Your example is apples and oranges. Flock maintains private infrastructure that stores data.
If the DSLR uploaded them to Rent-A-Center owned/leased servers it would in fact require Rent-A-Center to take the necessary steps.
As Rent-A-Center would be the only group with proper access to data storage they would have inserted themselves into the chain of custody, and thereby have such obligation to ensure others data is wiped from systems they control.
Flock has knowledge/use of the data. Their system processes can relate the photos “owned” by two different entities. They’re interacting with it and selling their access to it as a feature. That’s obviously distinct from S3.
I know quite a bit about Flock, having been intimately involved in the process of evicting it from our municipality, and I don't think the distinction you're trying to draw here is meaningful. Flock will say they provide a service, one avidly sought by the actual owners of the data, to generate analysis based on that data.
They're contractually forbidden from "selling their access to it" to arbitrary parties; they can share data only with the consent of their customers, almost all of whom actively want that data shared --- this is a very rare case of a data collection product where that's actually the case.
Flock's facilitation of data-sharing is a huge part of their value proposition over other cameras, and why their customers buy from them over their competitors.
As such, even if they can contract it such that they are not legally responsible for such use, they are very much knowingly facilitating it. If this was physical goods, rather than data, they would probably been as responsible as their customers.
I've read our contract. I know what it says. This isn't an abstraction. They can do lots of things. What they actually do is not data brokerage under California Law, at least not that I can tell.
Except their customer's data isn't actually theirs: OP requested their private data to be deleted from the system. So OP expressed a clear intent for their data not to be used by Flock's customer. We could say that the data thus becomes abusively retained on these systems. As a result, IF Flock has the technical means of performing the requested data deletion, it should be compelled to perform it.
This is the same situation as a web hosting provider: if it is communicated to them that one of their customers uses their service to host illegal content, then it becomes the web hosting provider's responsibility to remove that content.
Reasonable technical feasibility for the service provider is key here, but it can be argued since the data can apparently be shared in ways that identify OP.
Probably not how the law currently works (don't know, not a lawyer), but I guess it should, as otherwise it allows creating a platform that shares abusively retained data without any reasonable recourse for the subjects of this data to remove the data from the platform.
Devils advocate here. There is currently an article on the front page about a US bill to compel operating systems to collect age verification / id data. If something like that was actually in place and every packet on the internet was stamped with your digital id then you could feasibly demand that aws purge/filter your data out of their systems.
You can't even request AWS delete your actual PII from S3. If you've been to a doctor in the last 2 years, you have HIPAA PII somewhere on S3, and AWS won't do a thing about it for you. I don't know why people have this idea that service providers will scrub their customers data for you.
I don't live in a state with a law like California's so your "gotcha" isn't relevant.
Californians would have standing under the law but need expensive lawyers to litigate.
AWS has employed expensive lawyers to argue semantics; they host OS VMs and databases. This provides them legal cover for what AWS customers store.
Amazon the retailer stores customer data. A non-customer would have standing under California law to litigate removal of PII should they decide to hire lawyers.
Your reductionism is to law what a Linux beige box on a routable IP, no firewall, hosting a production health database with creds set to admin/pwd1234 is to software engineering.
Coincidentally 1234 happens to be the code to my luggage.
If AWS maintained private infrastructure that stored and indexed data associated with people's license plates and vehicles and then charged customers to do searches against that data then yes, you could write them to ask them to purge data pertaining to you.
If Flock was just an opaque cloud storage service for law enforcement to back up their mass surveillance to then sure, your argument would have merit; it's not, it's a giant database of photos, locations, times, license plate information, and likely a lot more. They're not selling cloud storage, they're selling (leasing?) surveillance devices and tools.
The argument you're making implicates way more than just Flock, and is in a practical sense novel. If you can cite jurisprudence (or even legal experts) backing it up, I'm interested in reading it. Otherwise, I'm happy to accept that we just have premises about the law that are too far apart for an argument to be productive.
My experience on HN is that these kinds of discussions almost immediately devolve into debates about what people want the law to be, as opposed to what it actually is.
Realistically speaking you're never going to get pro Flock people in any numbers on this site writing comments at all. The anti surveillance position's popularity when it comes to up votes, down votes, and flags on this site is such that pros will continue posting about what they want the law to be and antis will stay out. That's just how crowd voting dynamics shape out.
Does AWS actively and by design parse and keep track of personally identifiable information of the data that AWS customers store on their S3 buckets? If that were the case they would absolutely be subject to CCPA (and GDPR) requests for deletion.
However, I suspect that is not the case. AWS is agnostic as to the type of data stored on S3, and deletion of PII stored on S3 is the sole responsibility of the AWS customer that chooses to store it.
