Traditional look-up software is probably being misused by cops all the time (à la the old noir trope of a PI having "a buddy in the department" who can look up anything for him).
The first batch of firing that happened in GA was not because of Flock safeguards, it was because an internal auditor said let's look at your new system.
If they cared about privacy, they would have had such a system in place not something that is just being rolled out.
Second, these people are getting caught because “The activity identified during the audit revealed that the employees searched their own license plates or those of a family member/acquaintance, and not random members of the public,”
A fair reading of that says it is ok to look up information on random members of the public. I feel better already.
If the bar is set at random people, a friend of a friend looking up the info and getting it back to you would get around the safeguards, back to the old buddy in the department.
something an artificial buddy will happily do anyway when you promise that your grandmother is on the line
What percent of law enforcement agents do you think would meet that bar?
Here, in my locale, honest LEOs that that have strict ethics run at about 80%.
Interestingly the things that LEOs are strictly ethical about varies by interaction and preconceptions - straight bat with fourth generation farmers, entirely willing to bend the law in bad ways when dealing with indigenous people etc. is not uncommon.
If it is, and you are assuming 80% strict ethics then I have a PBA card from my grandfather to pull out to show you how incorrect that is on a statutory basis.
Also your second paragraph
> Interestingly the things that LEOs are strictly ethical about varies by interaction and preconceptions - straight bat with fourth generation farmers, entirely willing to bend the law in bad ways when dealing with indigenous people etc. is not uncommon.
How can you assume they have strict ethics but also understand that they change their ethical stance depending on who they are dealing with. That’s not strict ethics by any definition.
How can you assume the LEOs with variable ethics are in the 80% and not the 20%?
Also, Philippine Basketball Association membership carries no weight here.
> How can you assume the LEOs with variable ethics are in the 80% and not the 20%?
Is that a real question? Having strict ethics is a higher bar than variable ethics. How can you assume that more LEO’s are strictly ethical than varying their ethics when you literally brought up
> Interestingly the things that LEOs are strictly ethical about varies by interaction and preconceptions - straight bat with fourth generation farmers, entirely willing to bend the law in bad ways when dealing with indigenous people etc. is not uncommon.
You literally said “…strictly ethical about varies…” you are being inconsistent with terminology if you are trying to claim strict ethics can vary
If you need
Strict[1] Variable[2]
You seemed determined to get messy rather than legitimately discuss where we are not seeing eye to eye.
Yes, definitions matter. Yes, I do see difficulties in two strangers discussing this.
Yes, the behaviour of LEOs changes depending on who they interact with and yes they can be oblivious to that change.
When I say that most of our state LEO's have strict adherence to the code of ethics, I mean that. When I say those in the grey area still consider themselves to have strict adherence, I also mean that.
Part of the mess lands with where they see themselves in the state and who they see as those they serve and those that they protect others against.
Maybe get a life and stop idly throwing about dictionary definitions? Particularly one that's a fork of English.
When Terrance Howard says 1x1 = 2, he also means that and it’s as equally coherent.
They cannot strictly adhere to a code of ethics and simultaneously violate it when it comes to people they don’t care about. The “strict” part would require them to always adhere to said ethics.
My father worked as what would be (roughly) equivalent to the US Marshal service in Australia.
One day in 2001 one of his coworkers was fired because he saw what he thought was a cute girl in a newspaper article who had won a car in a lottery, and her new license plate was visible. He looked her up.
He didn't interact with her, communicate with her, drive by her home, call her. He looked her up out of sheer bored curiosity, and within 2 months, auditing of the warrants he was working couldn't find a correlation as to why he'd queried this license plate, and he was asked to explain, and couldn't.
Please don't conflate Flock with responsible use of technology. The CEO is on record as saying he says a false positive is better than a false negative. And Flock itself won't turn off data sharing options that are illegal in a state to an agency of that state. They'll happily give training on how to use that data sharing to that agency. They've stated that it's not their policy to tell agencies how to abide by data sharing laws.
That includes a Henry County police officer who was fired and arrested last week following an investigation into his access of the Flock network, authorities there said.
Please use one of the standard archive.today sites or wayback machine to offer mirrors.
Yes, devil's advocate could say if standard citizens can't, no one can. Just seems so minor it's not worth losing a job over. All other cases (including plates of family which you don't directly own), yes, investigate fully and apply appropriate actions.
Not if they're married and their spouse also drives the vehicle.
I didn’t express an opinion about whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea. All of you have had an immediate emotional reaction to the idea that there’s no legal “right to privacy” from your spouse. The legal question and the ethical questions (should you be aware at all time what your spouse is up to? should you dig around in their personal journal or phone to learn thing?) are separate.
Should you invade your spouse’s privacy? No. And if you’re constantly paranoid enough to be doing that, you likely have issues that are negatively affecting the relationship.
There’s not even proper protection of your privacy from strangers and companies, let alone such from a spouse.
Should there be? Of course.
The arguments against this behavior don’t even need to include spousal considerations. It shouldn’t happen, period. When it happens, it should be punished, period. But when it’s punished, “oh, it’s just my wife” isn’t a defense - not because spouses should have privacy protections, but because the system was abused.
Oh right, because I am worried about the safety of my children. God save us from child safety.
"Ethics aside" for the person empowered to act on behalf of the state?
Unless you mean that there's no legal issue with obtaining data in anyone, which is a much larger problem.
But if you mean husband and wife keeping secrets hidden from each other, that is not really a thing, except for normal human limits and boundaries, and in a marriage, the spouses should probably expect a reasonable minimum of that.
If a cop was checking to make sure they got away with drunk driving, it removes factors that might deter them from continuing that behavior.
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I don't think there is any website that will tell you where a car has been and when it was last spotted, and I assume that was the kind of information that Flock would be gathering.thats why looking up your own marker, should be suspicious, its reconaissance, investigating the investigation.
when someone queries the police for status of info, or tries to be overly helpful its a checkmark toward reasonable suspicion.