Presumably there are people that have access to it. And if you are demoing software that connects to cameras, then someone gave the sales guy access to those cameras.
I’m also assuming those probably weren’t the only cameras…
I imagine its for security. Ie if there are reports of robbery, you can find who did it. I know its not that popular in the states but its common elsewhere, but with better controls. (well, "better" as in controlled by shitty IoT devices)
I think the thing with flock is just how poorly put together everything is. They are obviously insecure, and the entire network has massive holes in it. Yet its still being rolled out.
Robbery may not be the main reason for a camera. Having a video of any incident that happens (broken equipment leading to injury, angry parent, etc.) would be valuable.
Looting is done for fun too. It must suck to have kids show up for practice in the morning and some of the essential gear is gone. It doesn’t matter if it is inexpensive to replace, you still have to cancel class and take a day or two up replace it, file a police report, etc
Right, but why is a Flock camera a better approach than: insurance, on-prem camera, etc. The Flock camera doesn't prevent theft. It increases remote viewing (especially if it's used in a demo to strangers they aren't customers yet, doubly especially if those strange customers are doing it because the might want to see young gymnasts)
normally a condition of insurance is that you have CCTV and other preventative systems in place.
> The Flock camera doesn't prevent theft.
Not directly, but it does increase the chance of the perpetrator getting caught (not flock, the camera) in theory this means that less people are about to steal/break stuff.
Also sign posts with saying that "this place has surveillance" tends to reduce opportunists.
On a side note I would recommend volunteering at a community centre/sports/scouts/library. First its extremely rewarding, and secondly you learn about how things are in the real world "for the normals"
At least for private households, it's not mandatory to have surveillance cameras at home. If you do have one though, they will demand footage and can deny your claim if it was off, or worse. https://youtu.be/UMIwNiwQewQ?t=903
In many cases the people deploying these cameras have no idea the feeds are being resold to Flock. It’s not like they have a consumer brand and people are saying, “oh yeah, Flock, they’re the license plate camera folks…I definitely want one of those in my locker room.”
We are opening up a wellness clinic and we were planning to use a managed service company for internet, network, and security. I was appalled by the managed services suggestions. Privacy of our patients and their data is critical, and the managed service company wants to send all of our feeds to third parties and give third parties direct access to our network.
We decided this was a privacy and security risk, and have gone in a completely different direction, but it would not surprise me if most businesses used one of these companies and just went with whatever they suggested without understanding at all what is at stake or who has access to the data.
It's "hilarious" how incompetent some companies are.
One background check firm used by a previous employer of mine sent me an email saying:
"Hi FireBeyond, doing a background check, just want to verify that all these details for you are correct:
full legal name, address, dob, full ssn, phone number, USCIS#..."
and then the kicker:
"and also want to make sure we have the correct email address for you"
Oh. You just sent all this shit to an email address and "oh, let us know if this your email address"?!?
Meanwhile, they've found my fiancee on FB and are messaging her out of the blue to "verify" she knows me (to be clear, this was meant to be a standard background check, not a security clearance or anything similar).
To their credit, that employer, when I told them all this, were as horrified as I was and fired them as their background check provider.
Most often the business hires a security contractor to take care of it, and signs the contract without understanding the terms. You should be able to trust your suppliers enough that you can do the above, they are the experts in the thing (cameras in this thing, but could be things like plumbing or accounting) and you have your own business to run. "Should" is key though, all too often someone doesn't do right by their clients.
>Most often the business hires a security contractor to take care of it, and signs the contract without understanding the terms.
The bulk of the responsibility here would lie on whoever signed I think. It's one thing to click "I agree" when you are making a SaaS account for downloading cat videos. But at a job, you are getting paid to read these things and to make informed decisions.
> Or are you just saying the person placing the cameras is decoupled from the person making the decision to aggregate them all.
That's exactly what's happening.
People are buying webcams which are cheap and have in their ToS something to the effect of "we get to sell everything the camera can see". Which, in turn, allows them to partner with Flock and sell video footage directly to them.
