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ALPR Maker Flock Broke Laws Repeatedly While Installing Cameras, Courting Cop Shops
from the this-actually-isn't-irony dept
Amazon’s home surveillance tech acquisition, Ring, wanted to be all things to everyone. But mostly, it wanted to be BFFs with law enforcement.
Providing homeowners with an easy way to surveil their own doorsteps and driveways was enough for Ring for a little while. Then, following its acquisition by Amazon, it began to portray itself as an essential addition to government surveillance networks. Ring promised cops easy access to recordings captured by devices mounted on private residences, giving officers “free” cameras to hand out to taxpayers — each one bearing the implicit suggestion that any footage gathered by “free” doorbell cams should be considered property of citizens’ government benefactors, rather than their own.
Flock, the private sector purveyor of automated license plate readers, followed the same pattern. It pitched its products to gated communities and homeowners’ associations, promising them an effortless way to deter those not paying HOA fees from passing unnoticed into the interiors of their walled gardens.
While Flock was initially happy to increase the assholish nature of the inordinately wealthy, it soon developed a thirst for real money. It started pitching its ALPRs to government agencies, hoping to secure lucrative contracts that contained the potential to generate revenue streams unlikely to be interrupted any time before the turn of the next century.
Public money is often steady money. Flock recognized this. And, according to this report by Thomas Brewster and Cyrus Farviar for Forbes, it knew exactly how to ingratiate itself with law enforcement: by breaking a few laws. After all, few entities have less respect for laws than those enforcing them.
Company communications with state transportation agencies obtained via public records requests, and interviews with more than half a dozen former employees, suggest that in its rush to install surveillance cameras in the absence of clear regulatory frameworks, Flock repeatedly broke the law in at least five states. In two, state agencies have banned Flock staff from installing new cameras.
The company claims it’s on a mission to “reduce crime” in this country. Not its own, apparently. In its hurry to expand it market, Flock tended to ignore regulatory requirements meant to discourage companies from installing cameras where they weren’t welcome, or where they couldn’t be installed safely.
With its general disregard for applicable laws exposed, Flock has gone on the defensive. Its statement to Forbes suggests it’s doing its best but laws are just so darn complicated these days.
Responding to a detailed list of questions, Flock spokesperson Josh Thomas told Forbes that the company has nearly 50 people dedicated to permitting and “operates to the best of our abilities within the bounds of the law.” He said that since jurisdictional boundaries are not always clear, Flock didn’t always know when and where it should be applying for a permit. “For the tens of thousands of permits we have applied for, and the tens of thousands of locations that do not require permits, we have certainly not been perfect,” Thomas said. “But we try to respond and fix any issues, or we make the effort to retropermit as needed.”
Some sympathy is warranted. Regulatory laws are generally referred to as “thickets” or “impenetrable wall of text boilerplate nightmares.” There are a lot of hoops to jump through, plenty of boxes to tick, and a variety of other red tape analogies to satisfy. That being said, if you’re a tech company that’s decided to fully embrace the government business of law enforcement, you should be going above and beyond to ensure you’ve got everything locked down on your end.
Flock, despite its alleged “50 people” dedicated to the task of performing regulatory hoop jumps prior to deployment, has failed often enough it’s now attracting national attention. Sure, no person or entity will ever be without sin, but Flock wants to help cops cast the first stone. That’s the sort of thing that rarely goes well when you’ve decided to cast these stones from the interior of your glass house.
Sure, it’s one thing for me, a private citizen and contributor to Techdirt, to have exceeded my regulatory allowance of mixed metaphors. It’s quite another when a public company decides to mix its business and pleasure by bedding down with any cop shop that will have it while failing to ensure it’s complied with all applicable laws. At best, it just looks sloppy. At worst, it looks like the sloppiest form of collusion — the kind that assumes all will be forgiven because Flock is now (by extension) in the business of law enforcement.
Haste makes waste, Flock is now learning, presumably after promising agencies in compromising positions that it would be the best thing that has ever happened to them.
In South Carolina, State Transportation Secretary Christy Hall told Forbes that since spring 2022, her staff has found more than 200 unpermitted Flock cameras during routine monitoring of public roads. In July 2023, the agency put a moratorium on new installations and ordered a safety and compliance review of all Flock cameras across the state.
I’m no business talking guy, but it’s pretty hard to expand your market when you’ve been locked out of it after pissing off regulators, including state representative Todd Rutherford, who told Forbes Flock is apparently “willing to break the law to install these cameras.”
Directly north of this state, things aren’t going any better for Flock. As Brewster and Farivar report, Flock was hit with an injunction forbidding it from installing new cameras after it was sued by the North Carolina Department of Public Safety over its refusal to obtain licensing for its camera installations.
Not that this constant illegality appears to bother those in the literal business of law enforcement:
But as state officials grumbled, cops raved — and kept buying. Tim Martin, a former police officer in Huntington Beach, California, was an early user of Flock’s surveillance cameras and described them as” one of the greatest technological advancements” of his career.