AI outputting axiomatically valid syntax isn't going to be all that useful. It's possible to generate all axiomatically correct math with a for loop until the machine OOMs
I wrote my first neural net in the late 90s. Based on nothing but an old geocities post some rando put up about training a model to only unlock a pet door for their cat.
I implemented the same and it worked.
Where you see true innovation I see run of the mill. OpenAI, Google, etc are propping up data center rental business they came to rely on to titillate biology with whatever spaghetti that sticks. That's it.
The interesting science isn't happening anywhere close to big tech.
The mathematics of LLMs exists in textbooks from 1950s. Your entire comment chain here is little more than reciting propaganda.
Why is it important that Google (or any of these large companies) only hire Americans for their jobs in the first place? They are global companies now, they make money from everywhere. Why is the insular "Americans only" idea worthy of consideration at all?
The law forces American corporations to hire Americans, various work visas are exceptions from the law given under certain conditions. It appears the companies are abusing these exceptions and violate these conditions. There is no such thing as a "global company" in the law, with the exception of foreign consulates all the entities that hire people in the US are American corporations.
> But tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI etc. absolutely need immigrant talent, or they will lose to Chinese competitors.
Let them lose.
Google and the rest do not prop up humanity. They prop up a financial engineering Ponzi scheme.
You're just parroting media and social tropes you grew up with.
We could assert in our children social truth about other forms of economics; for example, healthcare as a tent pole rather than stock valuations; still requires technology and jobs and we don't remain the last modern economy on the planet without universal healthcare. We're losing to Russia and China in healthcare.
But thankfully we win when the metric phallic rockets to nowhere and Google search uptime?
You should consider your economic benchmarks and their provenance; a bunch of self selecting biological organisms that we socially describe as billionaires have convinced you via their fear mongering that if we don't give them all the power giant foot will step on us
The term "equivalence clusters" in the paper seems more appropriate than "categorization".
"Categorization" to me suggests language use; once a cluster is defined by constraints it is given a language key as a shorthand.
That key creation to tag clusters doesn't seem to be what's described here. Just the clustering is described. And that innate clustering seems obvious once already experienced in life. Sensory data makes it obvious an apple is not an orange.
More accurate to say physical reality has "categorization baked into physical constants."
Your way of life is dependent on slave labor and military conquest.
Your only noticing the "temperature" going up now is just a sign of how privileged you have been to be able to ignore war and conflict that's existed around the globe since your birth.
The temperature has not gone up. You can't ignore the flames anymore.
It is antithetical to capitalism as well. The whole basis of capitalism is property rights, and it generally encourages the public doing things themselves instead as private individuals instead of relying upon a bureaucrat or public agency to do everything unless there is a major reason not to.
And here they are telling you that you cannot use your own property to help alleviate issues in your community. That sounds more like an exaggeration of Communist attempts at division of labor and to 'organize' a civilization.
What you're wrestling with is the difference between what capitalists tell you capitalism is in order to make you support capitalism, and what capitalism actually is. "Do as I say, not as I do" kinda thing.
> Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad capitalism.
How is this due to capitalism?
I mean, I can maybe see how you can tie it to NIMBYism, and from there to capitalism through the desire to maintain or increase property values. But that's a stretch, and only one mechanism
There are many drivers for this type of regulation, some more well-meaning than others. Most of them would not go away simply because we ceased private ownership of the means of production
I don't care about the definition in some 300 year old scroll.
The majority alive say this is capitalism, then this is capitalism. Appealing to the authority of the dead is no different to me than appealing to Jesus and God.
I'll never forget when my Grandpa died 20 years ago, the first thing my dad did - even before telling us - was look for photos. His siblings did the same and they came up with a collage of around 30 photos I had never seen before that gave me a small glimpse of the highlights of his life.
My other grandpa, controversially used a big chunk of their wedding money on a good camera. They traveled the world and lived abroad for several years right before and after my mom and aunt were born. Because of this, we are all able to see such a fascinating and meticulous glimpse into their lives. Each photo tells a story even if the story is boring, but I really appreciated the small details. Even random pictures of cars that my Grandpa thought were cool. Or the mean guard dog they had in Taiwan while it was still a puppy. Or my mom on the Trans Siberian Railroad in the middle of the Cold War.
These stories and my own appreciation of photography have made me realize how valuable every photo I have is, and I'm willing to put in effort to save them. When I'm old and dying of dementia, I'll be able to look back at my life in incredible detail one last time. Even the dumb meme's I decided to save will tell a story.
I still have a deep appreciation for living in the moment and knowing not everything should be captured, but we live in an era where I have a really good camera in my pocket at all times, and the ability to store all those photos forever cheaply.
If the DSLR uploaded them to Rent-A-Center owned/leased servers it would in fact require Rent-A-Center to take the necessary steps.
As Rent-A-Center would be the only group with proper access to data storage they would have inserted themselves into the chain of custody, and thereby have such obligation to ensure others data is wiped from systems they control.
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