Consider the fact that at one point, Amazon partnered with Flock to sell their ring camera footage to Flock. [1] It only got botched because of the creepy superbowl commercial selling the spying as "finding lost puppies".
Any sane business that has lots of random people coming in will have cameras recording (except in bathrooms/locker rooms). There is too much opportunity for crime, and a camera is cheap. If something happens you pull up the feed from the last month and give the interesting parts to the police; most often you just delete everything after a month. More than one crime has been solved this way.
That said, if there wasn't a crime the camera footage should be deleted.
The problem isn't having cameras. Its that these cameras should be closed circuit with data residing locally, not being sent to a 3rd party that has full access to the video streams, and who processes them, combines them with other parties, resells data from them, or hands them over without a warrant!
Ok, and bear with me, but what if that third party needs to do a sales demo and the client can only be convinced by seeing live footage of stranger’s children in a gymnastics class or at the pool in their swimsuits?
I really don’t see how we can avoid having our cities hand over this data sight unseen to a company with a history of enabling stalkers and overzealous policing.
I haven’t checked this, but based on the enthusiasm for this technology, I assume that crime clearance rates are near 100% in cities with these cameras.
> There is too much opportunity for crime, and a camera is cheap.
The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it. Even when it doesn't it will not prevent the crime from happening. It _may_ provide you an opportunity to prosecute the person who committed it.
In reality the only real reason to have one is to reduce your insurance premiums.
> crime has been solved
A perpetrator was potentially caught and now has to be tried or negotiated into a plea. I understand we use the term "solve" as a term of art but it's a particularly poor one. It speaks to the need of police to clear their books of negative indicators and not to any first order desirable social outcome.
> That said
That said, if during a demo, you access another customers equipment, I will _never_ do business with you. That's just extremely unprofessional behavior.
> The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it. Even when it doesn't it will not prevent the crime from happening. It _may_ provide you an opportunity to prosecute the person who committed it.
And that is worth something in itself, at least in areas where disputes between people are the norm. Gyms in particular suffer from theft to sexual harassment.
> The camera doesn't prevent crime. It just displaces it.
That's why I periodically leave a bunch of bicycles with cheap locks downtown. They act like a kind of criminal sacrificial anode, reducing crime in the rest of the city.
Cops don't enforce drug laws in particular areas because wealthy people live there and not only will arresting wealthy people and their kids get those guys a call from their boss, but the courts will never make any money off prosecuting wealthy people that can afford to drop thousands of dollars on a lawyers and the court case.
Drug laws are enforced in poor areas tho because poor people can't afford good lawyers or drag the process out for years and potentially cost the court tens of thousands on just a single case, they instead get give a disinterested public defender, or maybe a bottom tier of private lawyer if they can afford it, against a prosecutor who's entire job is to ram cases and plea deals through the system as fast as possible to make a profit and fund the court and local cops. Judges that don't convict enough get the boots, prosecutors who aren't big enough dicks get the boot, public defenders that don't recommend a ton of plea deals or are too good at their job don't get offered as many public defense cases.
Because many of us who live in cities have experience with police being completely feckless.
I have experienced multiple times when I tell police that I have video evidence of a crime happening as well as evidence of the identity of the criminal and they won’t even look at it. I once had a cop tell me that I shouldn’t bother with a report with witnesses and evidence and a known perpetrator since it would never get investigated. That cop got punished for telling the truth, although they were 100% correct, the detective on the case never even opened the file. The detective was not punished.
What does this have to do with cameras covering little kids doing gymnastics?
I'm sorry you had a bad experience and using cameras to protect yourself is a thing but filming kids doing gymnastics seems very very far from purely defensive.
Why does the video footage need to be able to be viewed live, remotely, by a sales team and a prospective client in another state?
Predators have access to these cameras. There are numerous instances of police using these systems to stalk women.
If I want video proof of what happened at a school, I’m much more comfortable with it being held on premises in a tamper evident location. That eliminates some of the predators from the situation.
Why is the camera there in the first place??
Presumably there are people that have access to it. And if you are demoing software that connects to cameras, then someone gave the sales guy access to those cameras.
I’m also assuming those probably weren’t the only cameras…