And that’s the bigger problem — one regulators won’t easily be able to change. It rarely seems to matter to law enforcement agencies if their preferred tech providers violate laws. All that really seems to matter to these agencies is whether or not the tech makes it easier to engage in mass surveillance or enables performing more police work via keyboard and monitor, rather than by actually going out and engaging with the people they serve.
The truth is cops are as antagonistic towards over-regulation as the average small business owner. The difference is law enforcement agencies will look the other way while companies they like bypass regulations. Then they’ll go out and enforce these same laws against businesses they don’t like. Police officials will complain about red tape slowing down their valuable work (and, far too often, this “red tape” includes such things as constitutional rights) but are always willing to wrap others up with it because it gives the impression they actually care about laws and enforcement.
Flock is simply reading the signals being sent by its preferred customers and acting accordingly. And, no matter what’s happening now, it will lose ZERO law enforcement customers because it thumbs its nose at regulators. If anything, this demonstrates to cops that Flock is one their own: willing to respect the law only when it works in its favor.
Filed Under: alpr, law enforcement, license plate readers, surveillance
Companies: flock
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Meta Has Had Enough Of Australia’s Link Tax Shakedown; Says It Will Not Renew Any Deals
from the it's-linking,-not-taking dept
It appears that Meta is serious about no longer bribing news orgs to keep corrupt politicians from forcing them to engage in sketchy wealth transfer schemes to news orgs. While it caved in the past in Australia and paid off news orgs there, the company is informing news orgs that they won’t be renewing the deal.
Around the globe, there remain ongoing attempts to force Google and Meta (mainly) to hand money over to news organizations. Supporters have no fundamental principle behind this other than “Google and Meta are making money, and some news companies are struggling, therefore, they should pay us.” As we’ve discussed at great length, these laws are dangerous on multiple levels. They’re an extreme form of crony corruption, forcing one industry to pay off another. They’re also an attack on the open web, because they are based on the principle of “if your users link to news too much, you have to pay for sending them traffic.”
None of this makes sense. If the news companies don’t want the traffic, they can block it. But they want the free traffic and they want to be paid for it. It’s extraordinarily corrupt.
There have been variations on the link tax model over the past decade or so. Various failed experiments in the EU were followed by Australia’s infamous news bargaining code. Mainstream news orgs continue to insist Australia’s experiment has been a huge success, but that’s because the only ones talking about it are the big media orgs that are getting millions of dollars from Meta and Google. This might cloud their reporting on the law, not that they admit that. About the only Australian news orgs I’ve seen call out the inherent corruption in these plans are the satirical Juice Media and the irreverent Crikey.
Crikey’s summary is dead on:
The logic of the news media bargaining code isn’t that of ending a rip-off perpetrated by foreign tech giants. Instead, it’s similar to Coles and Woolworths successfully demanding, on the basis of all the great work they’ve done for the community, that the government forcibly transfer profit from an international competitor that had successfully disrupted their business model.
The fact is, these link taxes have been a disaster wherever they’ve been implemented, including Australia. The Public Interest Journalism Initiative in Australia tracks changes in the journalism space across the country with laser-like precision. And its data certainly does not suggest a huge grand success for journalism in the country. Rather, it shows a lot of consolidation, and plenty of smaller journalism outlets still struggling, while there’s an increase in areas with little to no journalism coverage. However, contractions in the news business greatly outweigh expansions:
Apparently the money flowing in is — as plenty of people predicted — going to the tippy top of the market, making folks like Rupert Murdoch even wealthier. But not doing much to help journalism.
Google has been much more willing to give in and pay the demanded extortion. A decade ago, Google was willing to take a stand in places like Spain, shutting down Google News in that country. But these days, Google has been willing to cave, quickly, in both Australia and, more recently, Canada.
On the other hand, Meta has been much more willing to push back on these laws. It would be nice to think Meta is doing this to protect the open web, but no one’s going to fall for that. Meta has spent years trying to wall off the open internet, so it’s not like the company magically got a conscience on these issues. But, whether for good reasons or bad, Meta has been way more willing to push back on these laws. In Canada, the company has blocked news links, where it was quickly discovered that news orgs needed traffic from Meta way, way more than Meta needed links from news orgs. Meta has also threatened to take similar steps in the US if various state or federal laws come into effect.
In Australia, you may recall, Meta initially blocked news there, before cutting a few deals with news orgs there. Those deals (and the ones Google did as well) were not technically under the News Bargaining Code. Rather, they were blatant payoffs to avoid the invoking of the code, which would then force the companies into binding arbitration.
But, apparently, Meta has decided enough is enough. It informed the news orgs it paid off a few years ago that it will not be renewing those deals when they finish, and that it’s removing its dedicated news tab.
Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, has set itself on a collision course with the Albanese government after announcing it will stop paying Australian publishers for news, and plans to shut down its news tab in Australia and the United States.
Meta informed publishers on Friday that it would not enter new deals when the current contracts expire this year.
The news tab – a dedicated tab for news in the bookmarks section of Facebook – will also shut down in April, after a similar shut down in the UK, Germany and France last year.
Again, it’s nearly impossible to get good reporting on this stuff because all the major media sites are biased in that they are recipients of these payoffs. The Guardian report quotes a ton of politicians and news orgs decrying this, and only presents Meta’s PR quotes in response — not bothering to speak to any civil society or academics who are willing to speak out as to why these regulatory schemes are so corrupt and problematic.
