It builds a map of your life without you knowing. Thousands of cameras snapping your plate over months means someone can piece together that you go to a certain church, a certain doctor, a certain bar, or a certain person's house. You never agreed to that, and you can't see it happening.
There's no warrant and often no real oversight. Normally police need a judge's permission (a warrant) to track someone. Flock can let them search where your car has been without that step, which is why people call it "warrantless surveillance." And it's been misused: several towns like Oshkosh and Appleton canceled their Flock contracts over privacy concerns and several incidents of misuse by law enforcement.
You don't control the data, and the rules can change. This is a big one. When Brookings agreed to install the cameras, the city was promised it would own the data, that retention would be temporary, and that Flock would not sell the information, with the contract stating Flock does not own and shall not sell customer data. Then in February 2026 Flock rewrote its terms, granting itself a perpetual, irrevocable license to use and disclose all customer data, and deleted the promise not to sell that data. So data collected about you can outlive the promises that were made when the camera went up.
And another thing to note is that it goes way beyond just reading license plates. It's building a profile and lets them search based on it. It captures things like bumper stickers and what the people in the car look like.
- a calculator does not have opinions, it gives facts
- also a calculator does not offload your critical thinking ability
- fun fact, i have stopped using calculators since the last 3 months or so as an experiment and guess what? I can subtract and add six digit numbers effortlessly now
- also a calculator is not subject to bias which the AI frontier model companies can most certainly push in your direction if they wanted to.
- So when I see people comparing AI with the dawn of calculators, i really sit and wonder how such a comparison even makes sense
do we have a report on general gaming like does the chance of dementia go down if you are playing call of duty or something? has there ever been any studies conducted on this?
Unfortunately in this real life iterated prisoner's dilemma, half of everyone is vocally defecting, so you not using the chatbot is hurting you whilst others get ahead.
The logic reminds me of what happened to Edge, it became a Chromium fork. If Windows starts using Linux, and they just make a better rendition of "WINE" it could be really interesting.
People will hate me for saying this, but if in fact Microsoft rolled their own distribution, it would mean a lot of Microsoft $$$ goes into developing, maintaining and hardening the kernel, with Linus Torvalds gatekeeping the changes.
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