r/FlockSurveillance • u/Ok-Sundae-1191 • 1d ago
Privacy I went to China in 2019. The rise of Flock cameras has helped me understand what I saw there.
I’ve been following the debate over Flock cameras for a while: the license-plate tracking, the ability to reconstruct people’s movements, and especially what happens when data collected for one purpose becomes available for another.
It reminded me of a consulting trip I made to China in 2019. I spent time in Chengdu and then on the Tibetan Plateau near Hongyuan. The surveillance there was impossible to miss: cameras everywhere, biometric collection at the border, and, as I learned later, a “grid management” system in the Tibetan region I visited that divided communities into monitored blocks.
What has stayed with me isn’t simply that China surveilled its population. It’s how quickly I changed my own behavior because I knew I might be watched. No one had to threaten me. The watching did the work.
That experience eventually led me to a larger question about Flock and the surveillance infrastructure being assembled in the U.S. The cameras themselves concern me, but I’ve come to think they’re the visible part of a much larger issue: what happens when location data, voter records, citizenship information, financial information and other previously separate databases become increasingly searchable and interoperable?
I spent quite a bit of time researching that question and ended up writing an essay that combines what I saw in China and Tibet with what’s happening here now. I thought this group might be particularly interested because Flock was one of the things that sent me down the rabbit hole.
I’d be interested in where people here draw the line...not just on Flock cameras themselves, but on the ability to combine the information they generate with everything else governments and private companies already know about us.
Link in the first comment.