But, Meta makes a fairly clear point that highlights the absurdity of these laws: what if Meta just doesn’t want to be in the news business? The company has made it pretty damn clear over the last few years that focusing on “news” as it did for a few years was nothing but a headache. It would rather people just use social media to connect with friends, not argue about the news.
Should it be allowed to do that?
“We know that people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content – they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions and interests. As we previously shared in 2023, news makes up less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed, and is a small part of the Facebook experience for the vast majority of people.”
Again, the reaction from people who are mad at this move just puts the exclamation point on just how corrupt the whole scheme is. They don’t care about the reasons or the problems of having to pay to allow users to link to public news sites. No, they just want cash and are mad that they don’t get cash.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, told reporters on Friday the decision was “not the Australian way”.
“We know that it’s absolutely critical that media is able to function properly and be properly funded. Journalism is important and the idea that research and work done by others can be taken free is simply untenable,” he said.
But nothing is being “taken free.” It is just that users on Facebook decide they want to point people to news stories, thereby sending free traffic to that news organization by posting the link. A little bit of text and an image shows up on Facebook, but that is entirely controllable by the news org since they can set the details for the cards that show up when linked.
So, Prime Minister, what the fuck is “taken” and what was “taken free”? Because the answer is nothing.
The communications minister, Michelle Rowland, and assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, called news media companies on Friday following the announcement, advising them the government would be taking all of the steps available under the news media bargaining code.
“We’re not talking about some plucky little startup, we’re talking about one of the world’s largest and most profitable companies,” Jones said. “It has a responsibility to ensure that it pays for the content that … has been used on its platform, and frankly, that it’s making millions and millions of dollars out of it and so the government is adamant it will be backing the code we’ll be taking all of the actions that are available to us under the code.”
No, it’s not a plucky little startup, but it’s also not “using” the content on their platform. It’s allowing its users to link to that content, which is a fundamental part of the open web. And by doing so, they are sending free traffic to that website.
If Albanese and the Australian government are so concerned about things happening without payment, why aren’t they making news orgs pay Facebook for the traffic they’re getting?
It’s like they live in this upside down world.
Either way, it sounds like the end result of this is that the Australian government is likely to try to force Meta to (1) host news it has no interest in hosting, and (2) paying for that news it does not value and which it would prefer not to host.
How does that make any sense at all?
Filed Under: anthony albanese, australia, extortion, journalism, link tax, news bargaining code
Companies: meta
Wikipedia Wisely Downgrades CNET Reliability Score After Lazy AI Screw Ups
from the sorry-you're-no-longer-to-be-trusted dept
We’ve noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate “AI” into journalism have proven to be a comical mess, resulting in no shortage of shoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It’s thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and automate lazy and mindless ad engagement clickbait.
The folks rushing to implement half-cooked AI at places like Red Ventures (CNET) and G/O Media (Gizmodo) aren’t competent managers to begin with. Now they’re integrating “AI” with zero interest in whether it actually works or if it undermines product quality. They’re also often doing it without telling staffers what’s happening, revealing a widespread disdain for their own employees.
After CNET repeatedly published automated dreck, Wikipedia has taken the step of no longer ranking the formerly widely respected news site as a “generally reliable” news source. As Futurism notes, the website’s crap automated content crafted by fake automated journalists increasingly doesn’t pass muster:
“Let’s take a step back and consider what we’ve witnessed here,” a Wikipedia editor who goes by the name “bloodofox” chimed in. “CNET generated a bunch of content with AI, listed some of it as written by people (!), claimed it was all edited and vetted by people, and then, after getting caught, issued some ‘corrections’ followed by attacks on the journalists that reported on it,” they added, alluding to the time that CNET’s then-Editor-in-Chief Connie Guglielmo — who now serves as Red Ventures’ “Senior Vice President of AI Edit Strategy” — disparagingly referred to journalists who covered CNET’s AI debacle as “some writers… I won’t call them reporters.””
Of course CNET was already having credibility problems long before AI came on the scene. The website, like many “tech news” websites, increasingly acts more of an extension of gadget marketing departments than an adult news venture. CNET editorial standards have long been murky, as exemplified by that whole CES Dish Network award scandal roughly a decade ago.
Things got worse once CNET was purchased by Red Ventures, which has been happy to soften the outlet’s coverage to please advertisers, and, like most modern media companies, sees journalism not as a truth-telling exercise, but as a purely extractive path toward chasing engagement at impossible scale.
That sentiment is everywhere you currently look, as a rotating crop of trust fund failsons drive what’s left of U.S. journalism into the soil. These folks see journalism as an irrelevant venture, and they’re keen to turn it into a sort of automated journalism simulacrum; stuff that looks somewhat like useful reporting, but is predominantly an unholy fusion of facts-optional marketing and engagement bait.
It’s great to see the folks at Wikipedia take note and act accordingly.
Filed Under: ai, automation, journalism, media, plagiarism, reporting, wikipedia
Companies: cnet, red ventures, wikipedia
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