s Albania wireguard did that)
They aren't just tracking license plates though. They're tracking people - let me explain. Their 'ALPR' cameras (purposefully misleading to call them ALPR btw) capture the footage and send it off to their servers where it's retained - building a long-term historical location history on every vehicle. Advanced analysis is performed on the data to provide features to their customers such as the ability to search for vehicles based on a description of its characteristics (no plate needed), real-time route prediction, location heatmaps, and identifying vehicles that travel together (convoy search). Here's the important part - data is also ingested into another service they run called 'Nova', which is essentially a people search tool that connects the vehicles they capture directly to people and their PII. Access to their platforms (Flock OS, Nova, etc.) is sold via a subscription to law enforcement where they can perform searches for individuals or vehicle whereabouts for any reason, without a warrant, and practically no oversight or regulations.
Warrants (are supposed to) have judicial oversight and are limited in their scope. There's also a paper trail attached to information obtained from a warrant.
A warrant required for the searches should already be the bare minimum. If the constitution were being upheld it would have been a requirement from day 1. So, I suppose I would be 'okay' with this in a sense. What really irks me is the fact that Flock, Axon, etc. are acting almost exclusively as a proxy for the government to conduct mass surveillance that would otherwise be unconstitutional. If the government were directly doing the indiscriminate tracking these companies are, it would be unconstitutional even before a traditional "search" (query) of the data took place, so instead they pay a proxy (i.e. Flock, Axon, etc.) to perform the tracking for them and offer the searches as a subscription service.
Flock isn't even finding the abuse or exposing the abuse. Sometimes it's their customers (police) discovering the abuse - if they actually perform audits like they should, but usually it's citizens submitting FOIA requests for data and discovering the abuses.
Show me an example of Flock (i.e. a Flock employee or official company record) exposing a cop for abusing their systems. Providing auditing tools to the customers to discover abuse is not exposing the abuse. If they were exposing the abuse they would be publishing publicly when officers submitted searches that violated a search policy, which they could do with their 'transparency' portals. But they'll never do that.
You’re right I guess in that flock isn’t themselves going through audit logs I don’t believe but everything else is incorrect.
I don't really think it is Flocks job to do the auditing. Flocks job is to make auditing possible and to surface abuse to the parties involved in policing the usage.
Deflect all you want - nothing I said was incorrect or nonsensical. Flock only provides auditing tools because they're required to for compliance reasons. Then they use the tools as PR to essentially say 'look we're catching bad cops' which is not the case. As I said from the beginning - the responsibility for catching abusers is passed on to the customers and citizens doing FOIA requests. Flock is not 'exposing' the abuse at all, they're facilitating it and passing the moderation responsibilities down. Their CEO is a compulsive liar and sucks at PR.
>"just because he thinks men shouldn't use women's bathrooms and spaces"
You're telling on yourself with this one, transphobe.
Lineham is an anti-trans activist. There's quite literally a whole section on his Wikipedia page dedicated to it, in fact it's the longest section on there. He's practically dedicated his life to the cause.
There's a difference between thinking those thoughts, and posting about them publicly to your following while simultaneously advocating for violence against trans individuals.
Have you considered people can enjoy different things than you? I personally enjoy a nice exhaust tone and I like subwoofers as well. And I don't like them just because they might piss off somebody like yourself, it's for my own enjoyment. Not all exhausts and subwoofers are created equal. Most modern cars with 'premium' sound systems like Bose, JBL, etc. have subwoofers, but they're usually small and don't require a lot of power. The system they installed in this car might have been the OEM premium sound package as well - the one Toyota offers is JBL and comes with a subwoofer. Do you get mad when it's OEM or just DIY? The GR Corolla has a 'loud' exhaust from the factory as well. Loud enough that you'd probably rage at it judging by this comment.
People buy aftermarket exhausts for a variety of reasons. They can produce a different tone, cut down on exhaust 'drone' (which the GR Corolla is notorious for with it's factory exhaust), offer alternative styling, provide weight savings, and reduce backpressure/improve flow. It's not just about volume. Certainly you could be an asshole who buys an exhaust just because it's loud, but that's not why the majority are doing it, it's for their own enjoyment and usually provides a performance improvement. If they really wanted to achieve max volume they could just do an open dump exhaust or a hood exit, it would be cheaper than buying a Borla and significantly louder.
I like sparring. If I went around punching random people in the face I'd get arrested. If you want to drive a loud car, tha's fine; just do it in a way that doesn't bother other people. Imagine how much better the world would be if everyone put in even the slightest bit of effort to be kind and compassionate to each other.
> Have you considered people can enjoy different things than you?
Midnight to 3 am driving around and around in circles in a residential area with a modified exhaust. Stopping occasionally to restart the car to play the programmed "startup growl".
Your nuanced hobby and aesthetics is reduced to “stupid loudness” in people’s minds because the primary interaction other people have with it is “I am being subjected to stupid loudness”, yes.
Spoken like someone that never even had to try. Neither of those can physically mitigate spikes of noise from engines, exhausts, or subs, and will only cause more harm if the noise floor is low.
Why spend three paragraphs insisting on the innocence of your motives when you’re just going to fall back on “fuck you suck it up” when pressed on the consequences of your actions?
Imagine the shock of the non-car-enthusiasts in this thread when they discover the factory exhaust on this car is already pretty loud. It's so loud from the factory it comes with a valved exhaust to tone it down under light throttle and idle.
Surely he means that himself and his billionaire buddies will be the first boots on the ground when we decide to plunder another country for oil again. No?
