A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
👉 The system is working exactly as intended and must be destroyed
I like license plates as I think some degree of accountability is important when you are controlling a highly deadly machine. If you make moves that endanger people they should have a way to identify you. I’ve always felt those tinted plate covers were the sign of being a real asshole driver. Now I think if there is anyway to block your plate from flock cameras you should try to do it. Has any coating been effective for this?
It is working perfectly as intended. It is intended to facilitate fascist authority, siphon wealth from municipalities, and help make cops feel tough so they can more efficiently lord over their communities.
For comparison, if you were hosting some kind of platform or service that only has a 99% uptime, you’d have to pay people to use it.
Yes, the Flock system is working correctly, as a tool for police to stalk and harass innocent people.
A- USA doesn’t have standardised plates? Not even 1 per state, but 8000?!
2- Fuck mass survalance, fuck armed cops, fuck Flock.Each state has different levels of customization with different background images. I like plate customization, its a form of self expression.
That’s like embellishing a prison camp number with a fun design. That’s not self-expression that’s morbid.
-
What the actual fuck is this comparison? I’m extremely anti-car, and even I’m wondering what has to be wrong with you.
-
Incidentally got a chuckle out of me that you’re saying this about what’s often effectively a social green-beard (e.g. plates for sports teams, hobbies, causes, etc.).
Look, I’m not saying we shouldn’t be registering cars I’m just saying a licence plate is intended as a vehicle tracking ID. That’s the whole point. I always considered licence plate customization at best tacky. If I want to add some decals and bumper stickers and such, I’m not going to put it on a state issued ID tag.
For the record, I think customized graphics on your credit/debit cards, check designs, etc. is just as morbid. You don’t “own” these things, they’re not part of your identity, and letting them trick your brain into pretending that they belong to you and are an extension of your “self” by adding fancy designs is kind of gross. They are symbols that reference you, they are not a part of you.
I’m just saying a licence plate is intended as a vehicle tracking ID
Everyone here and everyone who gets them knows and understands that.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t be registering cars
I didn’t say or even imply you were, and the fact you clarified that anyway is bizarre – because it’d be completely batshit.
letting them trick your brain into pretending that they belong to you and are an extension of your “self” by adding fancy designs is kind of gross.
Brother, my god, it is a fucking identifier plate on your car; no one’s getting “tricked”, and I don’t know if you can believe this, but people can enjoy making objects into extensions of themselves without becoming slaves to The Man – if you can apprehend that someone in Kentucky who pays $25/year or some shit to signal that they’re into amateur radio isn’t offering up their soul in a plate-shaped vessel on the altar of Rebecca Goodman.
Even if you want to bring ALPRs into this, custom plates existed long, long before we had the technology to turn plates into mass-surveillance tools.
This is so goddamn snobby that it’s painful.
I’m not really concerned what your opinion of me is. You think it’s snobby to not waste money on a stylized government ID? Because that makes sense. If you want to plaster your car in your favourite things, go for it. Live your best life. If you want to paint your car like Lisa Frank exploded in a mist of glitter on it, I’m totally down. But the plate, that’s not ever an extension of you. It isn’t yours and it never was, and the illusion that it is, is kind of sad. But clearly, my opinion isn’t a popular one, so I’ll leave off. We’re clearly not going to agree on this.
I’m kind of in agreement with him, in that I don’t see the point in paying extra to have an ID on my car that tells The Man more about me than I think they need to know, but I don’t think it makes me a shill or (much of) a sucker if I get them. Everyone, including me, makes less than ideal choices. This poor choice is less egregious than most.
I don’t see the point in paying extra to have an ID on my car that tells The Man more about me than I think they need to know
Literally what on Earth are you doing to your license plate that tells The Man more about you in a way that realistically matters? You don’t need your Ashley Madison credentials to create a custom plate.
If you’re worried about dragnet surveillance, I guess it’ll help them when they divide the prison camps by baseball team. If you’re worried about automated surveillance like by ALPRs then, uh, pretty sure the model whose literal entire purpose is to create its own features for classification will find abundant other ways to uniquely fingerprint and extract actual, pertinent information about you. And if you’re worried about targeted surveillance by humans scrutinizing you down to what your custom plate says about you, then god help you, and viva México.
Nike’s new IrisNet profit-sharing plan nicely puts a stylish glow on my shoe logos when the fashionably discreet LaceCam notices the right eyes noticing my shoes, and at this rate I will pay the shoes off in 54 months!
-
No. Just no.
As bbbbbbbbbbb said, every state not only has their own plates, but multiple plate designs. Some states, the variations will be completely different colors and number length. Absolutely no consistency.
They always claim everything they do is correct and working. To admit otherwise means opening the department up to a lawsuit they may actually lose their jobs over.
Well, at least we know this can only happen 98 times, by mistake.
Of course. Flock always works correctly, even when it causes innocent people to get harmed.
Its a spying tool first and foremost, the crime solving part is just a half-arsed afterthought justification.
Lucky he’s white.
That’s around 2/3rds of the entire US population
When the wrong is not defined…yea I guess everything is right…
fuck flock!
I know people here want to talk about flock, but does no one find it questionable a journalist got loaned a $150k vehicle to review? And then another alleged journalist according to the story got pulled over in a $105k Land Rover they were loaned to review? As a journalist, do they also receive homes and women to review? Sounds like some serious corruption right there.
How did you think product reviews happened?
By companies that buy reviews. Not journalism.
Oh bless your heart.
That definitely happens some of the time, in some places. Journalism still exists, however.
Product reviews require more than a ‘test drive’.
You think a free to read website is going out and buying $200,000 (and up) cars every day for a 2 week review?
Even at the height of automotive print journalism there wasn’t budget for that.
Ferrari is famous for cutting access to critical journalists. Most companies expect a blend of positive and negative reviews and lend cars to any credible outlet. American automotive media has typically been pretty bad about the PR regurgitation, but that’s a choice they’re making - hiring people to read the PR, not to write their own.
If they are automotive journalists, which in this case they are, then yes this is completely normal. People get review copies of games / books / movies / phones. So why wouldn’t they loan out cars?
That isn’t journalism. That is corporate PR and marketing.
Read more product reviews from more varied publications. You will see that there is a range of accountability in the sourcing of the product. Not all of it is direct marketing.
However, you can expect all of it to be ideologically consumerist.
