Say no to surveillance
Surveillance Company Flock Now Using AI to Report Us to Police if it Thinks Our Movement Patterns Are “Suspicious” | ACLU
Company crosses a dangerous line by beginning to offer AI suspicion-generation functions
Every one of these for-profit public-surveillance companies will:
- Surveil and collect more data than initially agreed upon
- Sell said data to brokers
- Sell access to said data to law enforcement
- Train AI models on said data
- Sell derivative products that infringe on their users’ liberty (i.e. pre-crime prediction, profiling)
- Retain data longer than they agreed to, either through negligence or intentional data-retention laundering.
- Get hacked, releasing personally identifiable data to the criminal web
- Get sold to another company that will use the data for things the initial contract never intended
This happens every time. Every damn time.
Say no to surveillance. No short-term “safety” benefit is worth this enshittification.
To be clear: I’m not singling out Flock as though they were somehow run by uniquely evil people. No, this phenomenon is something that I believe will inevitably happen to any company that enters this product space whose reason for existence is to maximize profit. In other words, capitalism demands this behavior. The incessant demand to increase profits will drive any business to enshittify and inexorably check off each item in this list, until they are sold to someone else (either proactively or because they’re dying), fulfilling the final checkbox.