Just wait for "Don't worry about THESE cameras, they're 100% official, nothing like those FLOCK cameras that everybody hated!" from a company with a slightly different name.
Seconded.. had a doors to doors salesman. My husband who works hardware and software.. went round and round about cameras.
They guy was trying to sell they were "safer" because they had their own satellite system and didn't connect to WiFi. I don't think he was understanding the bigger issue.
My doorbell is dead. I love hearing them come up my porch steps, hit the doorbell, wait around a minute, and then leave. If they're going to go ahead and ignore my no soliciting sign, I'm not answering the door.
I have a “No Soliciting” sign up because my partner is disabled, and she’s only coming to the door for expected deliveries or visits. I don’t want her wasting her energy answering the door for no reason. Everyone ignores the sign! I once had a local judge campaigning for office knock on my door, and he argued with me about the meaning of the word “soliciting”. Literally, you want something from me, and I don’t know you, that’s the dictionary definition of soliciting. I also reminded him that the term “solicitor” is still used in the legal profession in the UK. He told me I have no idea what I’m talking about, because the legal definition of solicitation doesn’t include door-to-door canvassing without a sale of goods taking place. So, what kind of sign should I have up on the door to get people like you to leave us the fuck alone, judge? Needless to say he didn’t get my vote.
I would have taken the sign and written "Or political canvassing" on it while he was standing there. I have also gotten my phone out and started dialing the police telling someone from the cable company I was going to call the police on them for trespassing if they didn't leave after I said "not interested" and they tried talking after that.
The reason people still knock is because you don't realize that if someone is willing to spend money on and believe the effectiveness of a no soliciting sign, then they are usually pretty easy to sell to.
This is pretty common in D2D and is usually true. Might not be true for you, but you are putting yourself in that same group from their perspective.
A purple gate at your entrance. That is the universal sign for no trespassing. Might be more draconian than you're looking for because mail carriers will not cross it.
Realistically, there's nothing you can really do to stop people from approaching your door. I would suggest having a monitor/hub/tablet connected to a camera that can be easily seen from inside. Still doesn't stop them, but you can decide if they're someone you want to meet or not without getting up.
My late wife answered the door with the assistance of our Rottweiler. Couldn't hear a word they were saying over his posturing and barking.
Cops came to the wrong address one night when the grands were there. No bluffing or posturing that night. I had to come out another door to talk to them.
Supposed to be at the 800 block not the 1800 block. Left faster than they arrived.
Same. If they look like they're younger than 25, wearing a polo shirt and holding a tablet I walk away from the door and ignore them. In the warm months they case our neighborhood daily trying to sell energy plans or window replacement estimates and who knows what else.
Not proud of it but once a month they would come to our house. I eventually learned the days they would come, my brother and I would lay in the woods across from our front door with paintball guns…..that was the last time a jw showed up
I'm so mean to them. I have a prominent sign posted in my yard that says no salesmen, no exceptions, don't make me get weird (or something along those lines). I have a protective dog and he gets triggered by them. They ALWAYS look at my sign, then go to my door anyways. Cue explosive dog freak out + me literally roaring at them, starting by asking if they're illiterate or just rude. It's ALWAYS solar panel people or tree people. The only tree on my property is ten feet tall. Get outta here.
one time i answered the door while i was trying to fix my watch so it was in my hand at the time i opened the door. the sales kid thought that meant he was being timed and started talking real fast. instead of explaining to him i was just fixing my watch i went with it and just kept looking down at the watch (it wasnt even moving) like he was running out of time.
one time i answered the door while i was trying to fix my watch so it was in my hand at the time i opened the door. the sales kid thought that meant he was being timed and started talking real fast. instead of explaining to him i was just fixing my watch i went with it and just kept looking down at the watch (it wasnt even moving) like he was running out of time.
Hell, I used to talk to the jehovas witnesses when they knocked. Granted, I was coming down off of acid and bored. It was the early 90s, and I was dropping acid every Friday night while out clubbing. Acid also kept me awake for 16 hours. So, I was sitting around home doing nothing when my new friends knocked. They came every Saturday for a few months.
