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Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'

483 points · 267 comments · sbulaev

  1. joshheitzman · · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, that's what they are. But does that mean are they breaking federal law or unconstitutional? I believe we've been told by the courts repeatedly that we should have no expectation of privacy out in public.
    1. hackyhacky · · focus · HN ↗
      I agree that it's not clear that this breaks federal law. But I do think it's clear that this should break federal law.

      There's an interesting analogy with copyright issues surrounding AI use. Both copyright laws and surveillance were created to (respectively) creative incentives for authors to create novel works; and to protect citizens for indiscriminate surveillance. The laws made sense given the technology available at the time: it simply wasn't feasible to put a cop on every street corner, or to ingest the ideas of every work ever written.

      But the laws have been eclipsed by technology. Technology makes a mockery of existing laws, by clearly violating their intent. Much has been written to the effect of "why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me." Similarly, Flock cameras have the effect or violating privacy in the exact same way the original laws sought to prevent.

      Unfortunately, laws are slow to change, and monied interests will fight tooth-and-nail to put their profits above the rights of ordinary people. It's going to be a difficult decade or so coming up.

      1. bogwog · · focus · HN ↗
        > why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me

        Can confirm. I've personally stopped releasing new open source code, and stopped contributing to projects.

        Until copyright laws are updated to protect my work from being stolen and my labor exploited by AI companies, there's zero incentive for me to participate in open source.

        Even OSI's cuck licenses are being cucked beyond reason. I didn't think that was possible.

        1. matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
          AIs make short work of proprietary code as well. Reverse engineering has become trivial. Not releasing any code whatsoever is the only possible defense now. I've made my peace with that.

          What worries me is the fact AIs render licenses irrelevant. What's the point of starting an AGPLv3 project when AIs can just study it and make a proprietary equivalent? The free software movement no longer has any leverage.

          I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.

          1. joshheitzman · · focus · HN ↗
            Indeed. I specifically decided to open-source my AI coding agent harness (coming later this month) because I felt like I was never going to be able to protect any the trade secrets due to how easy reverse engineering is now.
            1. jasomill · · focus · HN ↗
              Easy doesn’t mean legal, and the fact that the law hasn’t caught up doesn’t mean that it won’t. And if both public sentiment and LLM feedback loops trend in the directions I fear they will, retribution may be swift and not easily reversed.
          2. bogwog · · focus · HN ↗
            > AIs make short work of proprietary code as well. Reverse engineering has become trivial. Not releasing any code whatsoever is the only possible defense now. I've made my peace with that.

            This is a false equivalence. Reverse engineering my binary is not the same thing as training on my code. When you RE a binary, what comes out the other side is not the code that I wrote, its some machine-generated code that can reproduce the behavior of the binary. The result can't even be described as 'similar' to the original, because the compilation process is pretty much 100% lossy.

            Reverse engineering my binary doesn't concern me too much, as I'm sure there are legal avenues I could take to protect my business were it to become a real problem. And if it comes down it, there's zero competitive advantage someone would have in that scenario, as all they'd have is undifferentiated AI slop.

            Taking my work, putting it into your commercial product, and selling it without my permission is what I have a problem with. That's exactly what AI companies are doing with very little push back, and why I won't release my hand-written human code anymore.

            > I also don't feel any sense of accomplishment anymore. Software is so trivial now. Even if I make some unique thing, others can just have an AI copy it. Nothing is special anymore. Feels like there's no point.

            Software is certainly not 'trivial' now. The only people who believe this are those that have gotten caught up in the AI marketing blitz, or have completely detached/warped perspective on software. I.e. non-engineers wowed by novelty, finance execs wowed by the idea of being able to fire a bunch of people, or oligarchs wowed by the idea of being able to monopolize an entire industry.

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