Students force ten US campuses to drop Flock surveillance cameras
US university students tell surveillance cameras to Flock off
A nationwide student campaign is pushing universities to cut ties with Flock Safety's automated license plate readers. Since April, at least ten campuses in seven states have scrapped their contracts, including Stanford, Cornell, Penn State and Emory. Stanford senior Angela Nguyen gathered hundreds of signatures demanding the school drop Flock; it did this summer, but is already installing cameras from Genetec. Organizers say their real goal is ending all license plate surveillance on campus.
The devices are a signal from the police and university that everybody is under suspicion.
- unpleasurable
> A few schools […] have kept Flock contracts but restricted national access to the cameras’ records.
They get "national access" controls? And the default is "allow all"?
- barbariangrunge
Glad to see the public taking a stand against this stuff. I don't think anyone realizes how often they're being filmed right now
- volkl48
As a reminder: You don't have to fight this entity by entity, town by town or vendor by vendor.
You can just ban this shit at the state level, entirely, for everyone, including banning all private operators from using them in any capacity.
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Here in New Hampshire, we do and there's none of these in the state.
A legal use of an ALPR in NH would have to:
- Be solely for law enforcement use.
- Be incapable of capturing images of the occupants of the vehicle
- And most importantly: Delete all data within 3 minutes such absolutely no records are kept and no data is transmitted to any other party UNLESS the plate matched one that was already on a wanted list of plates being searched for.
(NH RSA 261:75b - https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XXI/261/261-75-b.htm )
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Your state can do the same - demand it from your legislators.
- matteoraso
The very idea of Flock doesn't make sense. The vast majority of crimes are committed in private areas, so its affect on crime will be very small compared to the massive loss of privacy.
- bell-cot
> In Georgia, two seniors at Alpharetta high school created a petition to remove Flock cameras from their campus. Aditya Manchanda and Henry Jones, who are ... and their petition attracted local news coverage.
> After gathering signatures... The principal referred the boys to Fulton county school board members. Their emails have so far gone unanswered, so they’re planning to show up to an upcoming board meeting to relay their concerns.
The local school district: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_County_Schools
At least in my part of the U.S., local school board elections are often decided by relatively small numbers of votes. And voters seldom have strong preferences between the candidates.
If you want to get the school board's actual attention, then get out and campaign for candidates who take strong anti-surveillance positions. There's really nothing as convincing as "Chris and Pat supported that, and both of 'em lost the election".