"We announced changes that required auditing, that required using our audit assistance tool, which detects abnormal behavior, and we’re calling on state regulators to focus less on banning this type of technology and more [on] holding our law enforcement community accountable.”

This is absolutely passing the buck. “The collection of your data isn’t wrong, it’s just the myriad ways it can be abused. We want to play whack-a-mole for every problem; as unelected corporate policy that totally isn’t purely profit driven.”

Not-a-lawyer, but I’m quite sure I haven’t signed any TOS allowing Flock to capture or retain my data for any amount of time. Just by driving through a city where some other idiot signed away my rights probably shouldn’t hold up in court.

Legislation should be prioritizing punishing misuse of PII, expanding what PII means in our modern world, and enforcing information sharing barriers instead of eroding them.

If you can tell exactly where I was yesterday at 2:35pm because my car’s internal spyware pinged, my cellphone pinged, I drove past a few ALPR cameras and my credit card was used at a vendor, all without a warrant; then the related data is PII and needs to be protected in a way it isn’t currently.

Corporations should not have data-sharing agreements with governments and should not be allowed to sell their user data to third parties at all.

Right. The root cause here is that companies are allowed to collect stupid amounts of information about private citizens - and then sell that information to a government or abuse it for their own purposes under the cover of an EULA of ‘we will collect [various information] for business purposes’. If I can’t apply for a job without agreeing to 3 EULAs that sign away my personal information, then I’m not agreeing to them; I’m being held hostage by them.

If flock was not allowed to store PII data (and PII was extended to cover location history, nearby devices, and a few other things), then their business model would evaporate.

Just adding here, what is clear to all of us as Coaster indicated, that aggregate privacy and anonymity are what is really at stake here.

Sure, I’m in public and just walking around. I don’t have a right to privacy in those instants. Some jerk with a camera is within their rights to capture my image.

The other aspect of the laws, though, is that even a few years ago, that image was of an anonymous person. The photographer didn’t know who I was and couldn’t find out without asking me and if a cop wanted that picture they had to request it from the taker. Now, though, that image can be shuffled off to a giant datacenter to be processed and potentially figure out who I am, coordinating the time, place, clothing, activities, nearby people, and myriad other details and the tech companies have no problem handing it over that information without any of the humans ever knowing.

I think the simplest solution is that any LEO querying a company’s data about a private entity should require a warrant or subpoena. Data sharing agreements between companies and governments should be illegal.

The longer solution is that collecting and retaining this information “for business purposes” needs to be more heavily regulated. The current definitions of PII are out of date. PII should include things like location, likeness, mood, etc, and the history of those things. Look at what Walmart and others are doing with dynamic pricing, for example.