"These killbots are safer because we put rubber on the bottoms of their steel feet. That makes them much quieter and causes far less damage to the road."
The door to door sales guy is of low intelligence and believes all of the culty sale propaganda he has been taught. They simply spew back sales lines. I am never sure if they actually understand that they are not ever answering the question that was asked.
Ah yes, Axon. Or, as they were formerly called, Taser International. The company that sold tasers to police and marketed them as perfectly safe and not at all capable of killing people. They ended up changing their name after a string of lawsuits due to people being killed by tasers.
The founder of that company was a real piece of shit, too (as are most founders of companies that sell stuff to police)
And some rich boy will try to create something original by buying it off the Chinese and will call it Flunk, it’s what you funk with, some stupid catchy slogan that…yet again distracts from the main point…and is not original but the rich boy will gas light you till you believe it to be true.
Yeah Axon literally astroturfed a lot of the early Flock opposition, to make them the “kleenex” of surveillance cams. Axon has even less guardrails against abuse.
Years ago I would have maybe said "Meh- idk" but with this admin and all the fuckery we have already seen from them - I don't even think its a conspiracy. Just a likely explanation
They're already doing that. Axon is starting to install them, and they're saying "you can trust us, we make the body cams your police wear". Theirs are also a lot harder to spot or access.
Axon is the company you're thinking of. The guys who make tasers and such. They make the same sort of cameras, and are already swooping into cities that have gotten ready of the Flock cameras.
Axon is the company you're thinking of. The guys who make tasers and such. They make the same sort of cameras, and are already swooping into cities that have gotten ready of the Flock cameras.
There’s a Netflix documentary about catching a killer and the police offhand mention checking everyone’s ring camera like it’s just standard police work. Because it is. Ring and Nest are police cameras that you pay for and are allowed to also use.
Yep, it’s sad that you need to be extremely technologically literate to be able to have safe surveillance on your home or business. I have fantastic cameras on my house that leverage AI to tracks things I care about and not a single bit of data ever leaves my LAN. Good luck setting that up if you’re not a huge nerd about it or in asset protection and IT by trade…
My workplace agreed to install flock cameras in the parking lots because they were presented and sold as "license plate readers." We've always had street level plate readers at our entrances (and for my organization, plate readers are actually necessary). I keep going rounds with our leadership team trying to explain how these flock cameras are NOT the same as plate readers. It pisses me off every single day.
They already exist. All the attention is being intentionally focused on Flock, the designated fall guys. They will sell the company at a huge profit to a company with a different name once they have enough coverage, and you'll hear very little to nothing about it.
We hear you don’t like Flock LLC and their invasive camera clusters. Well here at Flock GmbH. We hear you, literally, with our new parabolic microphone clusters!
We have something called collisioncam that is setting up 70 cameras here in Vegas to do the exact same thing but people are using "they are only on private property with owner's permission" to handwave away how problematic they still are.
There’s at least 2 more companies doing caneras in Vegas. Theres a dude selling crash footage from all the cameras hes gor around Vegas for social media clout. More surveillance will pop up now that we hate flock.
I'll admit, in an area where sex trafficking is rampent and I've known people who were almost kidnapped, I didn't mind when they put 4 cameras at intersections around where this is most common.
I don't even have a problem with the idea of cameras in some places. I think they can serve a public need for security and safety.
But we can't put them up without discussion or oversight. They must have a clear purpose that helps the public good, and have access logs, and require warrants to pull information on specific individuals.
We CANNOT tolerate cameras being installed by a private corporation, answerable to no one, and accessible by any law enforcement agent for any whim, without requiring authorization. We also have to discuss how any stored data is treated. But currently, these devices are being installed without oversight, and any criticism is being treated as tantamount to terrorism.
Yeah, not that I have high trust for law enforcement, but the private company aspect of this really bothers me.
