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Flock safety is a scam to your local government, forcing jurisdictions to pay for a subscription to access video footage from cameras which said government chose to install, and they've been caught selling the footage without authorization to 3rd parties like ICE.

Inform your town or city or state that if they want to spy on their residents, they can do so without an annual subscription to a cloud service they don't control. Security footage should never leave the vicinity of the property it is captured in under normal operation.

SaaS is literally scamming governments, profiting off your taxes. It needs to stop. Stop using cloud services. Look into ways for self hosting. If you're a corporation, spend that money which would've been spent on a subscription, on a self hosted system instead.

Self hosting is not scary or as dangerous as it was 10 years ago, thanks to services like Docker streamlining things. If you have an old computer or laptop (or in some cases a mobile device) you can turn that into a simple server, for backups, watching shows and movies, maybe home management...

And if you want to have more capacity or are an organization, there are tons of free and open source self hosted alternatives to paid software (though there should be more). Initial costs of a VPS or VM may be more than a month subscription, but the cost can be made up for when expanding.

The question that needs to be asked when considering SaaS or self hosting as a company, is: do you, the company, trust the cloud service to handle your data? Do you know what they're doing with the employee data or security footage or banking information you'll feed to it?

Do you trust their black box to prevent the data from being leaked, assuming they aren't doing it intentionally? Alternatively, is your organization able to hire and maintain the needs to establish a reliable self hosted system where strictly you have control of all the data?

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If something goes wrong, like a data breach or corrupted data, do you know if the cloud service has the means to recover your data and compensate for damages done? Or is the company able to deal with recovery and mitigate damage done?

Flock has demonstrated that they cannot be trusted previously to handle company data, and they're making companies pay to correctly handle the data.

It should be unthinkable that the footage of a security camera I see can't be accessed without paying for a cloud service which is responsible for enabling anyone to buy that footage or access its data.

Just like how it should be unthinkable that if I ask an assistant to turn on lights, it has to contact a remote server to do something local. We need to stop with this cloud-first approach. My phones and computers and laptops and oculus quest 3 aren't dumb frontends to websites. Self host anything