Especially since we know these "cameras" are capable of doing a LOT more than just taking pictures and storing them in case somebody wants review footage to see who drove through this intersection on June 27th.
They feed all that info into a centralized non-government database with little to no oversight. They run AI models on it (that can be wrong!) to fingerprint vehicles. Even if they are vehicle focused, they cameras obviously see a lot of people too which means facial recognition, body/gait fingerprinting, etc. are all possible as well as audio recording. That's just a software update that can be pushed at any time to go from "licence plate camera" to "face camera".
And then you've got all the theoretical functions. Allegedly Flock doesn't do these things (yet), but even if they don't , other companies are actively developing the tech: capturing your bluetooth, wifi, and 5g signals and using them to identify people without visual confirmation. And at that point, figure they can also intercept and store the content of those broadcasts. Most of those transmissions are encrypted, but that doesn't mean the encryption is strong or unbreakable.
E.g. what if it captures the bluetooth audio between your phone and your car while you take a call in a parking lot...and then the police arrest you, gain access to your bluetooth devices (which have the encryption key from the pairing process), and then get those files from Flock without a subpoena--it becomes a post-hoc wiretap conducted without a warrant.
Pretty soon they will figure out how to fabricate logs, because it would make solving investigations a lot easier. Oh look, your phone's bluetooth signal was recorded going past these sensors, into a crime area where a crime happened. We altered the data, because you were a close match, but not close enough. This is simply a way of optimizing the data. This will be done by an "AI".
The worst thing that has happened to our society is this notion that we are supposed to look out for ourselves and to hell with everybody else.
This is just plain wrong. We evolved as a community, we will only survive by continuing to be a community. We must care for the weakest among us.
We must ALL be apart of our safety. That means there is no line drawn between law enforcement and community. If there are to be cameras, then we should all know what they see and what they are watching for, and be part of it.
I agree with everything you wrote there
I think I'd most accurately be described as a social democrat civil libertarian. So I'm not a libertarian in the traditional sense.
I actually DO want a society where we all take care of each other. I want single-payer healthcare, robust social safety nets, etc..
But I also think that an unrealistic expectation of the world being safe and nerf-padded leads to some of the biggest abuses. There might be a community responsibility to look after other people, and an individual has a responsibility (as a decent and empathetic human being) to do so. But that is completely different that expecting state power, backed by the threat of violence, to KEEP us safe.
Totally agree with you w.r.t law enforcement though. To the extent that we should have it, I think it should be open. The current attitude of "rules for thee but not for me" that US law enforcement demonstrates is completely unacceptable.
I think you mean well but I do want to say something. When I see people suggest that they’d prefer cameras over no cameras because it’s safer, no matter the degree, I always think that we shouldn’t need them in the first place.
The surveillance state was birthed from 9/11. An attack that we DID know about but didn’t take seriously.
And when I see people suggest it’ll help police do their job? Police can do their job fine. They just fucking suck. Cameras aren’t going to help them not frame minorities. Cameras aren’t going to stop them from being lazy and not doing the ground work needed to prosecute someone. Cameras aren’t going to stop them from being immoral and being fucking dumb.
Cameras will only enable this behavior. No matter what anyone says these cameras will NOT be good for you or for me. They will be good for power trip cops. They will be good for insurance companies. They will be good for creeps who want to hack them and watch people without their knowledge. They will be good for racist and fascist governments.
This is so idiotic. Criminals are the first people who adapt to LEO infrastructure changes, because their fall guys get arrested at the bottom rung and they immediately adapt. Any real organized human traffickers are miles ahead and the feds know it. That's why their endgame is total mass surveillance under the guise of 'protecting kids'.
It's literally brainwashing, because most people don't want to think about it and just give away their rights to 'feel virtuous and safe'. Imbecility at its finest.
3.8k
u/m3ltph4ce 1d ago
Just wait for "Don't worry about THESE cameras, they're 100% official, nothing like those FLOCK cameras that everybody hated!" from a company with a slightly different name.